There Was A Sweet Message Hidden In Arya’s Brutal Rejection Of Gendry Last Night

Game Of Thrones Arya

If there’s one character I root for in Game of Thrones, it’s Arya Stark (Maisie Williams). Not to win the Iron Throne at the end, because let’s face it she’s not about that life. I’ve just adored her feisty attitude since the first episode and enjoyed her journey from baby-faced tween with a sense of justice to baby-faced adult with a sense of justice who brutally kills people without batting an eye.

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Her latest victim? Poor Gendry Baratheon (Joe Dempsie), who may not be physically dead after last night’s episode probably wishes he was. See, Gendry thought that now he’s an official Baratheon with a fancy Lord of Storm’s End title, that he needed a “lady” in his life.

Arya seemed like the obvious choice, since he’s suddenly decided he loves her after they boned exactly one time before a battle in which they were probably supposed to die.

So, awkwardly, he proposed to Arya in Episode 4: “The Last of The Starks”, and it didn’t go down well. For what it’s worth, I thought Arya did deliver a lovely shit sandwich, basically saying “You’ll be a great Lord but I don’t want to be anyone’s Lady”. She ended her rejection by simply saying “That’s not me.”

But it wasn’t just a “it’s not you it’s me” cliché. Any Arya stans watching will know it was a lovely reference to a couple of iconic Arya moments during the series. The first was a convo she had with her dad Ned Stark (Sean Bean) in Season 1, where he tells her one day she will marry and be a lady — basically describing the path she was on after her roll in the hay with Gendry.

But little Arya says to Ned: “No. That’s not me.”

True to her word, it never has been. And her independent, wild streak also extends to her direwolf Nymeria, who she had to send away in Season 1 to save the animal’s life.

Seriously, the scene in which she’s reunited with Nymeria in Season 7 makes me weep like no other scene in the history of television. Is it because my second most weepy scene is Arya sending Nymeria away in the first place? Probably yes. And you will recall that when Arya tries to coax the wolf to come back to her and be her pet, she then has a moment of realisation, saying: “That’s not you”.

SOB.

Some viewers (including people I was watching that episode with) thought she meant that it wasn’t Nymeria and she’d bumped into another random direwolf casually strolling around the forest. But most people read into it as Arya realising her former pet needed to be free. Much like Arya herself.

SOBBING INTENSIFIES.

This season has been full of cute little callbacks to old scenes and lines from previous seasons, and of course each episode is stacked with little details you might miss (and no I’m not talking about the bloody coffee cup.)

For more details from Season 8, Episode 4, check out our article HERE.

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