Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Last night’s Game of Thrones featured more action north of The Wall — wights and white walkers and flaming swords and dead dragons and Gendry running snow marathons in record time and then not-so-dead dragons with scary blue eyes — than we’ve gotten in other full seasons. So much so that everything else that happened feels a little dwarfed. Which is crazy, because we got some of the most unhinged Stark-on-Stark scenes of the entire series last night, in a pair of confrontations between Arya and Sansa.
We knew this was coming, of course. Last week, Arya stupidly followed Littlefinger’s breadcrumbs to exactly where he wanted her to: the scroll that Sansa wrote back in Season 1, imploring her brother, Robb, to cease his campaign against the Lannisters, come to King’s Landing, and swear fealty to then-King Joffrey. As we all expected, Arya got real got about all this, and when she confronted Sansa about it, she basically called her a murderer, saying she conspired with the Lannisters before and after they had Ned Stark killed. This is, of course, the least generous reading of that scroll possible, but we knew that was coming too. Every moment since Arya showed up in Winterfell, she’s managed to get in digs here and there about how awful Sansa was as a young girl, dreaming of lords and ladies and finer things and how she thought she was better than the rest of her family. Which is all true, we all saw season 1. But it leaves no room for Sansa to have grown through her experiences and ordeals.
Not that Arya cares about anything like that. Sansa tried to explain her circumstances — she was essentially the Lannisters’ hostage and had to do what they told her to in order to first keep him alive and later keep herself alive — but Arya is not interested. This is Arya. She doesn’t have compassion. She doesn’t want to hear about circumstances. She holds her grudges and prepares to avenge them, and that’s been her life for the bulk of the run of this series. Becoming a killer was never about helping her family — sure she sought out Robb and her mother before the Red Wedding got them; and she came running to Winterfell once she found out Jon Snow was there. But she’s been roaming the land of two continents since season 4, and she’s never once shown any indication of wanting to help save her sister, or even Bran and Rickon.
So no, it’s not exactly a surprise that Arya isn’t giving her sister a damn break. Is it surprising that Arya decided to give a serial-killer soliloquy to Sansa after she caught her snooping in her bag of faces? A soliloquy that ended with her threatening to cut Sansa’s face off? Yeah, that was a little surprising.
It’s also a total hypocrite move if you remember Arya’s history on the show. Remember how after Arya escaped King’s Landing at the end of Season 1, she ended up at Harrenhal, posing as a servant boy named Arry. There, she ended up as the personal server for none other than Tywin Lannister, where they actually ended up having a lot of very nice chats, and she poured him a lot of wine, and he got rather fond of her, in his own way. So last night, while Arya was spitting venom about how Sansa never tried to fight off the Lannisters and sneering about how long she stayed in her gilded cage, she conveniently omitted the year she spent pouring wine for the patriarch of the family that killed her father. And did Arya poison that wine? Or try to sneak a dagger and cut his throat while he was unawares? No? Is that because she figured it was smarter to stay alive than to be reckless in the name of family loyalty? Isn’t that exactly what Sansa did?
No, Arya thought of none of that, because she hates Sansa and is pretty much looking for an excuse to take her down. After “Beyond the Wall,” it’s basically impossible to take Arya’s side in this war of sisters. Is Sansa playing things perfectly? Definitely not! She’s still listening to Littlefinger, for one; she’s sending Brienne away when Brienne could be one of the few people who could keep her safe from her murderous little sister. She’s stressed and jumpy and making mistakes.* You know what would end up being a huge help? A sister who was willing to lend her a hand instead of threatening to cut her face off.
*It’s entirely possible that Sansa’s erratic actions are part of some plot to oust Littlefinger, who Sansa is at least smart enough not to trust fully.
I’ve talked about this before. Sansa is good. Arya is bad. These were once controversial stances. No longer. Arya is being an ungenerous hypocrite towards her flesh and blood for no reason beyond the fact that she hated her older sister growing up, and Sansa now has to add “sister who wants to cut my face off so she can play dress-up” on his list of shit she has to worry about. There are no “fine people” on the Arya side of the Stark divide.
