25 reasons we’re naming Sansa Stark the Queen in the North

9. She learns how to play the Game of Thrones

Surprising Littlefinger isn’t an easy task for anyone, but Sansa pulls it off with flying colors. In this scene from Season 4’s “The Mountain and the Viper,” she shocks everyone with her semi-truthful recount of the trials and tribulations she faced in King’s Landing and the Eyrie. This was the first time the audience saw Sansa as a major contender for power in Westeros. She proved to everyone she is not a little girl anymore, nor is she someone to mess with.

She could have easily told the Vale’s council that Baelish was the one who made Lysa Arryn fly out the Moon Door, and he knows it. “He tried to reason with her,” she says through tears, “Promised her she was the only one he had ever loved.” After seeing Baelish be a creepy manipulator for basically four seasons, it was nice to have Sansa be the one to deliver an ego-crushing moment on him.

These are also skills she had to learn during her time in King’s Landing. Though Cersei gleefully (and drunkenly) berates the ‘little dove’ as they hide in Maegor’s Holdfast (“Blackwater”), Sansa learns how valuable it is to listen to one’s enemy. Cersei delivers life lessons about being a queen to the Stark girl in hopes to scare her, but Sansa is smarter than that. By observing Cersei’s ruthless nature, she’s able to know how not to run a kingdom, a very valuable skill for someone whose goal is to reunite the North.