Arya Stark: The Most Undermined GoT Character?
I realize almost every primary character who survived to the last season of Game of Thrones is a contender for this title. Tyrion, defined by his wit and statecraft, became conveniently gullible. Jon Snow, maker of hard, honorable choices, became a passive extra. And Daenerys lost a Targaryen coin toss and went from an idealist to a mass murderer with no apparent cognitive dissonance.
When you play the game of Most Undermined GoT Character, you win or you get a sparkly plastic Slightly Less Undermined prize for participating.
Arya, one might argue, got the best deal: she avenged the Red Wedding, reunited with what remained of her family, teamed up with Sansa to outsmart Little Finger, and (surprise!) brought down the entire undead army by killing the Night King.
Sure, she didn’t get to face-off with Cersei, but simply evading or subverting fan expectations needn’t undermine a character. Subverting audience expectations was what GoT did so well in past seasons. Good guys don’t always get saved. Smart people can make dumb, trusting mistakes. And instead of a glorious showdown between Good and Evil you might get an inglorious bloodbath in the mud.
The undermining of Arya Stark went deeper than the choppy character arcs and Davids ex machina endemic to the rushed final seasons of a great show. Behind the camera, the creators fundamentally could not decide whether she was a lethal assassin or a scared little girl, betraying a skepticism about female heroism that runs deep in Hollywood and the real world.
Exhibit A: The Battle of Winterfell
It would be faster to list the things that made sense about The Battle of Winterfell than the things that didn’t, but we’ll focus on Arya.
Arya doesn’t start out on the frontline with all the other major fighters — she’s up on the battlements with Sansa. This is justifiable. Sisters who were once so at odds now await death in solidarity. And Arya’s an assassin, not a soldier drilled on military order and chain of command.
Her position would have been especially justifiable if the strategists — or just Arya, or anyone, really — had planned for her to hunt down the Night King, exploiting her unique stealth skills. It would have made sense for her to flee into the castle, and it would have made sense for the Hound and Beric Dondarrion to split off from the main fighting to shield her.
Instead, she’s Badass Arya one moment, ferociously battling wights, and Scared Little Arya the next, running for her life and prompting the Hound and Beric Dondarrion to abandon the battle to save her.
Granted, everyone was overwhelmed and could have used backup. Granted, martial arts don’t obey a transitive mathematical law, where if Brienne bested the Hound, and Arya bested Brienne, Arya could hypothetically best the Hound and therefore anything he could save her from. Still, Arya’s abilities are so erratic in this episode, her competence is clearly being parlayed into contrived suspense and Sandor Clegane’s redemption.
When we catch up with Arya again she’s cowering from wights in the castle. Is the battle over? Is she one of the only survivors? Is this part of a plan to get to the Godswood and kill the Night King? Or is this just a fun little zombie jump-scare interlude that made a good teaser for Season 8, and was totally worth the trade-in value of Arya’s legitimacy as a brave, competent fighter?
A few cheap thrills and some hasty twist-justification later (protecting Arya in this moment is what the Lord of Light resurrected Dondarrion for all those times, and Arya will shut many blue eyes forever), Arya sets out with renewed purpose and disappoints a vocal legion of fans by defeating the Night King. Whether this was the most satisfying narrative choice or not, it would at least have been believable if the preceding scenes hadn’t fundamentally undermined Arya’s lethality.
Exhibit B: The Massacre of King’s Landing
Focusing once again specifically on Arya in the episode “The Bells” and leaving aside everything else that was poorly supported about The Massacre of King’s Landing…
First, the fact that there was never even a discussion among the leaders about sending Arya to assassinate Cersei, preventing bloodshed on both sides, was a disservice to all the characters. The choice would have pitted Jon’s sense of honorable warfare against his ethic of saving lives, and given Daenerys a chance to hint that she had lost too much to be satisfied with an easy victory.
Omitting this scene suggests the characters don’t take Arya’s skills seriously, and neither should we, reducing her destruction of the Night King to an expedient fluke.
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Instead Arya rides south with the Hound to kill Cersei, as she has long vowed. Steps away from this confrontation in the Red Keep, she’s talked out of her revenge by the Hound, who tells her it will kill her or turn her into someone like him. It’s touching, but unconvincing.
But that is merely the pedestrian level of jolty string-pulling that afflicted all the characters in the final episodes. It’s no worse than how Jon, Varys, Jamie or Greyworm were handled, and was more substantially supported than Daenerys’s madness, which (though amazing in concept) was the narrative equivalent of trying to float the Titanic on whipped cream.
The real undermining of Arya in this episode begins when she parts ways with the Hound and flees into the burning city. The episode is reminiscent of the first season, when Arya was dismissed from her last ‘dancing lesson’ with Syrio Forel and fled into the pitiless streets of King’s Landing, eventually pushing through a mob to watch helplessly as her father was beheaded.
Back then Arya was a powerless little kid with a wooden sword, defiant and resourceful but simply too small and untrained to save her father or stand up to her family’s enemies. Her whole story has been a struggle for the skill and power to do what she could not do then.
Yet here she is, once again being sent away from the fight by a more veteran (and male) warrior, despite her childish pluck — “I’m going to kill her.” And there she goes, once again weaving her way desperately through the crowd, powerless to do anything but try to survive.
Was this a deliberate message about coming full circle and the impossibility of becoming powerful enough or ruthless enough to make the world safe for yourself and your loved ones?
Nah. David Benioff explained in the commentary on the episode:
The reason we decided to follow Arya out of King’s Landing and to see the fall of King’s Landing through her eyes is… you just care a lot more when you’re with a character that you care about. … When you’re there on the ground with Arya, who’s one of the people we care the most about, then everything takes on that much more of an edge.
Like the zombies-in-the-library scene in Winterfell, Arya just needed to be vulnerable and terrified for the sake of audience identification and suspense. As the horror genre has long known, nothing amplifies the threat of predatory danger like a frightened young woman in poses of female helplessness.
Begone, Badass Arya. Scared, lost, helpless Arya is more compelling.
A Girl Is Undermined
Despite thoroughly earning her abilities over the course of her story, they are toggled on and off so flippantly in the last two seasons it’s understandable that Arya lost credibility with many viewers, and that Mary Sue and Overpowered Character criticisms abound.
Arya’s courage and elite fighting skills are too inconsistent to take seriously because they were not taken seriously by the people who directed her.
Almost all the main characters declined gradually in effectiveness once the TV show departed from the books. But the decline of Jon Snow as a character doesn’t make us doubt the existence of heroic men; the decline of Tyrion Lannister doesn’t make us doubt the existence of clever men. Their finale failures reflect on the showrunners, rather than casting doubt on their achievements in earlier seasons.
Arya spent her whole story laying the groundwork for her skills and motives in the final seasons, giving her ferocity a gritty believability that is still rare for female characters. Treating that cheaply in the end undermined Arya Stark not only in the final season, but her aspirational ferocity in earlier seasons as well. She was undermined not just by the sloppiness of the showrunners, but by the industry and culture that produced them, which still treats realistically fierce women as mythical creatures.
I think it is thus fair to conclude that Arya Stark is the most undermined Game of Thrones character.
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