#that awkward moment when you realize you've been misquoting that line for years

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

Hi! This might sound a little silly, but I've been seeing a lot of gifsets about Ned's quote about Sansa and Arya being as different as the son and the moon and in them Sansa's the sun and Arya's the moon. I understand the aesthetic reason for the sorting, but I was wondering if there was a meta reason for it. I think both of their arcs could have the traditional sun and the moon parallels. Your thoughts?

I also got this anon within about 24 hours of your ask (was there a wank I was blissfully unaware of?):

Hey, I really love your thoughts on the stark sisters. This might be a silly ask, but who do you think reflects the moon better and who the sun? I know Ned’s words were more metaphoric than literal, but I always see edits with one sister being the sun and the other the moon, which always vary on which one is which. I can never decide. Do you have a preference?

Before I get into this, I… don’t really have a horse in this race tbh, largely because I think that focusing on the imagery in that line is missing the point of what Ned is saying.  He’s not necessarily saying “one of you is the sun and one of you is the moon,” he’s saying “you are as different as” so I think of it more as a poetic turn of phrase more than anything else.

But since you’re asking here are longer thoughts on the matter, the ones I do have go into symbolism as it appears for Sansa and Arya respectively.

The Quote Itself + Context

“Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths. So if you must hate, Arya, hate those who would truly do us harm. Septa Mordane is a good woman, and Sansa … Sansa is your sister. You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you … and I need both of you, gods help me.”

He sounded so tired that it made Arya sad. “I don’t hate Sansa,” she told him. “Not truly.” It was only half a lie. (Arya II, AGOT)

The first time that the reader ever encounters this quote about Arya and Sansa, there’s some very specific context going on.  

It occurs in Arya’s second POV chapter in the series, and it’s said by Ned to Arya.  It’s not simply a descriptor, it’s a way to try and get Arya to not be angry with her sister.

Arya is angry with her sister.  But, more importantly, Arya is upset with her sister:

“I don’t care about their stupid tourney,” Arya said. She knew Prince Joffrey would be there,and she hated Prince Joffrey.

Sansa lifted her head. “It will be a splendid event. You shan’t be wanted.”

Anger flashed across Father’s face. “Enough, Sansa. More of that and you will change mymind. I am weary unto death of this endless war you two are fighting. You are sisters. I expectyou to behave like sisters, is that understood?”

Sansa bit her lip and nodded. Arya lowered her face to stare sullenly at her plate. She could feeltears stinging her eyes. She rubbed them away angrily, determined not to cry. (Arya II, AGOT)

Ned very clearly is frustrated with the way that Sansa speaks to Arya in this moment; that doesn’t prevent Arya from wanting to cry.  As the passage continues:

No one talked to Arya. She didn’t care. She liked it that way. She would have eaten her mealsalone in her bedchamber if they let her. Sometimes they did, when Father had to dine with theking or some lord or the envoys from this place or that place. The rest of the time, they ate in hissolar, just him and her and Sansa. That was when Arya missed her brothers most. She wanted totease Bran and play with baby Rickon and have Robb smile at her. She wanted Jon to muss upher hair and call her “little sister” and finish her sentences with her. But all of them were gone.She had no one left but Sansa, and Sansa wouldn’t even talk to her unless Father made her.  (Arya II, AGOT)

Since they arrived in King’s Landing, Sansa has not spoken to Arya unless Ned makes her.  From Sansa’s perspective, the reason is, ostensibly, that she sees Arya’s actions on the Trident as being the reason that Lady is dead (in a later chapter, she screams at Arya: “They should have killed you instead of Lady!”–she places her pain at Lady’s death on Arya because it is easier than confronting the fact that Joffrey is a complete shit and Sansa–throughout the series–is someone who tells herself what the truth should be in order to make reality easier for her to bear.)

But the result of all this is a sense of ostracism.  Arya doesn’t feel comfortable around anyone, largely because no one–even Ned–understands her grief at Mycah’s death, and her sense of responsability in it.

Only that was Winterfell, a world away, and now everything was changed. This was the firsttime they had supped with the men since arriving in King’s Landing. Arya hated it. She hated thesounds of their voices now, the way they laughed, the stories they told. They’d been her friends,she’d felt safe around them, but now she knew that was a lie. They’d let the queen kill Lady, thatwas horrible enough, but then the Hound found Mycah. Jeyne Poole had told Arya that he’d cuthim up in so many pieces that they’d given him back to the butcher in a bag, and at first the poorman had thought it was a pig they’d slaughtered. And no one had raised a voice or drawn a bladeor anything, not Harwin who always talked so bold, or Alyn who was going to be a knight, orJory who was captain of the guard. Not even her father. (Arya II, AGOT)

So when Arya flees the dining room for her bedroom, and even contemplates running away she is so miserable, her father’s intercession has weight.

The weight of the passage above to me is not even necessarily about the sun and the moon and how different she and Sansa are–when Ned says “when the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives” in the series–the only time he says them to any of his children–it is to Arya about Sansa.  He is creating in Arya the undeniable truth: that whatever she currently feels about Sansa, whatever their summertime “squabbles” are, Sansa is her pack, whether or not she likes it.  

You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you … and I need both of you, gods help me. 

And to drive the point home, he says that he needs them both.  

The Sun and the Moon

I feel the context is helpful, largely because of how I think that it fits into greater symbolism in text.  If you have “the sun” and “the moon” as explained here, it’s clearly supposed to evoke some imagery.  (I like the point that @quentynnymerosmartell​ made a while back about how the sun and the moon are the main symbols on Brienne’s sigil, which ties back to her vow to Catelyn.)

There’s a lot of imagery–beyond Arya and Sansa–for it to evoke.  The onset of winter means that there will be less sun in the sky period; if the long night comes again, it means there won’t be any sun at all.  Having both implies a healthy state of the world writ large because you have both light and darkness–not to mention light in darkness.

You may be as different as…

An issue that I think rarely gets talked about in all the #discourse about Arya and Sansa (when there is #discourse about both of them in one go) is that frequently things stop around the “they’re just different” without going into the hows of it.

When it comes to symbolism, parallels, characterization–there are frequent explorations of similar themes but the mechanisms are almost impossible to talk about at the same time because they fundamentally rely on each girl’s approach to the world.

For Sansa, you have a character who approaches the world through narrative.  She thinks in terms of songs and stories that she knows–both as regards the world around her and as she regards herself (“Be brave, she told herself. Be brave, like a lady in a song.”)  She is a society child.  She has been presented with a social infrastructure (Westerosi Patriarchy) and she adheres to it and thrives within it.  She doesn’t question it, but when she encounters things that don’t fit in with what she’s been taught, she will adjust narratives around her to accomodate for the ills in society by redefining societal definitions to meet her needs (“He was no true knight.”)    She has a recurring motif of birds, but what elemental motifs exist in her arc are depicted through societal structures more than they are depicted through nature itself.

Or, to use Bran’s(/Summer’s) words:

But his sister had left the wilds, to walk in the halls of man-rock where other hunters ruled, and once within those halls it was hard to find the path back out. (Bran I, ASOS)

If Sansa “left the wilds,” we have Arya (quoting from this seminal scene) who has a “wildness” in her.  She has “the wolf blood.”  She is the child who society had no place for and so had to carve her own existence out of whatever place she could find.  She fundamentally questions most societal infrastructures and what they are present for and why they are present because she is someone who–even though she holds power on a structural level as a lady and as a princess–is still rejected by society as someone who doesn’t accept the role given her based purely on her gender.

So to me, it’s not just a “sun and moon” opposition, we have going on here, it’s a “society vs wilderness” that we have going on here–and that’s not even touching on things like their respective approach to truth and lies, their coping mechanisms (which are literally! the opposite! of each other’s!) and any number of other contrasts that you have between them.

Society

Let me start this with a point that I’ll come back to: I would argue that the moon is symbolic of nature, of wild, of mystery while the sun is symbolic of society.  I look at this in terms of calendars: there are a number of lunar calendars that exist within our world: among them, there is frequently a leap month added every few years (how many years varies between cultures) in order to keep the calendar in line with the seasons.  The solar calendar exists for the sake of society (when do you harvest, when do the seasons change) while the lunar exists because the moon exists. 

I bring this up because I’m not going to be talking about the sun in any particularly meaningful way.  Maybe I’ll come out of my asoiaf reread with a completely different perspective on this, but I don’t actually think that either sister has particularly pertinent sun imagery attached to her (which I think is part of why we have this question to begin with).  It becomes, then, a question of how the moon appears in both storylines and what the moon symbolizes on a larger scale.  I don’t think the moon represents society, which means that what moon imagery exists in Sansa’s storyline fundamentally challenges her worldview, while also being interwoven with it.  It becomes then, in her case, a question of arguing–not for the sun–but rather arguing that the moon doesn’t quite fit, which I don’t think it does.

The main source of moon imagery in Sansa’s arc stems from House Arryn, whose sigil is is a falcon soaring against the moon.  

The Vale itself has a ton of moon-related infrastructure, probably for this reason:  You have the Gates of the Moon, the Moon Tower, the Moon Door, the Mountains of the Moon.  You have this house–an important one for a lot of Sansa’s identity themes, her relationship with her father and with Petyr Baelish, with her aunt and herself–that has taken the moon and used it as a a supplementary part of the house’s symbolism.  I say supplemental because I compare House Arryn’s sigil to House Martell’s: the sun is more important than the spear in House Martell’s sigil; the falcon is more important than the moon in House Arryn’s.  To me, then, the moon becomes the servant of society, an artful backdrop to the falcon, a piece of nature who has been detached from its nature in order to perform its function.

And so that means that the moon is not so much the moon in Sansa’s storyline so much as the image of the moon.  And I think that that very imagery is threatening to some extent.

You have the Moon Door, which is where Sansa almost lost her life and which, in AFFC, she’s still super stressed thinking about, and you have the Mountains of the Moon–where the Mountain Clans of the Vale have been hoping to use Lannister steel since AGOT to reclaim the Vale from the Andal society that wrested it from the control of the First Men thousands of years ago.  You even have the simple fact of the lie about Sansa’s identity while she is in the Vale, and what might befall her if her identity is revealed in the wrong way.  If you’re looking at symbolism, I see that as the moon challenging Sansa on a symbolic level, because Sansa is a character who operates within society and the moon is not symbolic of society.   

But that means that if I have to pick a “sun” and a “moon,” I don’t think it fits that Sansa is the “moon”: I think it means that she is the sun, and that as winter approaches, as the days get shorter and the nights grow longer, she–and society as Westeros knows it–is going to have to adjust to a long winter and a long night where the main source of light is the moon.

Wild

There’s a lot of meat to moon symbolism.  It is a symbol of womanhood–the lunar cycle frequently used to symbolize the menstrual–not to mention its ties to the tide and water.  But if the sun is symbolic of society and the moon is symbolic of the wild, then “Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child,” lines up evenly.

And it does: there are mentions of the moon in important ways in Arya’s arc.  And, more importantly, it’s not symbols of the moon: it is the moon itself.  Which means that that moon gets to carry the weight of all its own symbolism, without being detached from it through a sigil.  

Arya takes comfort in the moon, even thinks that it is something that she can use as a way to guide her on her journey to wherever she’s going:

She carried neither candle nor taper. Syrio had told her once that darkness could be her friend, and he was right. If she had the moon and the stars to see by, that was enough. (Arya XI, ACOK)

It is associated with her burgeoning magic:

Sleep came as quick as she closed her eyes. She dreamed of wolves that night, stalking through a wet wood with the smell of rain and rot and blood thick in the air. Only they were good smells in the dream, and Arya knew she had nothing to fear. She was strong and swift and fierce, and her pack was all around her, her brothers and her sisters. They ran down a frightened horse together, tore its throat out, and feasted. And when the moon broke through the clouds, she threw back her head and howled. (Arya V, ASOS)

Except in dreams. She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she’d dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran. (Mercy, TWOW)

It as used as a timekeeper during her training at the House of Black and White:

Cat would always find the kindly man waiting for her when she went creeping back to the temple on the knoll on the night the moon went black. (Cat of the Canals, AFFC)

When the moon was black she was no one, a servant of the Many-Faced God in a robe of black and white. (Cat of the Canals, AFFC)

On a symbolic level there, you have the simple fact that when there was no moon in the sky, Arya ceases to exist: she is “no one” and not any of her other personas, and given the simple fact of the theme of self effacement in Arya’s arc, I think its’s not wrong to say that the moon in the sky means that Arya is Arya.  And this not even touching the fact of her wolf dreams (her burgeoning magic once again) as a touchstone for her while she’s blind and keeping her from truly sinking in to being “no one.”  The moon becomes just one more part of that theme for Arya, and a part of it that roots her in her own identity.

And, lastly, it is something that is associated with–and which Arya herself associates with the Old Gods of the North:

Shoving her sword through her belt, she slipped down branch to branch until she was back on the ground. The light of the moon painted the limbs of the weirwood silvery white as she made her way toward it, but the five-pointed red leaves turned black by night. Arya stared at the face carved into its trunk. It was a terrible face, its mouth twisted, its eyes flaring and full of hate. Is that what a god looked like? Could gods be hurt, the same as people? I should pray, she thought suddenly. (Arya XI, ACOK)

Except in dreams. She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she’d dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran. (Mercy, TWOW) (Again)

The moon isn’t challenging Arya’s worldview, it is part of almost every single piece of symbolism in her arc, and is symbolically attached to her identity, her wildness, her magic, her skills in a way that the moon is not for Sansa.  

Even innate in that moon symbolism in Arya’s arc, you have it existing in opposition to society and thriving.  

So all this is to say…even beyond the optics of it (Sansa having the brighter coloring; Arya having the darker) if forced to, I read the moon as Arya and Sansa as the sun in that comment.  I don’t think that the moon imagery in Sansa’s arc holds a candle to the moon symbolism in Arya’s arc, even if I don’t think that either has any particular emphasis on the sun in their arc.