“I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me. Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes...eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.”—Melisandre to Arya Stark
In terms of the grand, overarching story of the game of thrones, Arya Stark may be the least important of the Starks. But to Game of Thrones as a show, Arya may be the most important Stark. Here’s what I mean: Arya hasn’t been engaged to any kings, or led rebellions, or uncovered the magical secret history of Westeros. She hasn’t even been an essential part of a major battle, like poor, doomed Rickon. She’s done two things in the grand geopolitical sense: helped the North take Harrenhal (an achievement downplayed on the show compared to the books anyway), and killed Walder Frey at the end of Season 6.
But Arya’s also one of Game of Thrones’ most popular characters, arguably its moral center, and her story has consistently been one of the most compelling for the show. Think back to the very first episode of the show, when everything was new and confusing, filled with dense history and characters with unclear motives and names. There was Arya Stark—not actually doing much, but being present, an energetic force with big wide eyes, arriving late to the official greeting party, wearing a Stark helmet over her gown.
Arya’s story initially is a fairly traditional one: the tomboy princess, oppressed by patriarchy, pushes back on society’s norms. This, combined with Maisie Williams’ instant charisma in the role, provided an easy emotional gateway for viewers. Arya’s difficult—but loving—relationship with her father and sister was one of the most humanizing elements of the first season.
The younger Stark daughter also provided a straightforward moral clarity to the story from the beginning. While almost every other character makes excuses for Joffrey and Cersei Lannister, on account of them being the heir and the queen, Arya understands them to be her enemies. Her attempts to directly confront them don’t go well—on the Kingsroad, her fight with Joffrey causes her friend Mycah’s death, as well as that of Sansa’s direwolf—and Arya’s wolf is driven into the wild. It’s thanks to Arya that we recognize Joffrey and Cersei as irredeemable villains, even as the rest of the characters, particularly Ned, underestimate their ruthlessness.
Arya’s a girl of action, not politics, which is the trait that largely removes her from the game of thrones. Her heroes, after all, are warrior women like Queen Nymeria of Dorne, after whom she names her direwolf, or Visenya Targaryen, Aegon the Conqueror’s dragon-riding sister, which Arya knows destroyed Harrenhal.
So Arya provides a critical physical counterbalance to a story that increasingly takes place in meeting rooms and tense dialogues. She also has a strange set of teachers along this path. Her brother, Jon Snow, supports her martial training by giving her the sword Needle. Ned Stark, while he wants her to be a good daughter of a lord, sees his wild sister Lyanna in Arya, and hires a Braavosi water dancer named Syrio Forel to train her in a combat style worthy of her slight build.
But when things go bad at King’s Landing, only the Stark daughters manage to survive from the original entourage. Sansa is pushed into a world of politicized abuse, treated as nothing more than a name and body for marriage as she learns how to seize power. Arya goes on an opposite journey, fleeing the chaos of the battle, seeing Syrio get killed, and even killing a venal stable boy on her way out—a shocking act for a pre-teen girl.
Arya ends the first season with even more trauma: she’s present in the crowd for her father’s shock execution. Ned’s quick thinking in spotting her and telling the Night’s Watch recruiter Yoren where she is spares her witnessing the actual beheading, and Yoren has a plan to get her out of the city and up the Kingsroad to her family.
As the second season begins, Yoren becomes another mentor for Arya, helping her through her recent trauma by giving her a specific piece of advice: list the people she wants to see dead. This tic becomes one of Arya’s trademarks. She also befriends a few of the younger recruits, King Robert’s bastard son Gendry, and two boys named Hot Pie and Lommy. An act of kindness toward a charming, supposedly dangerous man chained in a cage also earns Arya the respect of Jaqen H’ghar.
Game of Thrones’ best buddy tragedy, Sandor Clegane and Arya Stark. (Photo courtesy of HBO / Photofest)
A Lannister attack ends in the deaths of Yoren and Lommy, adding some enemy names to Arya’s list. The rest of the crew is captured and put in a pen to be tortured by Ser Gregor Clegane’s men. This ends with Tywin Lannister’s arrival—who also sees through Arya’s disguise as a boy, and makes her his servant during his time at Harrenhal.
Arya manages to free Jaqen H’ghar, winning his loyalty and a gift: three names, three lives for him to take. The theoretically moral Stark girl has a choice to make here: whether to name names for death or not. But she doesn’t treat it as much of a moral dilemma. Her family is at war, and she and her friends are in danger. First on the list: the Tickler, the torturer who threatened to kill her, Gendry, and Hot Pie. Next: Ser Amory Lorch, the Lannister loyalist who discovers her potential treachery, and is killed by Jaqen right as he threatens to tell Tywin.
Arya shows her true potential with her last “wish,” though. In order to escape Harrenhal, she orders Jaqen to help her or the name she gives him is...his own. “A girl lacks honor,” he says, and she shrugs. Honor has nothing on survival—something she learned that her father Ned and brother Robb failed to. Jaqen helps, and reveals himself to be a Faceless Man—and gives her a coin that can make her one too.
In the next two seasons, Arya hits her peak as a character. In Season 3, her friends seek and find some stability in the Riverlands, with Hot Pie joining an inn and Gendry the Brotherhood without Banners. But the Brotherhood sells Gendry out, and for that, Arya flees, into the arms of Sandor Clegane, the Hound, one of her supposed greatest enemies.
But Clegane instead becomes her fascinating relationship. Out of supposed cynicism, he promises to take her to her family for ransom money. But especially after seeing the aftermath of the Red Wedding, the two begin to form a bizarre bond: they’re both enemies of the Lannisters, both too bitter to actually join or trust anyone else. The breaking point for Arya comes when they arrive at the Vale—only to discover that her aunt Lysa, like Arya’s brother and mother before her, has died just before they arrive. Arya breaks into hysterical laughter, and the two move on.
They’re confronted shortly after by Brienne of Tarth, who recognizes Arya as one of the Stark girls she’s pursuing. Arya is initially tempted by the promise of a woman warrior as a new mentor, until the Hound arrives and notices that Brienne is wearing Lannister weapons. Both Arya and the Hound are far too paranoid about the Lannisters to hear Brienne out. The Hound fights, and Arya flees. She later returns to find the defeated Hound, who asks for the mercy of death. But he is still on her enemies list, so the girl without honor steals his purse and leaves him to die. At the end of the fourth season, Arya finally takes advantage of Jaqen’s offer, and purchases a trip to Braavos and the Faceless Men.
The next two seasons see Arya attempting to train under the Faceless, under Jaqen, or at least someone with his face, and with a rival known only as “the Waif.” Arya is physically and spiritually gifted in terms of becoming a Faceless, but she struggles mentally with losing her “self” and her face in order to become the perfect assassin. At the end of the fifth season, this means that she diverts from her mission in order to kill Ser Meryn Trant, a man on her list and fully deserving of her wrath. But he’s not the man on her list from the Faceless, and for this they take her eyesight.
Arya continues to train, and, at least apparently, goes through the motions of being a good assassin despite the Waif’s bullying, and is eventually given her sight back. She’s ordered to kill an actress, Lady Crane, but once again goes against her orders and tells Crane that she’s a target. Arya goes on the run against the Faceless, but the Waif finds and stabs her—it should be fatal, but either the show doesn’t care, or there’s something special about Arya that helps her survive multiple stabs to the torso that nobody else on the show has survived.
The Waif kills Lady Crane, and corners Arya in a tiny room. But Arya, realizing she’s trained for this, snuffs the room’s candle and fights the Waif in the dark. While some have theorized that the wounded Arya couldn’t possibly have killed the Waif, who takes the Stark girl’s face, the show seems to indicate the opposite. Arya, who’s trained in the dark, has the advantage over the Waif, and kills her Braavosi rival.
When Arya returns to Jaqen and the Faceless, he tries to tell her that she’s passed his tests and truly “become no one”—lost her identity. Instead, Arya reasserts that she is a Stark. And she proves it by assassinating Walder Frey, the man most responsible for the deaths of her brother and mother.
But Arya’s in a weird role now. She has become the bringer of death, the perfect assassin for her family. This is tinged with the Stark sense of justice, but is it enough? How much of Arya is built for revenge, and how much of her is the strongly moral girl who started the series? We’ll see—and we’ll see how much it matters—as Game of Thrones heads to its conclusion.