#though also in fairness they got off with social ruin while their paid accomplices got hanged so fuck em

[arsenicandfinelace]

You mentioning the non-consummation makes me think of something many handwave away, that there should have been a 5 year timeskip. So 13 year old Sansa should have been 18. And in the original outline she was meant to have a child with Joffrey so not a virgin. Anyone who thinks Sansa can annul her marriage with Tyrion is as dumb as her. And those same idiots think she can somehow rule the North when Robb disinherited her?! And this easy, lazy way her stans try to solve this impossibility is Jon.

Let me tell you the story of this one specific seventeenth-century divorce I researched as part of my thesis.

Frances Carr was married at age 14 to the 13-year-old Earl of Essex. Owing to the couple's young age, they didn't live together for the first few years of their marriage, but even when they moved in together they didn't like each other. At all. Not even a little bit.

Meanwhile, Frances was a renowned beauty at court and eventually fell in love with the Earl of Rochester, King James's favourite (and yes, by favourite I do mean lover – it was complicated). She wants to divorce her husband and marry him. Her husband couldn't agree more. They apply for divorce on the grounds of non-consummation.

Did they get it?

Well.

First they had to explain why they hadn't consummated the marriage. The husband wasn't willing to humiliate himself and ruin his future marriage prospects by claiming to be impotent, so he had to go with, "I just hate her so much my dick literally doesn't work with her. Any other woman is fine. Save me and my dick." He had to do this because "We did not have sex with each other because we do not want to have sex with each other" was not reason enough for the Church.

They then had to jump through all sorts of hoops, from the Church trying to force them to wait three years on a technicality to Frances having to be publicly examined for proof of virginity. This despite the fact that King James, the head of the Church of England, was leaning really heavily on the Church to give them the divorce so his boyfriend could marry the hottest girl he could find (like I said, complicated).

The divorce did eventually go through, and she did remarry. But it took years, and a lot of chicanery, and a fair amount of personal humiliation for all involved. And that was because the CoE did not – and does not – want people thinking marriages can be undone on a whim. It displeases God, and more importantly it undermines their authority.

Now. Think of how much worse of a pickle Sansa is in.

For one, the Faith of the Seven, who conducted her wedding, are currently under the iron grip of religious extremists, who will absolutely not relax the rules to help her.

For another, there's no indication Tyrion would want to help either. He thinks she was in on Joffrey's murder! He thinks she split and left him holding the bag on purpose! Why on earth would he be prepared to further humiliate himself for her sake?

Finally, yeah, this possibility was riper when there would have been a timeskip, but Sansa might not stay a virgin forever. She may sleep with Harry, Petyr may rape her, whatever. I've never been entirely clear if GRRM believes in the hymen myth or if he's just deconstructing it like everything else, but if Sansa can't produce evidence of a vaginal freshness seal, she's doomed. The best she can hope for is Tyrion dies, either in Essos or fairly quickly in Westeros.

But, of course, the show got bored with that limitation and dropped it, and her fans are more than thrilled to be given a permission slip to disregard inconveniences.