ehn, she kinda is?

ya

ya she lost about 100 father figures in a row there
and then her family
and her friends

i mean she was precious & adventurous
she went through a lot of ****, and turned ruthless

her not becoming an emotionless psychopath like Jaqen is kind of the point, no?
they wanted her to surrender all humanity, and she refused

faceless men also tried to get her to surrender her identity, and she refused

she seems to be slowly regaining her humanity
she seemed much colder & stoic in s7
like how bran is all aspy

ya, could have been better

ya, show lost some emotional depth & perspective

but they didn't
that always really bugged me how jaqen pitched it as a fun murder club where you get to kill whoever you don't like, and then she gets there and they're like "ah no actually you're just some murder slave for hire, now let's start beating you for like 3 years for whatever reason"

oh yeah that reminds me i wanted to mention the tully aspect which tends to get overlooked
family, duty, honour
"family comes first?"-bran
arya is probably the stark most about family
over & over she's about family (even her unbearable sister)

anyway ya, so she separates from her brothers, loses her dad (and other father figures), flees from her sister, loses her mom, loses her oldest brother, loses her friends/crush ("i can be your family"), loses dogs, and whatever else i'm forgetting at the moment
her last tenuous grasp is the sword she got from ... her cousin
that tie is the last thread, so close, almost gone
but she is arya stark of winterfell

it's a better line than i thought actually (though the 2nd part needed work)

i'd prob argue that revenge being part of her deal is acceptable
(esp if she thinks that her entire family is dead)

i see a couple ways that this could be fine, for me anyway
probably could have been sharpened though, ya

little in the way of personal cost?

she might have thought that
naive like sansa about her dreams
of course the reality of fearsome warrior queen seems likely to come at tremendous personal cost
(mostly just referring to the psychological stuff, but she also did seem to get beat up a lot)

which arya suffered
like sansa, who was naive about the risks of being in the bigtime power game

maybe one of the reasons arya seemed ****ed up and wanted to join a murder cult was because she was super ****ed up from all personal costs?

I was trying to explain to someone today why I felt Arya's arc was inconsistent with the show as a whole, but couldn't express it as eloquently as Chris V. Thanks sir. You are spot on.

Never read the books, though might now just to see everything unfold in a hopefully far superior way.

The show follows the books surprisingly closely (surprising in the sense of how far TV adaptations usually deviate from the story) for the first 4 seasons.

After that things start to go wrong in the books as well, the 4th and 5th books are very self-indulgent and introduce a host of new characters, very few of whom are at all interesting. The 5th book expends like 100-150 pages and 3 POV characters on a subplot, the impact of which on the main story could be summarized in a sentence or two. There's an interminable amount of Essosian and Dornish politics. One of the reasons people think the books are never getting finished is that there are a just incredible number of subplots in the air. In addition to all the stuff the show had to deal with, a couple of dead major characters in the show are still alive in the books, there's a whole other contender for the throne who isn't in the show, etc. There's an amazing amount to do and the sample chapters released from TWOW show GRRM still just pottering around in random plotlines.

D&D have done a good job of showrunning, by which I mean trimming irrelevant plots back, omitting things which can't easily be done in a visual storytelling format, keeping tabs on a large cast of characters, etc etc. I just wish they'd had someone else write the new stuff. If we could combine GRRMs gift for characterization, plotting and world-building with D&D's gift for not letting things turn into a mess, we'd really be in business.

Edit: The point of this post is, I don't know if I'd recommend reading the books. They're very good and there's a lot of backstory not in the show - exactly what the hell went on with Robert's Rebellion and Rhaegar and so on is something that gradually gets built up over the series - GRRM once said something like "ASOIAF is a story where the hero dies before the story starts", meaning Rhaegar. But it's all almost certainly going to end in frustration. I guess if you read them with that knowledge in mind it's not so bad.

Read them, they're great.

A+ for both Chris and 72o for high-quality defence of their respective positions.

Such discussion is insightful, and enhances my enjoyment of the show.

FAIL: OAFK for spending 50+ posts trying to tell people the right way to watch TV.

The biggest fail is a poster such as yourself thinking they are in a position to call out other posters for forum popularity.

I would imagine that if you are going to spend a lot of time giving characters limits and vulnerabilities and not using silver bullet tropes/ plot armour/DEM then resolving issues becomes a lot harder.

Life/reality is a frustrating mess most of the time.

The whole reason hollywood tropes exist and get reused time and time again is because they are easy established means to tidy up messes.

Subscribed to Chris' newsletter.

If you like my thoughts on Arya I recommend this video, which was made in the gap between seasons 5 and 6. The creator Alt-Shift-X is one of the biggest ASOIAF content creators and I think this is one of his best videos. He uses both visuals from the show and quotes from the books to illustrate his points, and lays out a theory for what will happen to Arya in the books that I think would be an awesome ending for her. It's a good intro to the extra depth you get from the books, especially in terms of being able to see into the minds of POV characters. There's a digression for a theory he has that maybe the Faceless Men will order Arya to kill Jon which I think is a weird idea, but other than that I think the video is A+ in its entirety and demonstrates why I think wisecracking badass Arya is a bad direction to go with the character.

Really hard to imagine a bigger ****** than oafk11. Would be biggest and most suicide causing thread in history to have him and toothsayer from bfi talk about anything.

This guy says everything that i agree with. Those who are fine with the epsiode and want to learn why people arnt happy, watching this might help.

It was just a terribly written episode.




----------------------------------------------------------------------

I also like the idea that if you make arya kill night king, she shouldnt be doing it where everything goes right for her. Shes supposed to be no-one, a faceless assassin but she managed to keep all the skills of training whilst being arya. Make a punishment for her given she broke the rules and is just stupidly OP now

Nah, he is spot on.

I get why people don’t like it. But the obsession with Arya has two components.

First, there’s the “how did she get there” complaint. I don’t disagree with it really but it’s like so far down the list of implausible things in this episode and the series that I don’t understand the obsession. I’m much more annoyed by the endless scenes of characters being overwhelmed and yet never actually dying. Or the stupidity of not using the dragons to burn away your enemies fleet. Or how the **** Arya arranged a Frey family reunion without anyone being suspicious about the two sons missing for what would have been days or the really weird way old man Frey is acting.

Second, is the whole “she just stabbed him” crap. Which is such a ******ed complaint when the show has made it obvious for awhile now that this was going to end exactly like this. Someone was going to stab the NK with dragon glass or Valyrian steel and the whole threat would immediately disappear.

Still want to know what the "message from the Night King" was....

RE Angryjoes video and various posts ITT

I never read the books but I feel like I've been watching this show wrong all along with one of the main complaints being that the episode sucked because "the main villain" was dealt with in a lame way.

For me the NK has never been the main villain. He was the "tropy" part of the show for me that was fun to watch, but was not good for the overall quality of the show. I never expected the plot line to go any further or deeper than it did.

Regardless of what I think of the episode (I liked it except for the ridiculous plot armour), I am happy that the story line was dealt with in E3. I would've hated it if the NK remained a factor in the last episodes of the show.

I had already accepted that the NK plot line did not have the same complexities the rest of the show does have. Maybe I missed a ton of signs that did point to the storyline being complex, but I honestly missed them all .




I do agree that E3 was not a good sign for the quality of the last 3 episodes, the probability of them being ****ty has definetely gone up. But if the writers were able to find their balls again in E4, it could still be an amazing end run. I also think there is a fair probability that GRRM was like "IDGAF what you you do with the NK-plot, but this is what happens in the battle for the throne. "

Resolution of the NK story never felt THAT important to me. I am surprised that it was Arya who finished him off, not because I thought it was Jon Snow's job, but I figured it'd be the payoff for the Bran storyline -- Arya singlehandedly avenging the Red Wedding seemed like a good endgame for her. In a way Bran did set up the NK's demise and Arya is the best-trained person for the job but I thought he'd be doing more.

It's been pretty obvious to me for at least 10 episodes that Sansa is going to win the Iron Throne. Would be a major surprise at this point if that's not the case. Gendry hanging around could throw a wrinkle into that but he's been such a minor character for so long I don't think that's how it'll go.

they have been telling us for several seasons that the night king is the main villain. the only war that matters is between the living and the dead etc.

odds arya gets killed by gilly for killing all her brothers?

Some characters, namely Jon Snow, have been saying that but several other characters didn't think so. Like Cersei, the maesters at the Citadel, even Littlefinger. Sansa and Dany are not acting like that's the only war that matters.

If you have a source for this quote it would be amazing since nobody else on the internet can find where GRRM said this

I've always felt like it was a show about an existential threat to humanity and our complete inability to deal with it. So it was a little disappointing for the threat to not be that big of a deal.

The Army of the Dead basically dead huge defeats to our heroes on three occasions, wiped out all of the Dothraki and most of the Unsullied and a huge chunk of the Northern forces. So they were sort of a big deal.

Yeah, it looks like that came about by Chinese whispers more or less. I've seen it cited elsewhere a couple times but it looks like he never said it.