I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
I had no particular expectations, nor wanted any particular conclusion. I think it was bad writing because it defied previous characterizations of the characters, common sense, and logic.
The Arya story line was written on par with a good episode of The Walking Dead only. It only pinged your suspension of disbelief a handful of times instead of endlessly through out. the characters acted in a manner that was not 100% idiot and actually managed to do something semi intelligent for a change. and at the end of the day you didn’t feel like they (the writers) were deliberately trying to insult your intelligence.
The problem is that this is an episode of Game of Thrones, a show with mostly consistent writing of excellent quality (Sand Snakes aside). If you really expect nothing more than that level of writing from this show then I honestly wonder if we are even watching the same show.
Why is it stupid for Arya to walk like she owns the place. Spell it out for me. Your insistence isn’t that convincing.
In what way? The Waif being obsessed with trashing Arya? Arya being capable of stealing some money? Arya having a moment’s lapse? Arya being confident?
I’m not saying it was the best written segment of the series, I’m saying that it isn’t stupid on its face, as some are asserting. Those assertions seem to be based on wanting Arya to slink around, ninja style, or demanding that she had an elaborate trap, and allowed herself to be stabbed to spring it.
Is it possible that one of the reasons for the crappy ending of the Arya/Faceless Men storyline is due to the TV show overtaking the source material?
Maybe GRRM is better at making plot arcs work till their completion (e.g. the Hodor one), and the TV writers are not as good.
What I wanted was good writing.
All I wanted was a cogent explanation of what was bad about it. What I got was, “Arya was walking out in the open” and “Arya had a plan to get stabbed.”
You’re acting like she’s a real person. They could have told any story they wanted. The one they told doesn’t make sense, except that she did dumb things and got lucky.
You can be interested in that; more power to you. It’s not how good narratives usually work.
Though the Waif’s face did look sloppier than the others and it was missing it’s eyelids.
It was him talking about the estate or vineyard; it was him talking about only sharing the wine with his friends. You could hear the bullied little boy in him longing for lots of friends when he grew up.
I think he fill, if for no other reason than he didn’t want to be there in the first place and desperately wants to get back to Cersei in King’s Landing as soon as possible.
I get that a foreign audience would have very little direct knowledge of the subtleties of what’s happening in Westeros, but the incest rumours should be pretty well known, given the civil war they caused. I figured the play would play that up to farcical levels; what we saw of the play almost seems like it could pass censorship in Westeros.
Good point, it could just be a Jesse James scenario.
Good point, Daenerys might like Tyrion compromising w/ slaveholders, but I’m sure she could appreciate the pretext it gives her to destroy them.
It’s liquid opium, not crystal meth. If she was “high as fuck” on it she’d be really groggy & falling asleep , not a hyperactive invincible killing machine. Remember we’ve seen it used as a sleep aid in addition to a pain killer. She seemed to have slept off her dose from the night before; which is why Lady Crane was preparing another one.
He was taking his queues from Cersei, and he didn’t indicate she wanted the ones retreating in horror killed. I wonder how they’re going to deal with Mountainstein when the time comes to take Cersei back into custody. I doubt he’s indestructible, but it’s going cost a lot of men taking him down.
Yes, but it’s clearly something that’s been in the works for awhile. The High Sparrow revealed his opinion on trial by combat last season when he insisted that Margaery & Loras would be tried by judges of the Faith “like in ancient times”. I expected they’d find some pretext to deprive Cersei of trial by combat as well.
Think about it. You are a Stark, wanted all through Westeros. You had to escape to Braavos in the first place because people were either trying to kill you, or ransom you off to a despicable man. If you go back there, your life is clearly in danger.
In the meantime, you have pissed off a religion full of assassins who can hide in plain sight and who are preternaturally good at hunting down and killing their prey.
However, you have one main advantage: You’ve been trained in their arts. You can hide in the shadows, you can pretend to be other people. Presumably, the whole point to this story arc was to show us that Arya now has the skills to be able to take out powerful people back home despite being a young girl. But those skills are stealth and subterfuge, not super badass fighting powers. Like the Spanish Inquisition, her primary weapon is people not expecting her to be there.
So, given all that, you want to get back to Westeros and start killing your enemies. You can:
A) assume the identity of a merchant, tradesperson, or some other form of common folk and buy a ticket in the equivalent of steerage class and travel across the narrow sea in a hold full of other people just like you, using your new skills to blend into the crowd.
B) You can sneak aboard a ship bound for Westeros and stowaway.
C) You could quietly seek out the captain of a Westeros-bound ship and quietly bribe him to sneak you aboard.
D) You could strut around in fine clothes, looking and acting like royalty, and fling money at a captain in broad view of god-knows-who, declaring loudly that you want to go ‘home’ to Westeros. Then you can hope that word of this young rich girl trying to get to Westeros doesn’t make it back to the faceless men, and that your ostentatious display of wealth doesn’t get you killed by a common thief, and that no one puts two and two together and realizes you are Arya Stark or someone else who’s probably worth a ransom, and ransoms you off to the Lannisters, who will be waiting when your ship docks.
Choose wisely.
Regardless of your choice for transportation, you’ve now got your berth on the ship. At this point you can,
**A) **make a beeline back to your hidey-hole and cradle your sword, then sneak out to the ship at the appointed time.
B) Casually wander around unarmed, taking in the sights, then hang out on a bridge where people can see you from hundreds of meters around. While at the bridge, turn your back to the crowd, any one of which could be the waif who could just sneak up and slit your throat. Totally let your guard down, and just enjoy the evening.
This show has established that a death sentence from the faceless men is a terrifying thing, and almost certainly fatal. Arya should have been freaking terrified, and in fact at the end of the last episode they showed her behaving exactly as she should have: Hiding out in a cubbyhole somewhere with her sword by her side, hoping to survive long enough to get out of Dodge. Then suddenly the next day she’s wearing new finery and walking around like she doesn’t have a care in the world? That made no sense whatsoever.
The only reason she survived was because the plot needed her to survive. What should have happened to her is that the Waif should have walked up behind her and slit her throat, then if she wanted to show her face she could have done so while Arya’s life was bubbling out of her gaping neck wound. Or, the stabbing knife could have been covered in poison, since poison seems to be a common faceless man way of killing people.
But no, Arya survives because of plot armor, then has the brilliant plan of going to the only place the faceless men would know she might go. But then she hides in a dark corner behind some clothes, where by all rights she should have just bled to death. She had no idea when the actress would come back, or if she would be alone when she did. And of course she had to bump something while passed out so the actress would think to look in there. If she hadn’t, or if the actress had just gone for drinks after the show, she’d be dead.
Okay, so now she’s miraculously alive, with the miracle bandage wrapped around her waist. But she knows she’s in grave danger, and that the actress is also in grave danger. At this point, she should have said,
A) “This is the first place they’ll look for me! You have to help me hide somewhere.”
or,
B) “I think I’ll take some strong opium and pass out for about 12 hours, while lying in this nice soft bed in plain sight of any assassin who might walk in.”
And of course, plot armor necessitates that she be allowed to have her sleep so the magic bandage can mostly heal her, and that the waif only appear just as Arya is coming down and is awake. Good thing the waif didn’t turn up in any of the preceding 12 hours and just kill her in her sleep.
So of course she chooses the dumbest action, and the Waif turns up only exactly when the plot needs her to. Then we get an exciting chase where somehow the assassins whose skills are primarily stealth and subterfuge produce a terminator - complete with robotic slow-walking and mechanical head-turning, which gives Arya just enough time to get away.
Good thing the Waif didn’t kill the actress, then put on a random face and just wait around for Arya to come out then kill her by surprise.
Oh, and the whole reason the Waif hated Arya was because she didn’t believe Arya was ‘just a girl’, and it was wrong to be an acolyte of the faceless men unless you were totally ego-less. And yet, she herself acted like it was all very personal. That was totally out of character for her, but to be fair her character hasn’t made sense for many episodes.
It’s actually possible that it wasn’t bad writing, but that it was bad directing. Or bad communication between the two.
I think there are two primary things that bug me:
(1) How totally carefree Arya appeared. How completely NOT suspicious she appeared to be
(2) How totally fatal the stab wounds appeared to be
Maybe what the writers had in mind was that Arya pays for her passage, then walks away, then dashes around a corner, checks to see if she’s being followed, and from her POV we see her carefully examining each face, doubling back repeatedly, hiding a few times, until finally we see her give a sigh of relief, hurry around one more corner, and then WHAM, there’s the waif. But Arya still has good reflexes, gets stabbed in the shoulder once, gets her hand up, gets a defensive would on her palm, and then falls into the water. Something like that.
Watching that, we would have thought “ah, she was still worried about the magic assassins, but she got caught anyhow, and now she is gravely injured, but it’s not instantly life threatening”. That seems to be what the writers wanted us to think. Instead, we thought something else entirely. That’s not because a huge percentage of the readers of this thread are idiots, or weren’t paying attention, or are insane nit pickers. It’s because the people who made the show did a really bad job of communicating to us what was going on.
Just thinking out loud, would it make any more sense if there was a ton of time between scenes?
Maybe she hid in her dark room for weeks and weeks, only occasionally venturing out steal money and food. Eventually, after a month or two of this, she has two large coin purses full of money and has grown confident from all her sojourns that the heat is off.
Then, after getting stabbed, she laid up in the actress’ bed for a week or two recovering. Not fully healed, of course, but healed enough that it’s plausible she could WALK, much less run around the city and dive onto stone stairs.
The Waif let the actress live for those couple months (both Arya hiding out and Arya recuperating) because she figured that was Arya’s only friend, so until Arya showed up she just kept an eye out. But Arya was somewhat sneaky, and managed to get to the actress undetected. Only after a week or two there did the Waif finally figure out she was there.
At that point, the actress is no longer useful so the Waif kills her, then targets Arya.
Still stupid and lame, but would this at least be a little bit less stupid and lame?
There were plenty of things they could have done to not make it seem like Arya was being a careless fool that walked away relatively unharmed from what were obviously two killing blows, but they didn’t do any of them.
How? Explain to me how anyone is going to know who you are unless you tell them? Do they have her fingerprints? A very fine etching? Tywin-fucking-Lannister sat next to her for what, months without a clue? She is in Zero danger in Westeros for who she is, unless she seeks out people who know who she is. Westeros has the advantage of not being the home ground of the Faceless Men.
They appear to have conventional abilities to hunt them. They kill them by conventional means, as well. And they can get caught and locked in a wagon without issue. They’re just people who can hide their faces, and have training in deception.
And what she needed to do to purchase her way across to Westeros was to convince one captain that she wasn’t wanted by the authorities. So she appeared to him as confident and cocksure.
There aren’t 16 year old girl tradespersons. She wants a room, presumably so she doesn’t get raped or robbed by the other passengers. A room is a good idea.
Dumb idea if you have the option of a room.
“Why is this person acting so shady Maybe I’m suspicious of her now.”
This is the goofiest objection in this thread. The captains of merchant ships don’t check in with the FM. They also don’t dispatch ocean-going ravens to warn the Lannisters that there is a random young girl, and to be at the docks with soldiers ready, because, hey, might be someone you want. What the everloving fuck are you going on about here?
She did. Your troubles with it are based on downright bizarre views of how a primitive society works. People have no idea what someone they haven’t met looks like without strange features, “He’s a head taller than most men, and has terrible burns on the right side of his face.” There are no photos. Unless she meets someone she knows, or tells someone who she is, no one is going to assume she’s a Stark.
Or be happy that you’re out of the cult, you appear to have not been followed, and it’s almost over. You make a mistake. Like a sixteen year old girl might. This idea that she should have done a ninja run the second she’s out of sight of the captain isn’t that sound. She’s happy, for the first time since her father’s head fell to the ground. She revels in it, and lets her guard down. That’s not stupidity, it’s human.
Why do you assume it’s the next day? She likely spent time stealing the money. There was enough time for a re-write and re-tooling of the play into a tragedy. There is no reason to assume a couple weeks didn’t pass.
The Waif was undone by hubris. Again, not uncommon in GoT.
She’d been watching her, so presumably she knew the actress’ habits. She even went to her booze jug, as we’ve seen.
Again, you have no reason to assume it’s 12 hours. It could have been six days. Shit, it could have been two weeks.
12 hours is an assumption. And even so, she’s high as a kite on the good stuff.
She has stealth skills, but she screwed the pooch and was in cover-my-ass mode. You don’t use stealth on a rooftop chase. You run.
Yeah, good thing. A dumb issue to be upset with. Shit, good thing Littlefinger didn’t die of an intestinal blockage before plotting to kill Jon Arryn, otherwise the show would be about the Lord of the North dealing with mundane trade disputes (and snow-zombies).
Yeah, people hate others that have the same flaws as them. That’s a thing. Like homophobes being gay.
Too bad she got repeatedly stabbed in the gut in broad daylight in public and got her only friend butchered after making all those wise decisions, I guess.
Abdominal stab wounds in the front aren’t super-likely to be killing blows.
From: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1993/10/05/knives-00000/
I agree she was careless. I disagree that this is bad writing. She got overconfident, and nearly died.
Have you seen this show? Ned Stark did the right thing, how’d that work out? 
It only takes one coin to get a cabin to Braavos, two bags full to get a cabin to leave.
And after that happened, you didn’t have dozens of devoted fans of the thread who were so confused as to what had happened that they had to have a big argument about what had actually happened, what people had been thinking, etc.
If the creators intended “Arya was aware of the danger from the FM, but got careless and made a mistake, then received non-fatal wounds”, which is a reasonable thing to happen to her, consistent with her character; they could have done a vastly better job of actually communicating that through the medium of TV, because bunches of intelligent and attentive fans of the show didn’t understand that that’s what they were seeing. And there are still inconsistencies that I can’t easily explain. For instance why did she make so little effort to change her appearance?
If they intended something else intelligent, reasonable and consistent (for instance, “it was a long long time later, because Arya had been in hiding”) then they did an even worse job of communicating it to us, because no one seems to know what it was.
And if the show runners never even considered the notion that Arya ought to be on her guard, or that wounds of the sort that she apparently received would be debilitating and potentially fatal, then that was stupid of them, but at least they communicated their vision to us clearly. Their stupid, stupid vision.
Well, yeah, obviously it didn’t show it in a manner that doesn’t raise questions. Elsewise, there would probably be fewer objections.