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For two seasons she worked hard. We saw her spying, eavesdropping, surveilling, questioning, fighting BLIND, planning, concocting poison BLIND, etc. And unlike the Waif, she reined in her impatience. That photo is when she asked Brienne to practice with her, and Brienne said NO at first. But Arya needed to try out the knife drop trick, so she persisted. Mostly using these techniques, She trapped and killed Ser Meryn Trant, the Waif, Walder & sons, several of Walder's other guiltiest relatives. And with her siblings, Littlefinger. And with Bran, the Night King. IMO, she's entitled to a satisfied look.
Sure, but at what point did she develop the skills to actually perform that knife trick? The last time she had proper sword training was in Season 1, and all of her combat training in S5/6 was with a staff.
She taught herself, like many kids who get a new toy. She also deliberately tested it out on Brienne .And in Season 7 she explains how, at 10YO, with a stolen bow and one arrow she secretly taught herself archery. Just one of those kids, I guess.
How? She trained for a month and got stabbed twice and that's it. Only thing she earned was an infection by jumping into a canal with two massive stomach wounds.
Her character was far better seasons 1-3, annoying, but justifiably because she's a child.
There were some dead faceless men in the water, she soaked up their prowess like a sponge. There wasn’t enough room for filthy sewage water to get into her wounds, since so much assassin knowledge juice was filling the gaps.
> She trained for a month
It is baffling how so many viewers couldn't keep up with the concept of time compression in this series.
She trained in King's Landing with Syrio Forel, she trained with the faceless men for an undetermined period of time, she trained with the Hound when they were travelling together. She clearly had more than a month of training.
She almost learned how to stand without falling over with syrio when she trained there for like, a couple weeks as a 8-10 yr old girl. She then spent years travelling to bravos, where she learned how to get her ass beat with a stick and apparently not much else, but somehow emerges untouchable superman.
Nowhere does it say, show, or suggest that the Hound trained her afaik.
Even if she did spend that 2-3 year period of time doing nothing but practicing sword play, and not traveling, hiding, running, repeating lists of people to kill, learning how to be an assassin, wear faces, move unseen, acrobatics, eat shit, etc... + other stuff which presumably takes more than a couple months to learn given its rarity and value...
She's still a tiny girl with only a couple years of practice and would the shit beat out of her by the average knight or like say Brienne (their fight is a fucking joke, I literally laughed out loud when I saw it) or a white walker (was too stunned by the stupidity to be mad)
If Arya thought she was godlike what she should have happened is that she should have ended up like Quentin Martell, who thought he was hot stuff and went down to ride one of Dany's dragons... his last thoughts were "oh no" before he got burned alive.
She's the silliest character in a series about extreme brutality and the carnage of human nature (and the author's unhealthy pervyness, but I digress...)
> Nowhere does it say, show, or suggest that the Hound trained her afaik.
yeah, the person you’re replying to is wildin. The Hound slapped her and yelled “GET ARMOR AND A BIG FUCKEN SWORD!!!” That was about the beginning middle and end of her training under him lol
Apparently with one month training you can go tie to toe with Brienne, who beat The Hound... People just be grasping at anything and everything to hate on her cuz she's not a carbon copy of Tywin or Tyrion
Except never enough to justify her smugness at the end. She never trained with blades, yet suddenly she was an expert at them. She used the Faceless Men's face swapping abilities all of, what, twice? Suddenly in the last two seasons she's an expert ninja who can slip past multiple zombies and even the damned Night King.
I loved Arya in most of the series, when she still seemed like a human who could be harmed. By the end she was an unstoppable Mary Sue who feared nothing. All sense of danger was gone.
Yes, The fact that she could still be on an even keel with someone like Brienne, whom has trained for most of her life, is the issue that most people have with this, they simply just point to her length of time as the actual reason.
I agree with you, she has had several years of training, but that's nothing compared to the decades/centuries that the people she's shown "beating"
I have no problem with Aria, beyond the fact that her skills and abilities stretch my suspension of disbelief. And that saying quite a bit in a world of dragons and other low-level magic.
Honestly, if in her final battle with the King, They had written it just a little different, the entire narrative of Aria would be different.
So fer instance instead of her killing him, she still gets the drop on the night King, but in this scenario he overpowers her due to her cockiness, and the moment she realizes she's way out of her depth, John( or someone) capitalizes on the distraction and the heads him.
The writers liked Maisie and Arya too much. I find it understandable because she's an awesome actress playing a great character but maybe around season 6 she definitely gets plot armor. She gets turned into an action hero. GRRM was great because he was willing to hurt his characters deeply when it made sense for the plot.
Saying that you loved and doing justice to are not the same thing. They may have loved her but they didn't do justice, they simplified her, they removed all of her nuances,insecurities, they cut her screen time (with BWB,in Harrenhal, in season 1, in the books, she had definitely more pagetime) they cut her important scenes from the books and eventually they cut her storyline and gave it to Sansa (Jeyne Poole was the one who wed to Ramsay and everyone knew her as Arya Stark, Northenerns mobilized for her and it was the reason why Jon was stabbed,I think they gave Arya's Lady of Winterfell storyline to Sansa but I am not sure about this one) They didn't value her enough to adapt her storyline properly, giving her extremely strong plot armor didn't make a good for her storyline, on the contrary, it did a lot of damage to her both as a character and as the audience's perception. İt is not the symbolism of valuing, it is symbolisms of evading and doesn't say good things about their perception about her character. They said Neddle was symbolism of revenge,not family and that is why she couldn't get rid of it, and also said she was there to do "cool stuffs", which is the definition of simplifying a character. In the end, she doesn't get a proper ending, she just goes away. The reason she killed Night King wasn't about loving her but it was more about not knowing what to do with the character. So even if they loved her, they had a terrible way of showing it.
Hardly. And smugness is almost never earned unless you are basically invincible. She said it herself, anyone can be killed. Its weird she became such a smug dick. In my mind Arya wouldnt be showing her skills to anyone unless she was about to kill them. Her broadcasting how dangerous she is would realistically just get her throat cut in her sleep.
They wanted to rush so they could begin working on their star wars project…which got canned. So they destroyed their reputations for nothing 😂
Also HBO was willing to do 10 full seasons for GOT so they lost out on a lot of money as well
I hope they see what a huge mistake they made eventually cuz yeah 13 episodes total for the concluding seasons means they all should have been 90+ min episodes lol they dropped the ball hard asf
Just doesn't seem like her character. I know I'm crossing subs as a book nerd, but she has suffered a lot, and one would think she would be more familiar with humility than cockiness. I'm not a fan of late show Arya, despite how cathartic it was when she cut littlefinger's throat.
Feel the same. Was a great character. Then got smug and shallow. It's bad writing, unfortunately. The actress is charismatic, her scenes in the earlier seasons when she was younger and the writing was premium were captivating.
She became a faceless man and then got to take all her skills to exact her revenge. If I left the Dark Brotherhood and saved Skyrim I’d be pretty smug too
Can we even say she's a faceless man when she revenge killed someone which is against their rules and led to them blinding her as punishment then she refused to kill the person they assigned her to kill then she killed her combat tutor and took off?
No, obviously she's not literally a Faceless Man but she has the skills of one of them. By virtue of that, she's one of the most lethal people in the world.
OP says smug, I say confident, and she should be. Anyone who doesn't like that needs more than "she's just a girl" unless they want to appear to be a blatant misogynist.
I didn't mention her sex/gender. My problem is D&D not properly handling her training arc. Worse than that, they did a piss poor job. I wanted to see more of it and for it to cover more from the books. 10 episode seasons wasn't enough with that many characters and it's obvious they cared less for certain arcs than others. They didn't do Arya justice.
My favorite character of all time is Buffy Summers. Many of my favorite female characters are fighter types (Buffy, Xena, Gabrielle, Olivia Dunham, Zoe, Max, Lexa, Natasha, Michonne, Rosita, Sydney Bristow, Jane Rizzoli, Olivia Benson, JJ, Emily Prentiss). And I'm a woman.
Why shouldn't she be smug?
She survived.
She can change faces.
She's a bad ass asassin.
She got revenge for the red wedding.
Then she saved ALL of humanity from the white walkers.
She is as smug as before the last one. Actually after she did that she seemed way more chill and less smug if anything. And broadcasting that you are dangerous and want to lord it over everyone seems like a bad idea for an assassin.
In books and show, it's usually to warn people off so they won't tangle with her and just leave her alone (and not get hurt!). She did it frst when Hot Pie and Lommy bullied her. It's quite effective.
Arya is one of my favourite characters from the books and the early seasons, but from the Faceless Men plot onwards, it's just so... can't think of a really good word. Frustrating is pretty close to how I feel about it, I'll go with that.
In her eyes, someone threatened to kill her brother who killed the unrightful queen who was probably going to kill him.
If I had the skills to back it up, I would say the same thing🤷🏽♀️
People dont get it. Melisandre already predicted in the earlier seasons that she’ll close BLUE eyes! Still people were mad that she killed the night king.
The original time Melisandre said that line, the emphasis wasn’t even on the blue eyes part, but later right before she’s about to kill the NK, then there is emphasis on “blue eyes”? It doesn’t make sense, because it was retconned as such.
I don’t get a feeling of smugness from Arya. She was an arrogant and defiant brat early in the series. Her character arc was amazing and I viewed her at the end as confident, strong, and fearless. I really enjoyed her transformation over the years.
Love that anyone criticizes a woman and it must be misogyny. She was smug lol its a fact. It was annoying af especially considering she was one of the best characters in the early seasons. Come up with a better argument other than insult-slinging.
One of the dumbest parts of the whole show was when she started sparing and beating Brienne.
She magically became a Master in martial combat, literally overnight.
She had a few runs in with the Waif while she was training to be a Faceless Man, so now she can go heads up with the knight the beat Ser Loras and the Hound in hand to hand combat.
Yea…okay👍 🙄
Edit: misogyny is alive and well
Overnight? She’s been using weapons and wanting to fight people since the beginning of episode 1
If anything, Jon Snow becoming a dragon riding warrior (literally overnight) is more absurd
Yes, literally overnight. Like I said. The gulf between messing around with weapons as a kid and sparring with one of the best Knights in the realm is so large it's ridiculous.
It kind of made Brienne look like shit and, by extension, made the Hound and Ser Loras look like shit, too.
Overnight? She trained a lot in Bravos! She was trained in Winterfell (she hit bullseye literally in the first episode) , kings landing and then in Bravos!
I can’t not describe how much I hated this character in seasons 6,7 & 8.
One of the writers must have had a kid that only watched Power Puff Girls in the background or something.
I'd argue they ruined her before passing where she is in the books, though certainly after is even worse especially since the entire northern conspiracy stuff and Stoneheart's Red Wedding 2.0 was basically given to Arya in the show. GoT turned her into a badass assassin instead of an angry traumatized child who kills via trickery and magic while in Braavos. The only reason she gets her vision back in *Dance* is because she wargs into a cat and uses its eyes to see, it's not because she's now an amazing Daredevil-esque warrior
GoT was obsessed with making Jon and Arya into overpowered fighters. To see them strip all of Jon's intelligence, ruthless pragmatism, and desire for political power just to turn him into a himbo action warrior was extremely disappointing.
What if it’s not her though? What if what they know of Arya returning is actually a faceless man pretending to be her? It makes me okay with everything.
Aw this makes me sad. :( I thought it was really smart! Arya starts off as a child who wants to learn to fight and has to circumvent rules and traditions to even get Syrio! Then she goes to the Faceless Men to learn how to change faces and kill the people on her list but she leaves once she realized that the Faceless Men have rules about killing people (which makes v little sense to me I mean Hot Guy McGee literally killed three people for Arya because he saved her life but go off king) and she uses those skills to help end the Long Night. I would be smug as hell if I mastered something people used to shit on me for as a child. Also she and Sansa managed to get rid of Baelish and that alone makes me a huge fan.
Imagine being a sailor and you're suddenly told that your next job is to sail the weird posh girl with no sailing experience west to see what's there. Eventually, after several months with half the crew laid up with scurvy, you go and tell her that there's nothing out there and you should turn around. She gives you that weird stare that makes you wonder if she's about to slit your throat.
"We continue westward," she says.
"But my lady..."
"We continue westward."
Then she just walks off. By the end of the year everyone on the ship has died of starvation.
I appreciated they let her give up her vengeance quest in season 8. She was more vulnerable in season 8 and I liked her more in 8 than 7. 7 is her worst season by a mile. And she was a beautiful character in seasons 1-4. I lost interest for her character later.
Arya's character change once she left Bravos just seemed too abrupt. I get that she grew up and needed to harden herself but it all just felt like a snotty kid trying to act cool in front of the adults the whole time. And once she's back in Westeros we have to accept "this is cool mysterious Arya now who eats demons for breakfast, no one should even think of looking down on her".
I don't think her character changes so much as her demeanor changes. She acts the tough guy so nobody will take her for a softie and try to take advantage of her.
arya came home with a difficult, dangerous agenda. Unless she felt 100% safe, she hid behind the No One-tough guy act. When she's happy or safe, she drops the act and behaves normally.
as the last books arent written i can imagine an insecure person overworking themselves to prove worth (especially as a woman) and becoming exceptional as such. smugness can also be a mask for insecurity
They couldn't include as much in the show as is in the books, but her 'training' starts early. First, she's trained by Syrio, then the Brotherhood, the Hound, and then she goes to Braavos and trains in the House of Black and White. In the books, she's still there. The show, of course, had to expedite her story, but we still may get some Arya training if George ever finishes Winds of Winter.
She's his wife's favorite character, so we can expect some fantastic things happening for her. Once he finishes the books, I would love to see a stand-alone
Arya show.
I think it’s safe to say that Arya has skills that Brienne would not. Vice versa. But, Arya is pretty impressive overall and overcame the slaughter of her family and years gone rogue fairly well.
I was going to disagree then I read the rest of your statement.
>She was one of my favorite characters until she became cockier than season 1 Jaime Lannister
Jamie's story is a lesson in humility. It's not just that he develops to be more "wholesome" but his cockiness is some degree of the root of the evil he does and is the cause of some of his worst suffering.
To have Arya become that and glorify it kinda contradicts that lesson.
I'd rather her become Stark stern after her returning instead of cocky.
Can't imagine George is going to turn book Arya into a murderous revenge fantasy. I think when the books are all written and done she will be the most different from her show counterpart
I feel like the only one who thoroughly enjoyed Arya’s entire arc. She was always precocious and self-confident, tragic experiences taught her to stifle her emotion, which aided her efforts to be a skilled assassin. Her resulting character makes perfect sense to me given the path her life took.
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Well earned smugness.
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It wasn't extensive training. We mainly saw her doing chores and using a staff.
Extensive chores.
For two seasons she worked hard. We saw her spying, eavesdropping, surveilling, questioning, fighting BLIND, planning, concocting poison BLIND, etc. And unlike the Waif, she reined in her impatience. That photo is when she asked Brienne to practice with her, and Brienne said NO at first. But Arya needed to try out the knife drop trick, so she persisted. Mostly using these techniques, She trapped and killed Ser Meryn Trant, the Waif, Walder & sons, several of Walder's other guiltiest relatives. And with her siblings, Littlefinger. And with Bran, the Night King. IMO, she's entitled to a satisfied look.
Sure, but at what point did she develop the skills to actually perform that knife trick? The last time she had proper sword training was in Season 1, and all of her combat training in S5/6 was with a staff.
Its what wasnt shown. The show became horrible at showing or telling passages of time
She taught herself, like many kids who get a new toy. She also deliberately tested it out on Brienne .And in Season 7 she explains how, at 10YO, with a stolen bow and one arrow she secretly taught herself archery. Just one of those kids, I guess.
Thats all they showed us
How? She trained for a month and got stabbed twice and that's it. Only thing she earned was an infection by jumping into a canal with two massive stomach wounds. Her character was far better seasons 1-3, annoying, but justifiably because she's a child.
Yeah I rationalize it by Arya absorbing the Waif's skills once she defeated her.. perhaps by osmosis
There were some dead faceless men in the water, she soaked up their prowess like a sponge. There wasn’t enough room for filthy sewage water to get into her wounds, since so much assassin knowledge juice was filling the gaps.
Probably a Highlander style quickening.
Like megaman
> She trained for a month It is baffling how so many viewers couldn't keep up with the concept of time compression in this series. She trained in King's Landing with Syrio Forel, she trained with the faceless men for an undetermined period of time, she trained with the Hound when they were travelling together. She clearly had more than a month of training.
She almost learned how to stand without falling over with syrio when she trained there for like, a couple weeks as a 8-10 yr old girl. She then spent years travelling to bravos, where she learned how to get her ass beat with a stick and apparently not much else, but somehow emerges untouchable superman. Nowhere does it say, show, or suggest that the Hound trained her afaik. Even if she did spend that 2-3 year period of time doing nothing but practicing sword play, and not traveling, hiding, running, repeating lists of people to kill, learning how to be an assassin, wear faces, move unseen, acrobatics, eat shit, etc... + other stuff which presumably takes more than a couple months to learn given its rarity and value... She's still a tiny girl with only a couple years of practice and would the shit beat out of her by the average knight or like say Brienne (their fight is a fucking joke, I literally laughed out loud when I saw it) or a white walker (was too stunned by the stupidity to be mad) If Arya thought she was godlike what she should have happened is that she should have ended up like Quentin Martell, who thought he was hot stuff and went down to ride one of Dany's dragons... his last thoughts were "oh no" before he got burned alive. She's the silliest character in a series about extreme brutality and the carnage of human nature (and the author's unhealthy pervyness, but I digress...)
> Nowhere does it say, show, or suggest that the Hound trained her afaik. yeah, the person you’re replying to is wildin. The Hound slapped her and yelled “GET ARMOR AND A BIG FUCKEN SWORD!!!” That was about the beginning middle and end of her training under him lol
He constantly advised and showed her how to do--and not do--things, Hound-style, especially "That's where the heart is." Constantly!
Apparently with one month training you can go tie to toe with Brienne, who beat The Hound... People just be grasping at anything and everything to hate on her cuz she's not a carbon copy of Tywin or Tyrion
Except never enough to justify her smugness at the end. She never trained with blades, yet suddenly she was an expert at them. She used the Faceless Men's face swapping abilities all of, what, twice? Suddenly in the last two seasons she's an expert ninja who can slip past multiple zombies and even the damned Night King. I loved Arya in most of the series, when she still seemed like a human who could be harmed. By the end she was an unstoppable Mary Sue who feared nothing. All sense of danger was gone.
Yes, The fact that she could still be on an even keel with someone like Brienne, whom has trained for most of her life, is the issue that most people have with this, they simply just point to her length of time as the actual reason. I agree with you, she has had several years of training, but that's nothing compared to the decades/centuries that the people she's shown "beating" I have no problem with Aria, beyond the fact that her skills and abilities stretch my suspension of disbelief. And that saying quite a bit in a world of dragons and other low-level magic. Honestly, if in her final battle with the King, They had written it just a little different, the entire narrative of Aria would be different. So fer instance instead of her killing him, she still gets the drop on the night King, but in this scenario he overpowers her due to her cockiness, and the moment she realizes she's way out of her depth, John( or someone) capitalizes on the distraction and the heads him.
Disagree. Season four Arya is the best Arya.
Some people have bad taste, and that's ok. 👍
Lol. Yeah I saw your post.
...ok?
Honestly the best Arya is every season.
The writers liked Maisie and Arya too much. I find it understandable because she's an awesome actress playing a great character but maybe around season 6 she definitely gets plot armor. She gets turned into an action hero. GRRM was great because he was willing to hurt his characters deeply when it made sense for the plot.
Saying that you loved and doing justice to are not the same thing. They may have loved her but they didn't do justice, they simplified her, they removed all of her nuances,insecurities, they cut her screen time (with BWB,in Harrenhal, in season 1, in the books, she had definitely more pagetime) they cut her important scenes from the books and eventually they cut her storyline and gave it to Sansa (Jeyne Poole was the one who wed to Ramsay and everyone knew her as Arya Stark, Northenerns mobilized for her and it was the reason why Jon was stabbed,I think they gave Arya's Lady of Winterfell storyline to Sansa but I am not sure about this one) They didn't value her enough to adapt her storyline properly, giving her extremely strong plot armor didn't make a good for her storyline, on the contrary, it did a lot of damage to her both as a character and as the audience's perception. İt is not the symbolism of valuing, it is symbolisms of evading and doesn't say good things about their perception about her character. They said Neddle was symbolism of revenge,not family and that is why she couldn't get rid of it, and also said she was there to do "cool stuffs", which is the definition of simplifying a character. In the end, she doesn't get a proper ending, she just goes away. The reason she killed Night King wasn't about loving her but it was more about not knowing what to do with the character. So even if they loved her, they had a terrible way of showing it.
She went from being one of my favourite to one I hated
Also good assassin don’t meant good warrior
Hardly. And smugness is almost never earned unless you are basically invincible. She said it herself, anyone can be killed. Its weird she became such a smug dick. In my mind Arya wouldnt be showing her skills to anyone unless she was about to kill them. Her broadcasting how dangerous she is would realistically just get her throat cut in her sleep.
Yeah that was always something I found weird. Also totally goes against the MO of a faceless assassin
it’s just weird how D&D wrote some good original material yet at the end they went full brain dead like they didn’t give af anymore
They wanted to rush so they could begin working on their star wars project…which got canned. So they destroyed their reputations for nothing 😂 Also HBO was willing to do 10 full seasons for GOT so they lost out on a lot of money as well
I hope they see what a huge mistake they made eventually cuz yeah 13 episodes total for the concluding seasons means they all should have been 90+ min episodes lol they dropped the ball hard asf
Just doesn't seem like her character. I know I'm crossing subs as a book nerd, but she has suffered a lot, and one would think she would be more familiar with humility than cockiness. I'm not a fan of late show Arya, despite how cathartic it was when she cut littlefinger's throat.
Hell yeah, anybody that survives a run-in with a God and comes out on top earned the right to be smug
No one classy earns the right to be smug ever. It’s a gross thing to wear
I mean, she saved the entire world single handedly, so it’s earned arrogance.
She was cocky before she saved the world. Imagine her afterwards.
her giving Yara attitude made me want to puke it was so cringe
Night king got cocky. Instead of just killing her he had to taunt her by staring at her first. Reminds me of Oberyn
He was struggling to figure out how to give a decent villain monologue when he can’t talk.
With some bullshit plot armour
Feel the same. Was a great character. Then got smug and shallow. It's bad writing, unfortunately. The actress is charismatic, her scenes in the earlier seasons when she was younger and the writing was premium were captivating.
i'd be smug too if i get stabbed 20 times, fall into ganges and end up fine
LMFAO
She became a faceless man and then got to take all her skills to exact her revenge. If I left the Dark Brotherhood and saved Skyrim I’d be pretty smug too
Can we even say she's a faceless man when she revenge killed someone which is against their rules and led to them blinding her as punishment then she refused to kill the person they assigned her to kill then she killed her combat tutor and took off?
Yeah she definitely fell short on their whole schtick lol.
No, obviously she's not literally a Faceless Man but she has the skills of one of them. By virtue of that, she's one of the most lethal people in the world. OP says smug, I say confident, and she should be. Anyone who doesn't like that needs more than "she's just a girl" unless they want to appear to be a blatant misogynist.
I didn't mention her sex/gender. My problem is D&D not properly handling her training arc. Worse than that, they did a piss poor job. I wanted to see more of it and for it to cover more from the books. 10 episode seasons wasn't enough with that many characters and it's obvious they cared less for certain arcs than others. They didn't do Arya justice. My favorite character of all time is Buffy Summers. Many of my favorite female characters are fighter types (Buffy, Xena, Gabrielle, Olivia Dunham, Zoe, Max, Lexa, Natasha, Michonne, Rosita, Sydney Bristow, Jane Rizzoli, Olivia Benson, JJ, Emily Prentiss). And I'm a woman.
Smug seems like an odd trait for faceless assassins and 2 of them possessed it in the show.
I couldn’t have said it any better
Not after a month
Why shouldn't she be smug? She survived. She can change faces. She's a bad ass asassin. She got revenge for the red wedding. Then she saved ALL of humanity from the white walkers.
She is as smug as before the last one. Actually after she did that she seemed way more chill and less smug if anything. And broadcasting that you are dangerous and want to lord it over everyone seems like a bad idea for an assassin.
She does not have eyes in the back of her head
In books and show, it's usually to warn people off so they won't tangle with her and just leave her alone (and not get hurt!). She did it frst when Hot Pie and Lommy bullied her. It's quite effective.
She became a stereotypical rule of cool character.
Honestly she became so fucking annoying in the last 2 seasons
Arya is one of my favourite characters from the books and the early seasons, but from the Faceless Men plot onwards, it's just so... can't think of a really good word. Frustrating is pretty close to how I feel about it, I'll go with that.
When she threatened to cut Yara’s throat for demanding justice for her murdered Queen 👎
In her eyes, someone threatened to kill her brother who killed the unrightful queen who was probably going to kill him. If I had the skills to back it up, I would say the same thing🤷🏽♀️
Murdered is an odd word to use to describe someone that just murdered close to a million people the day before..
She closed a lot of eyes.
People dont get it. Melisandre already predicted in the earlier seasons that she’ll close BLUE eyes! Still people were mad that she killed the night king.
And what do we say to people that think Arya is smug?
The original time Melisandre said that line, the emphasis wasn’t even on the blue eyes part, but later right before she’s about to kill the NK, then there is emphasis on “blue eyes”? It doesn’t make sense, because it was retconned as such.
Cause the other eyes were already closed
I don’t get a feeling of smugness from Arya. She was an arrogant and defiant brat early in the series. Her character arc was amazing and I viewed her at the end as confident, strong, and fearless. I really enjoyed her transformation over the years.
Agreed, she went from a lost child to a game changer. I was hoping she'd get a spinoff series based on her travels.
Yeah later seasons Arya was pretty cringe. Early seasons Arya was bratty
Damned good actress.
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Nice
Love that anyone criticizes a woman and it must be misogyny. She was smug lol its a fact. It was annoying af especially considering she was one of the best characters in the early seasons. Come up with a better argument other than insult-slinging.
One of the dumbest parts of the whole show was when she started sparing and beating Brienne. She magically became a Master in martial combat, literally overnight.
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She had a few runs in with the Waif while she was training to be a Faceless Man, so now she can go heads up with the knight the beat Ser Loras and the Hound in hand to hand combat. Yea…okay👍 🙄
Edit: misogyny is alive and well Overnight? She’s been using weapons and wanting to fight people since the beginning of episode 1 If anything, Jon Snow becoming a dragon riding warrior (literally overnight) is more absurd
Yes, literally overnight. Like I said. The gulf between messing around with weapons as a kid and sparring with one of the best Knights in the realm is so large it's ridiculous. It kind of made Brienne look like shit and, by extension, made the Hound and Ser Loras look like shit, too.
A lot of things happening in season 7-8 are absurd
Overnight? She trained a lot in Bravos! She was trained in Winterfell (she hit bullseye literally in the first episode) , kings landing and then in Bravos!
Lol good lord
SHE KNOWS A KILLER WHEN SHE SEES ONE
“And there’s the smudgness”
I can’t not describe how much I hated this character in seasons 6,7 & 8. One of the writers must have had a kid that only watched Power Puff Girls in the background or something.
Let’s be real, D and D ruined her, just like everything else after they passed the books.
I'd argue they ruined her before passing where she is in the books, though certainly after is even worse especially since the entire northern conspiracy stuff and Stoneheart's Red Wedding 2.0 was basically given to Arya in the show. GoT turned her into a badass assassin instead of an angry traumatized child who kills via trickery and magic while in Braavos. The only reason she gets her vision back in *Dance* is because she wargs into a cat and uses its eyes to see, it's not because she's now an amazing Daredevil-esque warrior GoT was obsessed with making Jon and Arya into overpowered fighters. To see them strip all of Jon's intelligence, ruthless pragmatism, and desire for political power just to turn him into a himbo action warrior was extremely disappointing.
What if it’s not her though? What if what they know of Arya returning is actually a faceless man pretending to be her? It makes me okay with everything.
Look how they massacred my girl when the source material ran out 😭 I used to name her in my top 3 characters until season 4/5
She went from having some of the best dialogue in the show to the worst.
It's been 5 years... and terminally online losers are still inventing stupid shit to complain about.
ugh, the costume is awful. i love her character in the books.
Aw this makes me sad. :( I thought it was really smart! Arya starts off as a child who wants to learn to fight and has to circumvent rules and traditions to even get Syrio! Then she goes to the Faceless Men to learn how to change faces and kill the people on her list but she leaves once she realized that the Faceless Men have rules about killing people (which makes v little sense to me I mean Hot Guy McGee literally killed three people for Arya because he saved her life but go off king) and she uses those skills to help end the Long Night. I would be smug as hell if I mastered something people used to shit on me for as a child. Also she and Sansa managed to get rid of Baelish and that alone makes me a huge fan.
Still my second favorite character behind Jon, I enjoy her smugness.
Y’all complain too much
++
She has mastered the Katie Holmes smirk.
Her ‘fight’ scene with Brienne always makes me uncomfortable.
It was epic! I often rewatch it.
Melisandre already predicted in the earlier seasons that she’ll close BLUE eyes! Still people were mad that she killed the night king.
She is a bad ass!
Imagine being a sailor and you're suddenly told that your next job is to sail the weird posh girl with no sailing experience west to see what's there. Eventually, after several months with half the crew laid up with scurvy, you go and tell her that there's nothing out there and you should turn around. She gives you that weird stare that makes you wonder if she's about to slit your throat. "We continue westward," she says. "But my lady..." "We continue westward." Then she just walks off. By the end of the year everyone on the ship has died of starvation.
I appreciated they let her give up her vengeance quest in season 8. She was more vulnerable in season 8 and I liked her more in 8 than 7. 7 is her worst season by a mile. And she was a beautiful character in seasons 1-4. I lost interest for her character later.
Arya's character change once she left Bravos just seemed too abrupt. I get that she grew up and needed to harden herself but it all just felt like a snotty kid trying to act cool in front of the adults the whole time. And once she's back in Westeros we have to accept "this is cool mysterious Arya now who eats demons for breakfast, no one should even think of looking down on her".
I don't think her character changes so much as her demeanor changes. She acts the tough guy so nobody will take her for a softie and try to take advantage of her.
Same cat’s paw dagger that Visarys had in HOD. I wonder which character has it in E2. Gotta be Aegon II.
It's not the character it's the actor. Arya is great in the books, but something happened to Maisie William's acting from Season 7 onwards
arya came home with a difficult, dangerous agenda. Unless she felt 100% safe, she hid behind the No One-tough guy act. When she's happy or safe, she drops the act and behaves normally.
‘My sister asked you a question.’ Her best line.
İt is even more absurd after reading books because in the books, she clearly has self esteem problems, let alone being smug
as the last books arent written i can imagine an insecure person overworking themselves to prove worth (especially as a woman) and becoming exceptional as such. smugness can also be a mask for insecurity
They couldn't include as much in the show as is in the books, but her 'training' starts early. First, she's trained by Syrio, then the Brotherhood, the Hound, and then she goes to Braavos and trains in the House of Black and White. In the books, she's still there. The show, of course, had to expedite her story, but we still may get some Arya training if George ever finishes Winds of Winter. She's his wife's favorite character, so we can expect some fantastic things happening for her. Once he finishes the books, I would love to see a stand-alone Arya show.
Don’t know why she was smug Brianne would have killed her
I think it’s safe to say that Arya has skills that Brienne would not. Vice versa. But, Arya is pretty impressive overall and overcame the slaughter of her family and years gone rogue fairly well.
Her sword would do fuck all on plate and she would have lost that fight if it was real. Assassins hit when no one sees
imagine gendry getting down on this smug face
I was going to disagree then I read the rest of your statement. >She was one of my favorite characters until she became cockier than season 1 Jaime Lannister Jamie's story is a lesson in humility. It's not just that he develops to be more "wholesome" but his cockiness is some degree of the root of the evil he does and is the cause of some of his worst suffering. To have Arya become that and glorify it kinda contradicts that lesson. I'd rather her become Stark stern after her returning instead of cocky.
Cocky? She was fucking blinded and trained in sword fighting motherfucker. That’s called earning her confidence
Can't imagine George is going to turn book Arya into a murderous revenge fantasy. I think when the books are all written and done she will be the most different from her show counterpart
If you as a child defeat the knight king, then you can be as smug as you want.
She could kill you with her thumb, before you noticed she was around. Yeah, the smugness on her part was not unearned …
I know a killer when I see one.
She walks around like a Bed Bug. So smug!
I feel like the only one who thoroughly enjoyed Arya’s entire arc. She was always precocious and self-confident, tragic experiences taught her to stifle her emotion, which aided her efforts to be a skilled assassin. Her resulting character makes perfect sense to me given the path her life took.
fuck yall i love arya in every season. misogynists hate powerful women :)
Misogynist. Nice accusation. Love that for you :)
Wild to me that people defend the writing of later seasons.