This article is dark and full of spoilers. If you missed this weekend’s epic conclusion, I’d definitely check out one of our other lovely articles.
The Game of Thrones cast wasn’t immune to being a little spoilery ahead of the Season 8 episodes. Some months ago, actress Emilia Clarke hinted at the fate of Daenerys Targaryen and, looking back, she basically spoiled what was coming for her character. Now, it looks like Sophie Turner, who played Sansa Stark on the formerly long-running series, may have gotten a bit spoilery ahead of the release as well.
Some months ago, Sophie Turner got a tattoo. Not just any tattoo mind you, this one showed the direwolf that is the Stark family’s sigil. Completing the tattoo was the line “the pack survives.”
Way back in 2018 when Sophie Turner posted the tattoo, fans thought she was giving away a major spoiler indicating the remaining Starks would live until the end. She later went on The Late Late Show with James Corden to show off the tattoo again, and said at the time:
While I was getting it done, people advised me not to because it looked like I was giving everything away. But I wasn’t. It’s just a quote from last season, but everyone figures that the pack really does survive, but it’s just a moral I like to live by.
Sophie Turner isn’t lying; “the pack survives” is something that comes up in Stark conversations a lot. Back in Season 7, the character of Sansa Stark made the ominous comment on TV, noting:
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.
It’s actually something that Ned Stark says in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series early on. It first appears in a conversation Ned Stark has with his daughter Arya and not his daughter Sansa.
Apparently, it stuck with Sophie Turner after she was the person who uttered the line in Season 7 and she also got a tattoo with the words.
However, now that we know that Sansa, Jon, Arya and Bran all made it through the long Battle of Winterfell and into the days beyond, outliving the likes of Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, the tattoo really does come off as a spoiler.
Even the comment that Sophie Turner made that people “advised her” not to get the tattoo almost seems like it came from people who knew how Season 8 was going to pan out.
Complicating things further is the fact that Sophie Turner actually got the tattoo in June of last year, so 2018. Season 8 of Game of Thrones actually went into production in October of 2017 and continued until July of 2018.
So even if Sophie Turner wasn’t trying to throw out a huge spoiler, Lady Stark should have known exactly what her fate would be at the time she got the tattoo. She’s not the first person to pretend she hasn’t given a spoiler away, however, and she won’t be the last either.
Having said that, in the world of spoilers, this ranks well below Mark Ruffalo actually live streaming part of Thor: Ragnarok. Sophie Turner may not have even intended to be spoilery and probably wasn’t lying when she said she really liked the quote.
Ultimately, though, the pack did survive.
