Sansa • Eddard

Sansa is puzzled that her father sent the "too old" 22-year-old Beric Dondarrion instead of Loras to deal with GREGOR, explaining to her friend Jeyne that Eddard's injured leg was probably impairing his decision making. No you stupid girl, the reason he didn't send Loras was because GREGOR would absolutely destroy pretty boy. Sansa needs to learn that in a fairy tale, the hero may slay the monster and marry the princess, but in real life, being eight feet tall, angry, and ridiculously strong easily trumps magical flower powers. In addition, Sansa still has no idea that pedo Littlefinger is only nice to her because he wants to proxy-fuck Catelyn by getting into Cat's daughter's pants.

Amazingly, Sansa is still in love with Joffrey, conveniently forgetting that his family executed her pet, attempted to assassinate her brother, and killed several of her household guard after severely wounding her father. She reasons that it wouldn't be fair to blame Joffrey for something his uncle Jaime did, because that would be like "blaming Sansa for Arya's actions," conveniently ignoring that Cersei did exactly this a few chapters ago. Sansa gets into yet another argument with Arya about Mycah's death, prompting Arya to nail her in the face with an orange, adding yet another badass skill (throwing accuracy +10 points) to Arya's growing list of badass skills. Unable to cope with Arya's awesomeness, Sansa retreats to her room, where Eddard informs his daughters that they will be sent back to Winterfell. The two girls finally agree on something: they love King's Landing, albeit for vastly different reasons. Sansa is in full fledged teen freak out mode now that she won't be marrying Joffrey, her dreams of being queen crumbling right before her eyes.

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I feel pretty stupid that I didn't see that Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen were products of incest. In retrospect it seems so obvious. George mentioned hair color a dozen times and kept calling them "lions," but the most obvious clue was that they all acted like prissy, pretentious jerks. Now that Eddard knows the big secret that the previous Hand died for, he just needs to wait until Robert gets back to smash some Lannisters. Instead, Eddard decides that it's a good idea to tell Cersei that he knows her secret. Since there's no poison lying around and no window to push Eddard through, Cersei admits to the whole thing. We also learn that Robert and Cersei don't have the healthiest of marriages. They barely ever have sex, and in the rare instances they do, Bob is always drunk. Once, he even called Cersei "Lyanna" in bed (hahahaha).

Cersei then busts out her version of the Godfather offer: don't tell anyone and I'll have sex with you. Eddard's response:

Eddard says, "Did you make the same offer to Jon Arryn?"

She slapped him.

"I shall wear that as a badge of honor," Ned said dryly.

Somewhere in the King's Landing, the sun is shining bright; the knights are jousting somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, and somewhere wolves are howling, and the treasury is broke; but there's shock in the godswood -- Eddard Stark has cracked a joke.

Cersei doesn't think it's funny, and hits Ned below the belt, making fun of his bastard son. If I had three kids with my brother, I'd probably refrain from making fun of the pedigree of other peoples' kids. Also, if I was Hand and I found out the secret that got the previous Hand killed, I wouldn't warn the person that did the killing.