Arya Sue: Is Game of Thrones’ Youngest Stark a Mary Sue?

I was rereading the comments on my old piece There’s Something About Mary Sue and I came across this comment from Pillsy:

As it so happens, I’m writing about Game of Thrones all winter long, so this seems like a great comment to revisit. Now, I suspect that Pillsy is referring to the book version of GoT and not the show. And if so, I agree, book Arya is not a Mary Sue (yet).

But Show Arya? That is not such an easy call for me to make.

Is Arya Stark on the Game of Thrones TV show a Mary Sue (technically, since she’s a canon character, she’d be a Canon Sue) and if so, is she the ONLY Mary Sue in Westeros?

Let’s quickly go over the definition of a Mary Sue I gave in my Mary Sue piece, and see if Arya meets any of the criteria:

*A Mary Sue is a female character who is meant to be a stand in for the author or some portion of the author’s perceived audience.

Yes, Arya is definitely meant as a stand in for some portion of the author’s audience. Anyone who self-ID’s as a tough girl is supposed to find Arya appealing. She is clearly meant as a relatable protagonist for those who love female characters who can beat up the boys. And unlike Brienne of Tarth, who’s also a badass, Arya never wastes a second moping that some boy doesn’t like her. This appeals to a certain subset of viewers who like the Plucky Girl, especially when we get to see her mature into an Extraordinarily Empowered Girl.

*A Mary Sue is a character with a fascinating, heart-wrenching, impressive backstory.

Yep. Arya Stark has suffered hugely and is a very impressive, resourceful girl. And she’s a lady, descended from generations of Northern noblemen. And she’s a warg (in the books) and an assassin (in the show).

*A Mary Sue is incredibly gorgeous and very skilled.

No…but also yes. While technically Arya is not described as gorgeous, she is repeatedly told she looks like her aunt Lyanna Stark, who was so beautiful that Rhaegar Targaryen forsook his wife Elia Martell for her. I suspect in the GoT books we are going to see an ugly duckling transformation any minute now. And while she starts her hero’s journey fairly weak (though plucky! so plucky!), by the end of the show she is inarguably a complete badass, being able to fight with great skill, having special abilities like being able to warg (in the book) and taking out Walder Frey and the bulk of the Frey family in one fell swoop (in the show).

*Other canon characters are inexplicably smitten with her and want to protect her even at high cost to themselves.

Definitely. She’s Jon’s favorite, her dad has a soft spot for her, Syrio Forel takes her on as a student and dies for the privilege, Yoren gets her out of King’s Landing and dies for the privilege, she makes friends with Hot Pie and Gendry, Roose Bolton (in the book) and Tywin Lannister (in the show) make her into their serving girl and keep her relatively safe in Harrenhal, Jaqen H’ghar takes a shine to her, the Brotherhood without Banners takes her in, the Hound looks after her and dies (in the book, maybe) or nearly dies (in the show) for the privilege, she’s accepted into the Faceless Men for training, Beric Dondarrion sacrifices himself for her (pointlessly), and Gendry eventually proposes to her.

Even the actress Arya had been sent to assassinate nursed her back to health…and, perhaps unsurprisingly given Arya’s track record, died for the privilege. Not all these people have the purest of motives, and their affection is not, perhaps, always completely inexplicable either, but if you hold Arya’s experience up to, say, Sansa, who’s basically left to fend for herself with far less impressive a skill set, Arya is much better taken care of. In fact, it is only that level of care and protection she receives that allows her to develop the skills she does.

*A Mary Sue possesses a wide array of talents that surpass the abilities of all the other canon characters.

Yes. The only skills Arya Stark doesn’t have are the ones she had no interest in developing. It is irrelevant to say “but that Mary Sue of yours couldn’t do needlepoint” because Arya didn’t WANT to do needlepoint. Not being able to do things a character has no interest in does not unMarySue them. Setting her obvious physical prowess aside, when Arya seduces Gendry, she displayed a level of sexual confidence that made no sense for her to have – totally Mary Sue. Even Arya not killing the actress she was sent to assassinate was a Mary Sue move, thereby proving she was so much more ethical than the Waif.

The writing site Mythcreants has this really useful concept called candy and spinach – candy being the qualities that make your character awesome, and spinach being anything that reflects badly upon them (NOT bad things that happen to them. Spinach means things that humiliate the characters or qualities/events/choices that make them seem less cool or good). By S7 and 8 of GoT, Arya is all candy, no spinach. To wit: “Look, she’s so normal, she’s totes initiating sex with Gendry!” Even the things that are ostensibly supposed to make Arya look bad – say, gradually becoming a remorseless killing machine – are played as moments for the audience to cheer or are handwaved away.

*There is no price to the acquisition of Mary Sue’s skillset.

Clearly, Arya Stark suffered greatly along the way and worked hard to acquire the skills she gained.

But that having been said, did Arya suffer enough? In terms of her overall character, there was no real cost to her exploits. Yes, she may have suffered along the way, but Arya was still clever, cute, and daring. Her direwolf lived. Even her completely-unnecessary-to-the-plot friend Hot Pie survived unscathed (can’t say that of Sansa’s friends Jeyne Poole in the book, or Dontos the Fool). While losing her family gave Arya the sadz, by the end of the show she really hadn’t changed much at all. If anything, she got pretty much everything she ever wanted from the world – which would almost certainly not have happened had her parents lived. If her parents had lived Arya would have ended up married and miserable. Arya’s parents dying simply opened a whole new world that allowed Arya to get what she wanted.

Compare this to Sansa, who started off as this innocent girly girl and changed quite a bit by necessity by the end, or Bran, who turned into something that was hardly even a person. If they really wanted to go with “girl becomes inhuman assassin” for Arya, then by the end of it the story, Arya should have become as inhuman and unlikeable as Bran, just in a different way. That is a real cost to acquiring skills. But a character who just gets cooler and then ends up getting everything she wants? That’s really not a true cost, now, is it?

To bring it back to Mythcreants’ “spinach vs. candy” concept, Sansa has to eat a lot of spinach (and by the way, there are a good number of fans who passionately hate Sansa for the spinach she ate along the way). Bran has to eat a lot of spinach. Daenerys and Jon Snow have to eat a freakin ton of spinach. Even the secondary characters have to eat more than their fair share.

What does Arya do except become cooler and get everything she ever wanted?

That’s candy, not spinach.

*She saves the world, usually dying in the process.

Half-true. While Arya survived the experience, she saved the world in a ridiculously easy way, and the most Mary Sue part of it from a storyteller’s perspective was that she had no specific beef with the Night King. Obviously it’s the end of the world as we know it and IRL whoever gets the kill, takes it – but we aren’t IN the real world here.

Jon and Bran both had a huge personal stake in defeating the Night King. Theon Greyjoy killing the Night King to redeem himself made sense. Beric Dondarrion kept being brought back from the dead again and again, and for what? To run around aimlessly and get ripped apart by zombies? Melisandre came back to Winterfell to light a trench on fire? Surely she should have had some great part to play since the Lord of Light supposedly had this huge investment in seeing the Night King defeated. Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, killing the Night King, had a certain ring of poetic justice to it and would also have been a nice redemptive touch, since he’d broken Bran in the first place. And Sam Tarly had ample reason to want the Night King dead – and would have been a fun underdog to cheer for.

It made NO narrative SENSE that Arya killed the Night King. None whatsoever. She didn’t even use her special abilities to do it. Arya killing the Night King was meaningless girl power fan service, and yes, completely Mary Sue.

Now, you may say I’m being unfair here. You may say that a lot of Arya’s journey was determined by the plot and with the exception of her killing the Night King, everything I mentioned can be handwaved away by the needs of the story.

But there is one final element of Mary Sue, and in my opinion it’s the most damning element of them all.

* She deprotagonizes the other characters.

Or as I put it in my original piece:



Once Arya got back to Westeros from Braavos that’s exactly what happened. A show about a game for some thrones that had 700 people in it all pursuing their own agendas became The Wacky Adventures of Arya Stark.

This thorny, complicated history between the Hound and Sansa (that in the books was exponentially more interesting and went on way longer than Arya’s time spent with the Hound) at least ONE of us wanted to see get some sort of a conclusion? Treated as an afterthought and woefully mishandled (so, so very woefully). The Hound is a quivering mess during the Battle of Winterfell and Dondarrion tells him to pull himself together because Arya is SO INSPIRING! Then these two otherwise interesting characters run around a castle helping Arya for a while till Dondarrion gets killed (despite his allegedly great destiny) and then I guess the Hound and Melisandre – both of them pretty badass folks who probably should have been out there killing some stuff – barricaded themselves in a room while IDK, having a debate about the merits and drawbacks of fire, maybe. Daenerys is by far a more important character to the overall plot than Arya and what did she do during the battle of Winterfell? Not a whole lot other than getting Jorah killed. Jon was freaking RESURRECTED FROM THE DEAD to beat the Night King. Bran was stalked by him for ages. And where was Meera Reed in all this, who had her own grudge against the Night King? Cut, because I guess we needed to see more Arya for some reason, even though Meera was herself a badass tough warrior girl.

Night King aside, in Season 7, Arya outwitted the brilliant strategist Littlefinger (how exactly, no one seems to know – maybe Bran figured it out, IDK whatevs as long as Arya gets the kill) deprotagonizing Littlefinger in an aggravating way, robbing the pretty excellent actor Aidan Gillan of his Shakespearean moment, while everyone else – characters who were there at Winterfell, by the way, who had some pretty massive investment in the outcome of the Littlefinger-is-bad-achtually reveal themselves – had absolutely no input in his takedown. Just like with the Night King, it made very little narrative sense for Arya to kill Littlefinger, whom she had had practically no interaction with. I mean, why not have Arya show up out of the ether to kill Ramsay Bolton, too?

The win over Littlefinger should have belonged completely to Sansa because it was Sansa’s story, Sansa’s relationship, and Sansa’s victory over a dude that had seriously, seriously wronged her. Repeatedly. Arya took not only the win, but the entire storyline away. The moment of Sansa’s greatest triumph, when she should come into her own as a master strategist, turned into Sansa having to defend her actions for the sake of getting Arya’s approval, and then turning it over to Arya for the slam dunk.

Face it, folks, Arya Stark is a huge Mary Sue in the 7th and 8th seasons of Game of Thrones. Not the whole show, it’s true, but those last two seasons, totally. She’s a good character, I like Arya too, but by the end of GoT, her gravity becomes so great she pretty much takes over the whole show. Or to paraphrase TV Tropes, Arya becomes not only a Mary Sue, but the dreaded Black Hole Mary Sue.

The Black Hole Sue: Her gravity is so great, she draws all the attention and causes other characters to bend and contort in order to accommodate her. Characters don’t act naturally around her. They instead serve as plot enablers for her, with dialogue that only acts as set-ups for her response. Most people don’t oppose her and anybody who does will either realize their fault in doing so or just prove easy to overcome.

Here are some videos to prove it, not that you can see anything that happens in any of them since they are all so dimly lit. I mean, I’d be ashamed too I guess.

Hey, did you forget that Arya is so totally cool? Just in case we will have some characters obsess over her and obey her every command.

Sure, Arya can easily beat this chick twice her size, who had also trained very hard her entire life against overwhelming odds to acquire her skills. Also, more obsessing!

“Bored now, leaving.”

“AAAANND, scene. Oh no guys we gotta do that one again, neither of you looked obsessed enough.”

“How fucking obsessed are we supposed to be?”

“IDK MOAR OBSESSED”

“I thought the Hound was meant to be obsessed with Sansa?”

“That was like 4 seasons ago or something! Drink your wine, bro.”

This is Arya in pretty much every scene she’s in during the 7th and 8th season. She’s the focus of every scene, she’s the coolest person in every room, she’s not only the most badass but everyone around her, even people who are total badasses, are standing around watching her, thinking “whoa, that chick is like so totally badass, way way more than me that’s for sure”. Any ongoing concerns anyone might have with her behavior (killing all the Freys seemed just a wee bit excessive to me) are just either set aside, or in the case of Sansa, their plotlines are actually created specifically to give Arya another moment in the sun.

Previously formidable opponents like Littlefinger are NOTHING to Arya. They have no potential to harm her at all. The Night King? Why, just as easy as dropping a knife from one hand to another. Meanwhile everyone else is pissing their pants in fear and failing miserably, but Arya is cool as an ice zombie.

I’m sorry, Arya lovers, but that is NOT Game of Thrones. Seriously, that’s something I love and adore about Game of Thrones at its best – everyone is a legit threat, no one is ever safe, the strongest can be brought down at any moment by the weakest. Khal Drogo can be killed by a slave woman and there is nothing his Khaleesi can do to stop it. Little Old Lady Olenna Tyrell can take out a king. A 92 year old man with a stunning resemblance to Willie Nelson can slay an entire family.

Above all else, deprotagonizing the other characters is what makes a Mary Sue a Mary Sue. Arya Stark doesn’t just deprotagonzise the other characters, she even deprotagonizes the entire Game of Thrones itself by having shiny Mary Sue Girl Power plot armor so thick that no one can even touch her.

You win, or you die, or else you’re Arya and have it handed to you on a silver platter.

You may not LIKE it (I don’t like it either, as the original incarnation of Arya is a delight to behold) and the combined force of the Internetz may come together to shout me down, but in my opinion, in the TV version of Game of Thrones, Arya Stark sadly does indeed become a Mary Sue over time.

That having been said, are there other Mary Sues in ASOIAF? Because that’s the comeback to this argument – “well but the real Mary Sue was actually (insert name here)”.

Before we get into that, a quick reminder that I don’t think a character with some, even several elements of Mary-Sue-dom is inherently bad. This is particularly true in the fantasy genre, which is fundamentally about people who have power of some sort or another.

As I addressed in my original Mary Sue article, I think Mary Sues are something that many women in particular enjoy because we feel a lot of pressure to excel at everything we encounter, not to mention a desire for people to love, cherish, and protect us, and so a character that has those qualities, we often like a lot. The reason Arya Sue bugs me is NOT that Arya develops some Mary Sue qualities, it’s because she undermines the fundamental premise of Game of Thrones – that safety is an illusion, that the mighty Ned Stark can lose his head, that the person you thought was the star of the main story was actually a side trip on the way to someplace else entirely.

Some of the very best plots and characters of GoT got short shrift in order to further placate the Girl Power crew with MOAR ARYA. At this point, I find “Girl Power” to be done to death, so it was just about irritating to see plot threads and characters that I happen to enjoy sublimated to just another tired Captain Marvel, girl-beats-up-boys routine. It’s not that Arya represented some elements of Mary Sue per se that I take issue with, it’s that she ended up as the worst elements of Mary Sue. Completely without reason too, because the show was replete with interesting characters doing fascinating things, cast with actors who did a superb job portraying those characters.

There was no need to turn a delightful ensemble cast enacting a fascinating plot into facilitators for The Totally Amazeballs Exploits of the Superphenominal Arya Sue Stark.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s move on to Daenerys Targaryan. Is she a Mary Sue?

Because Daenerys is usually mentioned as the counterpoint to Arya Sue. “But DANY was the real MARY SUE ALL ALONG!”

Mmmmph…not exactly.

There are certainly elements of Mary Sue in the character of Daenerys – her unusual beauty, that tragic backstory, her wisdom beyond her years, her ability to speak several languages, and the fact that she has dragons – but she’s the Khaleesi, dude, she’s meant to be a talented person. And she’s a Targaryen, the last Targaryen (or so we think). Some people really ARE meant to garner more attention than other people, and that quality alone does not a Mary Sue make. I mean, does anyone look at Princess Diana and think “zOMG she was SUCH a Mary Sue, her existence totally strains my belief?”

Fantasy stories are replete with tales of queens and Chosen Ones and royal bloodlines and people who can ride dragons, and to cut those elements out of a story from fear of creating a Mary Sue, or to claim Mary Sue whenever you encounter such qualities just seems silly to me. You can have a Chosen One who is not a Mary Sue. You can create a powerful female character without her being a Mary Sue. You can have a magical universe with a smokin’ hot woman in it who can ride on the back of a giant fire breathing lizard and free millions of slaves without it being a Mary Sue, if it works in the rules of your fictional universe.

It is when the character’s power does not make sense within the bounds of the fictional universe you have a Mary Sue.

Read that sentence until it sinks in, people.

I don’t think Daenerys is meant to be a wish-fulfiller for anyone in the audience, either, no matter how many chicks like to cosplay as her. It’s pretty clear to me that GRRM was setting Dany up to be the Big Bad all along and she’s never been a particularly relatable character for me (though Emilia Clarke is great in the role and makes a character I honestly don’t like much in the book, much more likeable.) As I reread the books again, Daenerys is much more a tragic, doomed figure than she is a flawlessly cool one. She’s not a skilled fighter, she’s not a very good ruler, she trusts those she should doubt and doubts those who she should trust. She has the attention span of a gnat and her reach perpetually exceeds her grasp.

Everything Daenerys Targaryen tries to accomplish comes crashing down around her spectacularly. She gets her husband and unborn baby killed. She gets a LOT of people killed. She falls short of her noble ideals again and again. Falling short of her ideals is a situation Arya Stark never has to reckon with, since her goals always seem to mesh perfectly with her skillset. “On my agenda today, kill the Freys, and leave, wow, I’m so totally awesomesauce, no wonder everyone is obsessed with me!” Compare that to Dany: “Today I’m going to set hundreds of thousands of slaves free, rebuild an entire economy and culture, and be a wise and just ruler. Oh fuck I don’t know how to do that”.

Daenerys never gets to be the Mary Sue hero that selflessly saves the whole entire world. She wants to, and even imagines herself that way, but she fails miserably. She betrays her most loyal people, leading most of the Dothraki and the Unsullied to their death for her own gain, and she dies, not to save others, but from a need to save others from her. She regularly looks like an a-holish jerk along the way (aka she eats a LOT of spinach). There is NOTHING Mary Sue about that.

Yes, Dany gets her manicured mitts on some power, but the cost of that power is terrible and heartbreaking, completely changing who she is as a person for the worse. She pays a much, much greater price for failing than Arya pays to succeed. Daenerys loses her entire family and has to sell her soul to be the queen while Arya still gets to be that cool little kid that chases cats around King’s Landing. Only by “cats” we mean “the Night King”.

In the later seasons of GoT, while Tyrion, Varys, and Jon Snow do seem to fall under Daenerys’ spell in a rather out of character way (Varys seriously WTF dude, you don’t even have the obvious excuse), and Jorah always was under her spell (but that is in keeping with his character as an irredeemable simp), many others she meets are just like “meh”. Most of the people of Westeros are so totally “meh” about Dany it’s even a plot point. She expected to be greeted as a hero, a savior, and it’s shocking to her that people just aren’t that into her. It makes her question why exactly it was she sold her soul (and ye gods, this could have been so tragically interesting if only we got to see it play out over time instead of on fast-forward – done right, this could have been a descent into darkness rivalling Walter White’s). Mary Sue never questions anything. She never has to.

Furthermore, believe it or not if you can wrap your head around such a thing, there are entire scenes where Dany is in a room with other stuff going on and it’s not all about her. The camera actually leaves her for a moment to check in on other characters, to hear their conversations, some of which aren’t even about Dany at all. There are moments in which not every character is staring directly at Dany shaking their heads in amazement over her.

Unlike Arya Sue, Daenerys is part of the whole ensemble, she’s not the primary focus of every scene she’s ever in.

And while I do think that Dany does deprotagonize Tyrion, Varys, and Jon Snow to an unforgivable extent, on the whole, her character is nowhere near as full on Mary Sue as Arya’s. No way. No how.

And speaking of Jon Snow – is HE a Gary Stu? Because that’s another name I see pop up in convos about Arya Sue. Jon was the real Gary Stu all along, people say. Not Arya.

I can see Jon Snow being seen as a stand in for some of the author’s audience, sure. He does have a pretty intriguing backstory to be sure – but it’s in keeping with the genre and the plot (again, MarySueness occurs when it DOES NOT make sense with the genre/plot). I also don’t think Jon Snow has any remarkable beauty; he’s not described that way in the books and Kit Harrington is cute, but he’s no Jaqen H’ghar that’s for sure. Jon doesn’t even look like a Targaryen. Yes, he has a direwolf. Then again, so does Rickon, and Ghost being an albino direwolf is much more about Jon being an outsider to the Stark family instead of marking him as special.

While the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch Jeor Mormont and the leader of the Wildlings Mance Rayder do take a shine to Jon, many others (including Catelyn Stark, for Jon’s entire life) are not enamored of him. Ygritte likes him but that was in service of the plot. Jon has friends but he earns them. Melisandre thinks he may be the Prince Who Was Promised, but Melisandre thinks the potted plant she walked by in the hall at Castle Black was the Prince Who Was Promised. And the “hey, that Jon guy is kind of ok, I’ll give him a sword for saving my life” kind of admiration of Mormont is EXPLAINED, because Mormont’s own son had brought shame to the family line and he had no one else to give it to. It’s nothing like Tyrion and Varys inexplicably flipping their shit over Dany, let alone the long line of not-so-secret admirers Arya leaves in her wake.

Jon Snow is also really quite uncool. He’s an inept bungling chronically depressed emo goody two shoes and his star is regularly eclipsed by other cooler characters. Arya and Daenerys are cooler than Jon. Ygritte is cooler than Jon. Tormund Gianstsbane is cooler than Jon. Margaery Tyrell is cooler than Jon. Olenna Tyrell is cooler than Jon. Tyrion Lannister is cooler than Jon. Jaime Lannister is cooler than Jon. Tywin Lannister is cooler than Jon. The Hound is way cooler than Jon. Even Sam, a character defined by his uncoolness, regularly comes off cooler than Jon.

IMO Jon is the least Mary Sue of the three, by far. He’s not packing any weird unexplained skills. He’s good at some stuff, but not outstanding. He gets to be the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch but that’s because a lot of other people are dead and the other choice was terrible. Honestly, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed and a lot of his military (and personal) decisions are stupid as f*ck. Nor does he does he ever save the day singlehandedly. Arya swoops in and kills his archnemesis right out from under him. Even Sansa saves his dumb ass.

Jon Snow eats a lot of spinach along the way.

And most compelling, Jon Snow doesn’t deprotagonize anyone. In fact he’s the one who is utterly deprotagonized, with every scrap of independent thought or action he ever had completely erased when Dany shows up. I mean, basically all he says for the entire last season is “She is my QUEEN”. Jon was so diminished by the appearance of Daenerys Targaryen even our friendly neighborhood simp Jorah Mormont was shaking his head saying “Damn Son, have some pride.”

I honest to R’hllor think the only reason why anyone says Jon Snow is a Mary Sue is because he’s a dude and whenever the subject of Mary Sue comes up someone has to counter it by claiming some male character is the REAL Mary Sue all along. Me: “Rey is kind of a Mary Sue.” Others: “NO! It was LUKE who was the real Mary Sue all along!” Me: “Bella Swan is kind of a Mary Sue.” Others: “NO! It was EDWARD who was the real Mary Sue all along!”

Y’know, it’s ok to criticize women, I promise, especially fictional ones.

If you want a real Gary Stu (technically a Villain Sue/Stu) in the GoT tv show, check out Ramsay Bolton. He’s got a tragic backstory and has mad skills he acquired though we’re not quite sure how, and IMO the actor, Iwan Rheon, is of comparable cuteness as the guy who plays Jon Snow – though your mileage may vary.

For a good long while there Ramsay seems fully capable of accomplishing any task set before him (except winning his father’s love…sigh), is seemingly omnipotent (even comically taking out Stannis Baratheon’s entire army with “twenty good men”, something so ridick it’s become a meme), beats Yara Greyjoy’s Ironmen without even bothering to don a shirt, and spits flaming one-liners with the comedic timing of Spiderman and Deadpool combined.

Despite being a total grosso Ramsay Bolton somehow wins the unquestioning loyalty of all the Stark bannermen who were supposedly notable for their loyalty to the ways of the North – u know, the North remembers and all that honor and duty bullshit, I guess, until Villain Sue Bolton shows up and then they forgot all that faster than you can say “torture porn”.

Ramsay Bolton not only is a homicidal sadist and a rapist, he also has a super smokin’ hot girlfriend who’s totally into it. He actually had two until he got sick of one of them. In true Mary Sue style, he saves the day for the bad guys pretty much singlehandedly several times. And while I hate to acknowledge this reality I majorly dislike, I suspect there are a fair few number of dudes in the audience who find Ramsay totally relatable as an avatar for their misogynistic power fantasies. I further suspect that two of those dudes go by the name of David Benioff and DB Weiss, since they gave their Creator’s Pet Ramsay nauseatingly epic amounts of screentime.

Ramsay absolutely deprotagonizes (in a manner of speaking) Theon Greyjoy. And, sadly, much to my very great chagrin, Sansa Stark, completely derailing her story arc in which she continues learning the Game of Thrones from a series of twisted mentors, ostensibly to end up the most skilled player of all. This is an important story arc, because in case you hadn’t noticed, it mirrors Arya’s story arc in which she learns survival skills from a series of twisted mentors. But screw that, because as hack writer David Benioff so famously says, “Themes are for eighth grade book reports.”

To salvage this error of continuity, Benioff and his hack partner DB Weiss decided to still treat Rapey Ramsay like just another twisted mentor and have Sansa be all like “well I guess it was good achtually that I got sexually assaulted, because it made me a better person”. And hey, that is definitely a sentiment that women confess to dudes who had also kind of sexually assaulted them only in a more PG-13 way. Or as I like to call it, the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Scene, and no, I won’t be linking it here.

I’m not even gonna get into all the other characters and plotlines that needed more precious time for their stories to be told, which went to providing the creeps of the world with more of their fave. This bizarre focus on Ramsay Bolton at the expense of all other characters goes all the way back to the FIFTH SEASON.

In the name of the Drowned God, why???

So you’re right, naysayers, Arya Stark is certainly not the only Mary Sue in Westeros, not by a longshot. But she is still a massive Mary Sue, so there.

I would go so far as to say that if it wasn’t for Arya Sue and Ramsue Bolton sucking the air from the universe and devouring the screentime desperately needed to tell other characters’ stories, that the final product of those last several seasons of GoT might have been quite a lot better. I don’t think I’m alone in that I actually…gasp…liked some of the other characters (even the naughty ones) and really would have very much preferred them to get their due rather than being shuttled off with a wineskin to mope or else set up as a convenient victim.

A liberal application Mary-Sue-ness is not the only flaw of the Game of Thrones tv show, but it sure was a biggie.

Poorly done, D + D, poorly done.