always a hostage...even to Robb

You know, this always gets me. Because it’s so fucking cold. Why? Because he doesn’t say “if I didn’t send Theon to Pyke” or even “if I’d kept Theon here/close.” He says “if I had … kept Theon as my hostage.” Because we talk about his right? Does Theon’s position change once Robb’s calling the shots? Is it that Robb doesn’t think of him as a hostage or is it just that he thinks that getting ships is worth being out a hostage that may or may not even be serving a purpose anymore? And this seems to be hinting at his actual feelings/thought process.

 And ok, you might think, well it’s just the situation, right? It’s just that he hates Theon now because he thinks Theon killed his brothers. It’s hindsight. Right?

 Except:

This is about Sansa. Sansa is his sister. She certainly hasn’t done anything to hurt Robb or piss him off, but the parallels, especially vis-à-vis Robb’s reactions and thought processes, are striking.

 Because here’s what’s going on in both: These are people that could have been useful to Robb in a specific way, except he didn’t realize that at the time that relevant decisions were being and/or other things were a greater priority. Now, these people are not available to be useful + are instruments for hurting his cause (Theon of his own volition, Sansa against her will, but the end result is the same). And his reaction is to regret not having made use of them in the proper way.

 If it was just with Theon, we could blame it on the fact the Robb’s has just reassessed everything about their relationship in hindsight. But he has a very similar reaction to a parallel situation with Sansa, even though you might except him to be a lot more concerned about her as like…a person? But he doesn’t. He thinks about them both in terms of tools, lost opportunities, and ways they’re being inconvenient now. And since there’s no reason for his feelings toward Sansa to have changed, and since we do have an insight into how Robb thinks about her at the time the relevant decisions were made (from what he explicitly tells Cat, re: not being able to trade Jaime for her), we have a sufficient amount of givens to fill in the remaining variable by drawing the parallel.

 That is: Sansa was always the sister who didn’t have sufficient worth to be traded for Jaime Lannister unless she could be otherwise politically useful. And Theon was always the hostage.