There actually was a knife strike before that one: The Waif is shown slashing Arya’s stomach, but we don’t actually see the blow. But when the camera pulls back, we see a long horizontal cut across her stomach that is oozing blood. After the second knife strike, there is a spurt of blood after the knife is withdrawn.
The front of her shirt is already soaked with blood from the slash wound. There is plenty of blood around where the knife is entering her body. You don’t see a blood spurt because the knife hasn’t been withdrawn. If it’s meeting resistance from a bag of coins, Arya must have swallowed it because the knife is over six inches long and goes in up to the hilt.
She has two deep puncture wounds and a slash. Blood is just pouring out from the puncture wounds. She’s in deep trouble.
Didn’t “Robert Baratheon” bleed in the play by having red fabric or something come out of his shirt? I don’t remember the play having very realistic special effects.
Only if the bag of coins is between her bowel and kidney; that was a six inch blade, plunged up to the hilt, which the Waif twists to inflict pain. And there is no blood because the knife is still in her belly. We don’t see clearly when it is pulled out, so there may have been blood, we don’t know either way.
Okay that’s what I was thinking of. But if that was their special effect for disembowelment, I don’t think they’d have realistic blood packs for blood, especially considering how they don’t exactly have washing machines to clean the costumes between shows. I don’t think there wouldn’t be blood packs laying around for Arya to grab, or for her to have befriended any of the troupe and be shown how to make them.
There could have been some misdirection, and maybe Arya faked something, or that’s not actually Arya who got stabbed, but I’m betting that everything was as it seems, and Arya did get stabbed and is in danger now. Not in mortal danger, since I doubt she’ll die, but I don’t think it’s been a trick on the audience.
If Arya has interacted with the old woman face before, it makes some sense that she may have been the one using it, with the Waif’s face beneath. The Waif, perhaps with some plan to draw Arya out, may have been using Arya’s face. Or it was John Travolta or Nicholas Cage or summink…
Why would such an acting troupe use pouches of real blood in their plays? It would be an absolute mess, requiring lots of cleanup, new clothes or intense washing all the time (eventually necessitating new clothes). Not mention if there’s multiple shows per day, etc. They use streamers, fabric, etc. to represent blood (we saw that).
I’ve been to lots of plays myself, ranging from small troupes in the park, to a large company in the park, outdoor and indoor big-ticket theatre…nobody’s splashing liquid around the stage and staining everyone’s clothes every performance. This idea that she would get fake blood from the actors just strikes me as ridiculous. Something’s not as it seems, but we’re talking about a magical cult with magical disguise and stealth abilities. It makes far more sense to me that it was a fake Arya to test the Waif* than it was a real Arya actually trying to get stabbed (how would she know how she’s going to be attacked, where she would be stabbed, that it wouldn’t be poison, or a dart, or a blunt object, or something else…that idea makes no sense at all).
*testing the Waif – even the Fight Club theory makes more sense, that “the Waif” is actually a representation of Arya’s internal conflict between “Arya” and “no one.” So this would be the real test of whether “Arya” would/could be destroyed, leaving only “no one” (successful completion of Faceless training).
Who knows, we’ll find out. But the most preposterous thing of all in my opinion is the blood pack hypothesis. Crazy!
Now that’s actually a great possibility. The old switcheroo. And we wouldn’t expect that Arya would know how to switch faces, but maybe she did pick it up somehow. Because one complaint is that after all the show-time spent on this “training,” she still gets her ass kicked with the wooden staff all the time and it’s really unclear what if anything she’s learned or what the point of all of it was.
The problem with that is that the ‘old woman’ pulled off her face, and it was the Waif underneath. So are we now supposed to believe that Arya somehow made a waif face, then put that on, and put the old woman’s face on over it? Why? And why rip off the old lady face just to show the waif… her own face? That makes no sense.
And why would the waif think that pretending to be Arya would ‘draw her out’? More likely, the real Arya would see that and go running. She had no desire to kill the Waif, and we never had any kind of plot clue that she was planning it.
Again, I think we’re over-thinking this way too much. Arya was free of the torment of the house of the faceless men, and feeling her oats. She was back to her old self, and ready to head back to Westeros. So for a moment she let her guard down, and the Waif struck. The only question now is how she manages to survive.
Tommen is the King, he’s told us so. If the Queen has cut off his bedtime allowance, and her purse strings are his to plunder, then he really hasn’t got this whole king gig down very well. And don’t mean full on Ramsay action, just a regal demand for some sanctioned by The Seven hanky-panky. I realize this isn’t what Margaery wants, but I would have thought being the King would come with some undeniable perks.
And this is Game of Thrones, not 21st century America, so don’t go all feminist on me. If the King can’t get laid, and has to whine about it to his priest, then that’s fucked up.
Those are good points. But the way I see it, we’ve seen the face-changing. It’s a cool trick. I would not be one bit surprised to see it put to use as a mindfuck on the viewers. It almost has to, in my opinion. It’s an interesting idea that, ok, we were shown one “level” (“waif” disguised as “old lady”), but a lot of people expect something else, too. Maybe Jaq’en disguised as Arya. That would be a twist. But also not a crazy twist. You know what else we saw, once? Multiple “levels” of faces. The show has a habit of showing things like that and bringing it back later.
I’m still not convinced the masks are literal masks. When she pulled the old lady face off, where did it go? I think it’s very much more of a magical glamour…that they collect physical faces to use either as a ritual thing or to maintain a database of faces that they can use, but it’s not clear to me that to use a face they have to literally remove it from the hall and carry it around in their pocket or something. Maybe they only have to see it, or touch it, to be able to use it. Why show her her own face? “I know who you really are.”
That said, maybe the disguised old lady wasn’t Arya, but Jaq’en or another FM. Either because the Waif was the one who failed, or a favor owed.
Well, the idea might be that she would panic a bit if she thought that someone had literally stolen her identity and was planning to sail to Westeros and live her life.
I’m putting down my vote for the Waif stabbed Arya and there’s no trickery going on there. Mainly because of the scene of Arya walking through the street looking distraught. That scene wouldn’t make sense if it was anyone other that Arya.
