I Have Never Liked Arya Stark, and You Shouldn’t Either

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published May 2, 2016, 10:15 a.m. ET

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One of the fun things about the social-media-fication of popular television is that it’s sometimes fun to confess your least popular opinion and see what kind of feelings it stirs up. Which is why every once in a while I will casually drop in and mention how I hate Arya Stark, Game of Thrones‘ resident child assassin and current sophomore at the Jaquen H’ghar School for Faceless Men and Women.

Some might say this makes me a troll. Well, if trolling is making a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them, then I guess I’m a troll. But also: Arya sucks.
This isn’t just some random contrary opinion, I should stress. If I’m going to take a stance that will have people boo me in person (it’s happened!), I better have good reasons. This is a perspective borne of several seasons watching Game of Thrones. It goes back to the very beginning. Even before the HBO series began, I was hearing it from friends and colleagues who’d read the books; they were excited to see their faves Tyrion and Daenerys and Arya reflected in the new TV show. They were also ready to hiss at their least faves, your Joffreys and Littlefingers and some girl named Sansa, who was Arya’s crappier sister. I was all sorts of ready to take their word for it and accept these heroes and boo these villains as was appropriate. And then I quickly learned that Arya Stark was one of my least favorite character types: the violent child.
The violent child — and especially the violent young girl — is a thing that will pop up in genre fare in a way that’s designed to be shocking, crowd-pleasing, and often a gateway for male geek audiences to care about girl characters in a way they otherwise wouldn’t. This is not always a bad thing! Buffy Summers is in many ways a version of this type; as a regular teenage girl, she might not have been enough to elicit sympathy or interest from a sci-fi/horror audience, but as a teenage girl who beats the shit out of vampires, she’s the BEST. My least favorite version of the type is in the movie Kick-Ass, where the young tyke Hit Girl turns out to be virtually sadistic in her appropriation of violence, and the audience is meant to love her for it. To me, Arya Stark has always been the Hit Girl of Westeros, a girl who stands out for being as bloodthirsty as any of the realm’s men, except, you know, she’s a tiny girl! How awesome and such! It’s a way for those largely male audiences to engage with a female character while at the same time using violence to bridge over all those things that make a female character in a realm like Westeros interesting/challenging. Give me Sansa (or Margaery or Brienne or Cersei) any day.

I’m not saying that a thirst for blood on Game of Thrones is wrong; that would be a mighty big windmill at which to tilt for a fan of the show as I am. But I do find that Game of Thrones has consistently leaned on violence to goose Arya’s storylines that would otherwise be reeeeally dull and especially disconnected to the rest of the story. Arya got separated from her family early on. At the end of season 1, when Ned Stark’s head parted ways with the rest of him, Arya was spirited out of King’s Landing and to the countryside, where she would spend the next several seasons being taken from place to place — Harrenhal to the Twins to the Eyrie to Braavos — all while growing steadily more isolated. She was most interesting near the beginning, when she was in captivity with Hot Pie and Gendry, but even when she and the Hound had their little dog-and-pony show, Arya storyline was already being narrowed to a needle-sharp sword. Arya was learning how to be a killer; she had her death list, and she was going to take bloody revenge on those who’d slaughtered her family and friends. Like a pre-teen Beatrix Kiddo, she obsessed over her vengeance list. That list seemed VERY cool until you realized that most of the names on it would likely end up meeting their fate before ever crossing paths with Arya, because Arya NEVER CROSSES PATHS WITH ANYONE. Her storyline is more isolated than even Daenerys’, and the whole point of Daenerys’ storyline is that she’s stranded in a desert across the sea.

Meanwhile, back in King’s Landing, the truly interesting Stark daughter was busy trying to figure out how to survive. It’s not hard to see why someone might have preferred Arya to Sansa at the beginning. Sansa was a spoiled little jerk who was mean to her tomboy little sister, who mooned over the clearly terrible Joffrey, and who dreamed of being the kind of pretty princess that the Game of Thrones audience had been bred to despise. And if you were a book reader, Arya was just a much more consistent presence, especially in the early-going. Sansa was weak and wilting. But that’s what’s made Sansa such an interesting character! Surviving the wilds of Westeros by learning where to stick your sword is one thing. Surviving King’s landing while betrothed to a maniac, lorded over by a future mother-in-law who hates you, having to learn who to trust when every wrong decision can have dire consequences. My colleague Meghan O’Keefe has made the argument for Sansa as a badass, and I’m inclined to agree. Arya’s storyline now has her becoming a nameless, faceless assassin, while Sansa’s storyline is all about her finding her strength and claiming her name. She’s Sansa Stark, she’s the Lady of Winterfell, and now that she’s hooked up with Brienne (and maybe soon her brother Jon), it looks like we’re headed to at least an attempt to reclaim what their family had taken from them. Also, not for nothing, but last night’s episode also proved that Sansa is the only Stark child who seems remotely interested in reuniting with her surviving siblings.
But, you know, Arya has a death list. Arya stabs child-molesting jerks from King’s Landing in the eyes. Arya gives us the satisfaction of every once in a while seeing a bad guy laid low by a little girl. But if the price we pay for those occasional moments of satisfaction are literally full seasons of what amounts to a training montage, I’d much rather follow the Stark sister who’s dealing with the dynastic politics and alliance-building that makes Game of Thrones compelling.
Arya’s spent the last two seasons wearing rags and going blind in order to prove that she’s no one special. I suggest we start taking her word for it.