4. Sansa Stark
How She First Appears If anyone deserves a break it's Sansa, but go back to the start of the show and audiences had a less sympathetic relationship with this character. Back then, it seemed she had very few redeeming qualities. She was a naive snob who bullied her sister and failed to appreciate her father. She somehow fell for Joffrey (though in her defence, she'd never actually had a conversation with him at this point) and inadvertently had a role to play in the death of the butcher's boy and her own direwolf. What She Becomes Still after several seasons of torture and abuse at the hands of Joffrey, and more recently Ramsay Snow, audiences are far more pro-Sansa than they were before. At the same time, there is a greater change at work here than the audiences' relationship with Sansa; she's got a whole new personality too. Over the years she's expertly negotiated the trickiest of political tightropes and somehow escaped with her life. No one could have imagined her political savvy at the outset of the show. It turns out she's not just a pretty face - though she'd have everyone believe that in order to stay alive.