Mamby-pamby Wapo writer damns Arya

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Speaking of Arya, it’s lovely to have her free of Braavos, and not just because I was going to stick someone with the pointy end of something if she stayed there. Arya’s experience in the House of Black and White was flattening, and now that she’s back in Westeros and returning to her own dimensions, we can see just how much she was crumpled and damaged along the way.

Arya used to be one of the characters whose face we looked to in order to understand the cost of the struggle for power. When Yoren (Francis Magee) covered her eyes so she wouldn’t see her father’s (Sean Bean) execution, it was because he and we understood that she was still innocent, despite her fight with Joffrey, despite her dreams of learning to fight with a sword rather than curtsy like a lady. But now that cost is counted out in the faces of the serving women Arya spares as witnesses to her massacre at the Twins. Her own smiling face as she walks out of Walder Frey’s (David Bradley) hall, having poisoned the men who killed her mother, brother and sister-in-law is the visage of someone who has become blind to anything but her shrinking list of names. That sequence is highly effective, and it’s heightened by the later scene where Arya comes across a small group of Lannister soldiers looking to undo the chaos she unleashed at the Twins. They offer her the first bite of rabbit and share their blackberry wine because, as one baby-faced young man in armor tells her, “My mother always told me to be kind to strangers and strangers’ll be kind to you.” They miss their fathers and their wives and their newborn babies. They laugh when Arya tells them she’s going South to kill the queen.

Arya’s own face, with its round cheeks and its wide eyes, has become a false testament to her innocence. Sansa may share Cersei’s experiences and exalted position, but Arya shares the Lannister queen’s obsessions. If the question for Sansa is whether the older Stark woman can be wiser than the woman who molded her, for Arya it’s whether she can learn to see something other than vengeance. I know plenty of “Game of Thrones” watchers and readers of George R.R. Martin’s novels believe that Arya will be the “little brother” who is prophesied to kill Cersei. If that is in fact Arya’s destiny, it won’t be a glorious victory for Arya, but a dreadful damnation....

Also unlike Arya, who has regained her vision but lost her ability to see the world,...

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