“The last thing you’re ever going to see
is a Stark smiling down at you as you die.”
Arya Stark is a master of death on ‘Game of Thrones’.
“Valar morghulis.”
Her young life is shaped by it, her father is executed,
she can’t save her other family members from gruesome murders,
and she responds by learning the art of killing from the pros.
“Who taught you how to do that?”
“No one.”
As Arya comes into her own, she develops a real bloodlust.
“Nothing makes you happy.”
“Lots of things make me happy.”
“Like what?”
“Killing Polliver, killing Rorge.”
She becomes an agent of retribution,
“Winter came for House Frey.”
before finally facing off with death itself,
and living through the decimation of King’s Landing
with a renewed sense of purpose.
Arya’s series-long dance with death teaches us many important lessons:
about how to cultivate resilience, study the things that hurt us,
escape self-destructive hatred, and what it means, ultimately,
to fight for the side of life.
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Game of Thrones is a show permeated by death
and this is nowhere more apparent than in Arya’s story.
Her coming of age is an experience in watching her family be hunted down.
“Her mother's dead.
Her father's dead.
Her brother's dead.
Winterfell is a pile of rubble.”
Think back to the scene in Season One where Ned is executed:
aside from him, the focus of this scene is Arya.
We’re made to feel her confusion and terror
in this life-changing moment, as her father,
the strongest person she knows, is killed on a whim.
So while before this she enjoys swordplay as sport,
what starts her down the road to becoming a killer
is the realization that those in power are killing for the wrong reasons.
“Bring me his head.”
This is something that already deeply disturbed her
when the Lannisters murdered her friend Mycah.
“The butcher's boy.
My friend.
He was 12 years old.
He was unarmed.”
But the death of her father crystallizes her sense of purpose:
taking down the evil people who rule.
In Season Two, Arya can’t sleep because
she’s haunted by the memory of Ned’s death –
so Yoren tells her about how he used to repeat the name of his brother’s killer
until he finally got to slay the man.
“It got to the point where I would say his name
every night before I went to bed.
‘Willem.
Willem.’
A prayer almost.”
Yoren then sarcastically says:
“That'll help you sleep, eh?”
Yet, as Arya goes on to adopt this practice as her own,
“Joffrey, Cersei, Walder Frey…”
it does help her sleep.
“I can't sleep until I say the names.”
Her kill list becomes a mantra that grants her peace
and gives her the fuel to keep going.
It’s a way for her to take back power in this world that’s so disempowered her.
“So you're sad because you didn't get to kill Joffrey yourself.
Is that it?”
“At least I could have been there to watch.
I wanted to see the look in his eyes when he knew it was over.”
Part of the sting of Ned’s death is that Arya is so close, yet powerless to stop it
–
and this tragedy is repeated in Season Three
when she arrives moments too late
to see her mother and her brother Robb at the Red Wedding.
“It’s too late.”
Murder destroys Arya’s family, but as she becomes a killer,
she takes control of this fatal force and is empowered by it.
So she represents the power of using the thing that has hurt you as a weapon.
“I know Death.
He's got many faces.
I look forward to seeing this one.”
In our own lives, our instinct might be
to distance ourselves from the things that hurt us –
but through the surviving Stark children we see that we need to invite them in.
Bran loses the use of his legs only to discover his abilities as a warg,
“You’ll never walk again, but you will fly.”
Sansa’s suffering makes her one of the
smartest characters in the seven kingdoms,
“She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
and Arya turns the death that she can’t escape
into her own superpower.
“The Red God is the one true god.”
“He's not my one true god.”
“No?
Who's yours?”
“Death.”
[music playing]
Arya, the student of death, enjoys the tutelage of a variety of teachers
over the course of the show.
“Syrio says every hurt is a lesson and every lesson makes you better.”
She soaks up her lessons like a sponge,
but like the best of students, she also thinks for herself –
keeping what’s useful and letting go of what she doesn’t agree with.
Arya’s first teacher is Syrio Forel.
“Who are you?”
“Your dancing master.”
Warm, good-humored Syrio teaches Arya to enjoy swordplay as an art,
favoring a fighting style that’s all about grace.
“He says every swordsman should study cats.
They're as quiet as shadows and as light as feathers.”
His emphasis on delicacy and precision allows her
to see the hidden advantage in her small size.
“You are skinny, that is good!
The target is small.”
In their last moments together, as he defends himself
against Ser Meryn Trant with only a wooden sword,
Syrio’s gutsiness in the face of death stays with his student,
“What do we say to the god of death?”
“Not today.”
as we see when Melisandre calls on Syrio’s words
to prepare Arya for her own ‘against all odds’ moment.
“What do we say to the god of death?”
“Not today.”
Next Arya gets to know Jaqen H’ghar, one of the Faceless Men of Braavos.
“Only death may pay for life.”
As a reward for her saving his life, he offers to kill any three people.
This experience is the first time she recognizes
that death can be the solution to her problems.
“But he's going to tell Tywin.
He's getting away.
It has to be now.”
In Season Three when Arya is taken in by the Brotherhood Without Banners,
they show her it’s viable to take justice into one’s own hands –
which is exactly what she wants to do.
But the men of the Brotherhood make moral concessions for the greater good,
which Arya can’t accept.
“I'm a hostage and you're selling me.”
“Don't think of it that way.”
“But it is that way.”
So she rejects this aspect of their philosophy,
doubling down on her determination not to compromise
in her quest for justice.
Arguably her most formative teacher is her next captor and protector:
the Hound, who shapes her into a killer.
“That's where the heart is.”
While she thinks she hates him for most of their travels together,
her fellow lone wolf the Hound is one of
the few people who can truly understand this girl.
“I don’t like crowds.”
“Me neither.”
He, too, has been shaped by trauma and is fueled by anger.
“Hate's as good a thing as any to keep a person going.
Better than most.”
“Sometimes anger makes people do unfortunate things.”
“Sometimes fear makes them do unfortunate things.
I'll go with anger.”
The Hound gives Arya free reign to express her rage
and act on her violent impulses.
“Is that the first man you've killed?”
“The first man.”
“Next time you're going to do something like that, tell me first.”
Over time, she adopts his stone-cold veneer,
masking the more sensitive person underneath.
“You're a cold little b**ch, aren't you?
Guess that's why you're still alive.”
And he pushes her to adopt
a realistic view of this gritty world.
“I just understand the way things are.
How many Starks they got to behead before you figure it out?”
But Arya rejects the Hound’s total cynicism,
as she still clings to the importance of harming
only those who deserve it.
“He took us in.
He fed us and you--”
“Aye, he took us in.
He's a good man, his daughter makes a nice stew,
nd they'll both be dead come winter.”
When Arya reunites with Jaqen at the House of Black and White in Season
Five,
the Faceless Men train her in the psychological skills of expert killing.
She learns to lie,
“I'm the youngest daughter of a great lord, Eddard Stark.
He died in battle.”
“A lie.”
to fight while blind, and to take faces.
Yet Arya cannot accept the amorality that defines the Faceless Men.
In Season Two, mysterious Jaqen seems almost
like a genie who is granting wishes,
“I can name anyone and you'll kill him?”
“A man has said.”
and this too-good-to-be-true experience is part of how Arya firsts falls for death,
as an exciting way-out she can use to feel better.
“Show me how.
I want to be able to do it too.”
But as we learn more about the Faceless Men,
we see the darker side of Jaqen’s offer,
and the work the Faceless Men do as assassins who don’t ask questions.
Arya herself can’t become a contract killer.
“Who wants her dead?”
“That does not matter.”
What drives her as a killer is a deeply personal and emotional aim –
to avenge her loved ones.
“A girl has taken a life.
The wrong life.”
Her first real kill is a crime of passion,
brought on by hearing one of the Frey’s soldiers
bragging about the Red Wedding.
“None of the Starks had much to say about the end of that meal.
I'll tell you what, though, the hardest thing
was getting that wolf's head to stay on the body.”
Arya can’t let go of the fierce love that’s at the heart of who she is.
“He was my friend.”
“No, he wasn't.
Didn't you listen to him?”
“He was no one.”
But the biggest barrier between her and the Faceless Men
is that she can’t efface her strong sense of self.
“Finally a girl is no one.”
“A girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell.”
As she reclaims Needle, the sword she couldn’t
bring herself to throw away and which reflects
her own slim and dainty yet deadly personality –
Arya leaves the Faceless Men armed with the formidable practical know-how of killing.
But she leaves behind their impersonal philosophy of death,
which it never really seemed possible that she could adopt,
given what she’s lived through and the individual she is.
On top of taking from all these teachers,
Arya learns a thing or two from her enemies.
When she’s Tywin Lannister’s cupbearer in Season Two,
she gets insight into the mental skills
that have made Tywin a seasoned general and ice-cold killer of masses.
Tywin respects intelligence, which is why he takes an interest in Arya.
“You're too smart for your own good.
Has anyone told you that?”
“Yes.”
He spends his days plotting from a tower,
showing her that being smart, strategic and thorough –
and drawing on historical knowledge – is the way to win a war.
He’s extremely perceptive, as shown in how, unlike most others, he quickly picks up
that Arya is a girl,
“This one's a girl, you idiot, dressed as a boy.”
and a highborn one at that.
“Lowborn girls say ‘m'lord,’ not ‘my lord.’
If you're going to pose as a commoner, you should do it properly.”
So Arya comes away from this experience
understanding the importance of reading people
to decipher what they’re hiding –
something she later becomes very adept at.
“You are scared the Northern lords will read it.
They wouldn’t think much of Lady Sansa if they knew how she did Cersei's bidding.”
Each of Arya’s teachers helps her hone the skills
she needs to become an expert killer.
But even more importantly,
their wide-ranging and nuanced relationships to death
help her clarify what she truly feels and believes
about the morality and purpose of killing.
[music playing]
Arya’s style as a killer is very much a correction
to the cavalier violence she witnesses in King’s Landing.
Her executions are precise, deeply thought-out,
and most of all, they have a sense of poetic justice.
“Something wrong with your leg, boy?”
She lulls House Frey into a false sense of security
before murdering them,
mirroring the way the Red Wedding violated Westeros’ sacred ‘guest right’.
“Slaughtered your guests after inviting them into your home.”
She even makes Walder Frey feel the horror of having eaten his own children,
“They’re already here, my lord.”
before slitting his throat – just as her mother Catelyn
had to watch Robb murdered in front of her before her throat was cut.
She kills Littlefinger with the knife that he used
to start the War of the Five Kings,
“You told our mother this knife belonged to Tyrion Lannister.
But that was another one of your lies.”
Arya reminds her victims of what they did before she kills them,
“He told me he'd f**k me bloody with a stick.”
so that they’re thinking about their misdeeds when they die.
In this world that is so lacking in justice, she becomes an agent of retribution,
like a goddess of punishment visiting sinners.
“He on your little list?”
“He can't be.
I don't know his name.”
“What’s your name.”
Her lethal nature guided by her strict individualistic moral code
might even remind us of Omar on The Wire –
who likewise responds to Baltimore’s drug kingpins
destroying the community by inflicting his own justice.
In the end, Arya could never have become a Faceless Man
because they serve Death, whom they call the Many-Faced God.
But the contradiction of Arya is that she’s a killer who fights for life.
This is why it feels right that she is the one
to take out the Night King.
Some questioned why she was the one to slay death itself.
This triumph has always been in the cards for her,
“Blue eyes.
Eyes you'll shut forever.”
the embodiment of death could only be taken down
by this girl who has danced with death her whole life,
and come to understand it as no other character does.
“For, oh god, I think it’s maybe three years now or something,
we’ve known that it was gonna be Arya who delivers that fatal blow.”
Arya’s purpose is thrown into relief even more
in the penultimate episode of the series,
when Daenerys’ rampage of King’s Landing
makes Arya confront the cost of giving into hatred.
Arya has come there hellbent on crossing a key name off her kill list,
“I'm going to kill Queen Cersei.”
but the Hound gives her one final lesson,
urging her not to follow him in this important way.
“You think you wanted revenge a long time?
I've been after it all my life.
And look at me.
Look at me!
You want to be like me?”
So she turns back from making vengeance her life’s purpose –
and instead tries to protect the innocent civilians around her.
“You have to keep moving.”
The end of the episode shows her meeting another survivor of this apocalypse –
a white horse.
In the Bible’s ‘Book of Revelation’, the four horsemen of the apocalypse
all have different horses, with Death riding a pale horse –
so this scene could be getting at how Arya is Death,
riding to deliver its divine judgment.
The retribution she’s now capable of delivering
feels righteous, on a higher, more sacred level
than personal revenge.
She is violent justice embodied.
From the beginning, Arya is a fierce individual.
“You will marry a high lord and rule his castle.
And your sons shall be knights and princes and lords.”
“No.
That's not me.”
She understands early on that her nature
is at odds with the unwritten rules of her society.
“I was never going to be as good a lady as you.
So I had to be something else.”
Just listen to her recount this memory of her father
watching her use a bow and arrow:
“I knew what I was doing was against the rules
but he was smiling, so I knew wasn't wrong.
The rules were wrong.”
So Arya develops an instinctive understanding
that breaking certain rules is right –
and through a mix of rebellion and self-determination,
she writes her own rulebook,
relying on her own instincts as she goes.
“If you only trust the people you grew up with,
you won't make many allies.”
“That's alright.
I don't need many allies.”
The image of Arya with the white horse is also a symbol of survival.
Just as this beautiful animal is somehow still standing, Arya –
in spite of all she’s endured – has miraculously escaped the fate
of the all-consuming hatred that has poisoned so many around her
who can’t stop themselves from continuing the cycle of suffering and rage.
Arya’s will to survive and her devotion to the side of life
make her a beacon of hope on this death-saturated show –
as beautiful and awe-inspiring as this improbable white horse
riding through the burning rubble.
So this young woman is a model of resilience.
When we’re going through our hardest times,
which probably don’t equal what she’s been through,
we can learn from the enormous inner strength
she draws on, how she trusts herself, saves herself
and doubles down on what she knows in her bones is true and just.
Like Arya, we have to become masters of the painful things in our lives,
until eventually, we can beat them at their own game.
“It must have felt good sticking a knife in that horned f**ker.”
“Felt better than dying.”
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