OR He’s Dressed Up As The Prince From Ever After. 

women in history | spies

A solitary maiden, whose only friends are birds and flowers and her companions - books.

 ~ Lorna Doone (1922)

For the real Madame Du Barry … is a very different person from the popular Du Barry of the pamphlets and romances and contemporary biographies.

… On three occasions did she intercede on behalf of condemned criminals, and each time with success; she gave generously, lavishly; not only during the days when she had the Treasury to draw upon, but in later years, when her means were relatively small; nothing roused her to such indignation as the sight of cruelty or the neglect of suffering; she was the best of relatives, the most loyal of friends.

–Madame Du Barry by  H. Noel Williams.

This is a great essay! I love this show because it allows Daenerys to be a fully formed and complex character, the likes of which most female characters in fantasy and even on television almost NEVER get to be. She feels like a real person because, like a real person, she isn’t all good or all bad. 

Emilia Clarke has really hit it out of the park with her performance, getting us to love Dany and then fear her. 

This is a great character--one of the best female characters I’ve ever seen on television and I’m so glad the show had the guts to let Dany break bad, as she was always destined to do. 

sooo how do you feel about the whole mad queen thing?

Well, like much in the last half of this series, the set up has been rushed and clumsy and occasionally ridiculous.

But given all the crap they have to deal with— time constraints plus two dozen other characters; quickly trying to connect dots that GRRM has been struggling to join for the better part of two decades; the fact that we live in an age where a staggering percentage of people have developed the inability to watch 30+ minutes of television without looking at their stupid phones and can barely follow the plot of of your average sitcom— I pity those poor bastards enough to cut them some slack on that front.

That aside, I’m happier with it than I thought I’d be. Because I don’t think she’s mad at all, at least not yet. She’s just broken and finally fed up with trying to control her ruthless side.

For a long time, I figured the show was going to wimp out and go about “dark D-ny” in the “safest” way possible: she’d spin out of control for an episode and a half at most then snap out of it in time to heroically sacrifice herself.

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This show deserves more love. 

Even Sam loves the Stark girls

love a Sansa and Sophie stan

I know some of y’all are literally on D & D’s necks half the time because you are dissatisfied with how they are adapting the story from the books, but for this episode, especially with Arya’s arc, y’all got to give credit where credit is due! Never in my life would I have guessed that Arya would end up killing the Night King, but they have literally been subtlety planting the seeds for this for awhile now and we all completely missed it until it all suddenly came together tonight! That’s pretty incredible in my book!

Even though we didn’t get to see Sansa and Arya’s reactions to Jon’s parentage reveal, their next scenes subtly show how they process this information.

Arya, who previously worked so hard to return to her family and went out of her way to call Jon her brother (not her half-brother), now wants to go to Kings Landing to finish her hit list. 

Inconsistent character development? You might say that, but I have another theory. Arya only came home because she heard Jon had helped retake Winterfell, but when she arrives home he’s not there, Sansa and Bran are two very different people, and the loving family reunion she expected from Jon is ruined by the arrival of his new girlfriend and the impending war against the Night King. 

When we first see Arya this season she is standing with the commoners outside Winterfell watching Jon and Daenerys arrive. She smiles when she sees Jon, only to be disappointed when he rides right by her without recognizing her. This could be why she isn’t there when Jon walks into Winterfell--she’s sulking. Her reunion with Jon doesn’t go as planned because she has to defend Sansa and remind him that he needs to keep his family’s interests in mind. 

She reawakens her humanity (and dormant sexuality) with Gendry. After sleeping with him she looks...calm, disappointed? Maybe the experience wasn’t what she expected. Maybe she expected having sex would make her feel powerful and whole, maybe she thought it’d make her feel fully connected with someone for the first time in many years. Instead she stares off into space, probably thinking of the upcoming battle.

Then in 8x03 she saves the day by killing the Night King...only to not show up at the feast a few days later, where she SHOULD be the guest of honor, but is instead only thanked by Daenerys once in a toast which she doesn’t even see. Instead of joining her family and the other survivors, she training by herself all alone in the dark until Gendry arrives. 

Gendry proposes, but she declines because “that’s not me.” She doesn’t know how to do anything but fight. Revenge and hate have become a part of her, more than anyone else in her family, even Sansa. She doesn’t know the first thing about being a “lady” or a wife or anything but a nameless, faceless girl that used to be Arya Stark. 

She finally learns about Jon’s true parents off screen after calling Daenerys out and reminding Jon about the importance of family and protecting his own. The next time we see her she’s on her way to King’s Landing, back on the path to revenge. Why not stay home and let the others take care of Cersei? She previously said that she doesn’t trust Daenerys and now that she knows Jon isn’t completely a Stark, maybe she feels she can’t fully trust Jon either? Sure he’s still the man she grew up with and called brother, but Jon isn’t Jon anymore in the larger scheme of things. Arya might even think Jon going south and siding with a Targaryen (and maybe one day accepting that he is one too) is a betrayal of his Stark heritage and his Stark family.

Arya doesn’t expect to come back from her final mission. She doesn’t know how to live in her old home anymore. She doesn’t know how to be the Arya Stark she used to be and the Arya Stark everyone else wants her to be. She thinks she has no place in Westeros after Cersei’s death. But I hope the next two episodes prove her wrong. 

We are approaching the end of Game of Thrones, so at this point in any good story all of the major characters must feel a sense of hopelessness and darkness before the light at the end of the tunnel. Daenerys is loosing all of her allies, Jon suddenly realizes he’s not who he thought he was, and, likewise, Arya is questioning her identity and her own place in the world. 

I think she’ll find it, one way or another, by the time the show ends. 

No matter what happens tomorrow, we’ll always have jonsa