Game of Thrones Rewatch: Redemption Song

As I wrote about in my piece Men of Virtue (or Why is it So Hard To Write a Good Guy), I love it when a fictional character faces real, relatable challenges instead of manufactured angst – plot devices that show up conveniently as needed to inflict trauma of some sort upon our protagonist. Manufactured angst runs the gamut, anything from Superman’s kryptonite to the ubiquitous “Daddy Issues”. Whenever a writer can’t come up with an organic source of drama that grows sensibly from plot or character, and pulls some ridick drummed-up nonsense to up the dramatic ante instead, that’s manufactured angst.

How can writers avoid the pitfall of manufactured angst? Well, in real life, there ain’t no angst like the angst created when human beings do the wrong thing. The challenges we face in the real world don’t always or even usually involve another person like Lex Luthor or Cersei Lannister or Becky from Accounting. More often the biggest struggle of our lives comes at our own hands, as a result of our own flaws and our own foibles.

Humans tend to be our own worst enemies. The villains riding in on the noon train to shoot us down are our own character flaws. Like Marshal Kane in High Noon, we all go out to meet our destiny knowing the deck is stacked against us, but unlike Marshal Kane, a lot of that deck-stacking we bring upon ourselves. We try, we fail, we try, we fail, and maybe we learn a little something along the way that makes us less likely to fall short of our goals in the future. Or we don’t, and we keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over till they stick us into the ground and our kids take over where we left off.

We’re all a lot closer to the gritty anti-hero than the uncomplicated good guy. Maybe that’s why we like anti-heroes so much. Regardless of the purity of our intentions, none of us are Clark Kent, and so we enjoy a protagonist that struggles with questions of morality as much as we do.

Given that, is it any wonder we love redemption stories? Seeing a flawed person make good despite their past mistakes is something all of us screwed-up human beings with our feet of clay can totally relate to, and it’s a lot more emotionally compelling a plotline than Superman facing off against a magic rock (again).

But there’s just one problem with redemption: the anti-heroes we tend to encounter in fiction are generally pretty bad people when first we meet them. Fictional sins vastly outweigh real-world ones.

My friend Will Truman once mentioned, regarding the TV show Hanna (about a teenage genetically-altered assassin) that he had grown to dislike shows about redemption. As he put it, once you’ve killed tons of people, even in self-defense, how redeemed are you ever gonna get?

I admit Will’s resistance to the redemption story makes sense to me. We’re being shown people in our fictional universes that are freakin’ terrible human beings – people who kill with impunity, and without remorse. Yet we’re supposed to believe that these characters can be forgiven their trespasses. And more than believe it, we’re even supposed to find inspiration in our fiction, some hope that we too can be forgiven for our littler sins.

On the one hand, Will is entirely right. Sometimes (ok, oftentimes) a fictional redemptive arc is so unlikely as to strain belief. Sometimes the concept of redemption is as believable as a lump of kryptonite, just a convenient plot device for a lazy writer to fall back on. But other times, I do think it’s possible for a bad guy – even an Actual Bad Guy, mind you, not a character just playing at being a bad guy – to believably seek and receive redemption without it descending into just another case of manufactured angst.

When I looked up the religious definition of the word “redemption” I realized something I believe crucial to understanding the redemptive arc. Redemption hinges on being saved from sin. Not saving oneself, not wiping a slate clean through your own actions, being SAVED from sin.

There is something passive in the act of redemption that I think we the audience tend to miss. We’re so used to our take-charge action heroes that we have come to expect redemption to be just another victory a protagonist wrests from the jaws of defeat.

Luckily for our beloved anti-hero, redemption isn’t earned, it’s bestowed. Because it’s given, not earned, that means redemption is granted to people who don’t “deserve” to be forgiven at all, who haven’t balanced their ledgers. Redemption can be granted even to someone who is still totally in the red. No one, not even Angel, not even Constantine, earns their way into heaven with good deeds. They get there by asking for forgiveness and being granted it.

Redemption is not something our character does, it’s something that others (including God) do for them. Redemption comes from without, not within, not only in the real world, but in works of fiction as well. Thus, redemption can be granted even to someone who has done (gasp) NO good deeds at all. A character on the path to redemption has started being a good guy in order to stop being a bad guy, not to whitewash their past mistakes. They try to do the right thing because they want to be better people today than they were yesterday.

Being that better person doesn’t negate the past, but at least it stops compounding the sin. A character that doesn’t seek redemption is irredeemable not because they didn’t “earn it”, but because they didn’t try. They chose to stay stuck wallowing in the Molasses Swamp of self-hatred forever.

If a person continues beating themselves up over things that happened in the past, they can have no future, and without a future they have no ability to do better IN that future. You wish you were a better person, Mr. Anti-Hero? Then quit dwelling on the past, which is unchangeable. Quit doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. BE a better person in the here and now. Because the present is only thing you can control, the present is the only time your actions have any meaning at all.

Since I’m writing about Game of Thrones all winter for some reason I no longer recall, I decided to look at the concept of fictional redemption arcs in GoT. In the Game of Thrones tv show, there are three main redemptive arcs. (I’m differentiating them from the book, because I’m really not too sure things are going to progress the same way in the books, and boy howdy, I sure hope they don’t).

One of them, Theon Greyjoy’s arc, in which he betrays the Starks and then makes up for it by rescuing Sansa from Ramsay Bolton and then helping to defend Bran from the Night King, is pretty standard Hollywood fare right down to the emo Daddy Issues plot device. I don’t find it worthy of much reflection. Not only is Theon’s redemption manufactured angst, but it also feels about an inch deep to me, probably because there’s a fundamental selfishness underlying it. Being good solely to earn your redemption, to make people like you again (that earned redemption Will is referring to) would be an entirely selfish motivation. Anyone going down that path, treating forgiveness as an end to be attained rather than a gift that is given couldn’t actually EVER be redeemed.

This is one of the reasons I think Theon doesn’t quite work for me, though it could have if the writers had investigated that concept rather than expecting both the other characters and the audience to accept Theon’s change of heart at face value.

Fortunately, the other two arcs in GoT are much more interesting. Both of these arcs are stellar examples of the type of redemption story that really works for me – two people who know they’re going to the Seven Hells, and understand there’s no coming back from what they’ve done, but who just can’t seem to bring themselves to keep doing the wrong thing again and again. They aren’t trying to earn redemption deliberately like Theon. They aren’t trying to con people into liking them. They aren’t trying to wipe the slate clean. They’re just trying to do things differently than they did in the past. When the opportunity to do something decent presents itself, they can’t quite bring themselves to walk on by.

In doing so, they end up forgiven by some of the very people they’d wronged, even though that was never the goal. And most importantly, we the audience forgive them, and that’s why we love these guys even though they’re both pretty messed up.

Jamie Lannister starts off as a self-absorbed, arrogant prick with no compunction about throwing a child out a window because the child witnessed the incestuous relationship between him and his sister Cersei. He’s known as the Kingslayer, because he killed Mad King Aerys for threatening to blow up the city of King’s Landing (though this point is not belabored, I find it very intriguing that Jaime was actually a hero who saved millions of lives in the first place, and was treated so badly for his trouble it actually underwrites the bastard he is when first we meet him). Jaime is rich, gorgeous, he has crazy high sword-handling skills, he has a hot girlfriend he happens to be related to, and his family is made up of the most powerful a-holes in the whole country of Westeros.

Over the course of the show, the previously unflappable Jaime is beaten in battle by a teenager, held captive in terrible conditions for a year, has his hand cut off (for a master swordsman, this is a huge blow, causing him to descend into suicidal misery), nearly dies on numerous occasions, is forced to bear witness to the results of his family’s political ambitions up close and personal, and forms a strange bond with a much nicer person named Brienne of Tarth, eventually coming to respect and even admire her. When he’s finally able to return to his beloved sister Cersei, she spurns him cruelly. His son dies before his very eyes. He’s forced to stand by as his sister and father wrongfully accuse Jaime’s brother of murder. His father is murdered (by the brother that Jaime himself set free) and then his daughter is killed, again, right in front of him.

Though he still loves Cersei, she becomes more and more irrational, her actions ever harder for him to support. Jaime’s only living son takes his own life because of Cersei’s actions. Then Jaime is beaten in battle once again, this time by an army with dragons, and he realizes there is just no way for Team Lannister to win. They’re outmatched, outclassed, and on the wrong side of history. He begs Cersei to get with the program, to aid the good guys against the imminent attack of the ice zombies, which at that point are the biggest threat to Westeros. But when she won’t, he turns his back on her and joins the good guy team.

And then there’s Sandor Clegane, who starts off as a self-absorbed, miserable prick with no compunction about slicing a kid nearly in two and joking about it. He’s known as the Hound because his family sigil is dog-themed and he takes that as his personal avatar in more ways than one. He’s poor, he’s hideously burned, he’s big and strong, good with a sword, his brother is a homicidal maniac that bullied and abused him as a child, his parents covered it up, and he works for the most powerful a-holes in the whole country, Team Lannister. As does his bullying abusive brother whom he can never seem to escape.

Over the course of the show, the entirely flappable Hound is faced with, and even has to partake in, some unpleasant behavior from his bosses he disagrees with not because he’s not a violent brute, because he is, but because he despises bullies. Then he’s forced to go out and fight a battle in which a lot of stuff is getting lit on fire. Since he’s terrified of fire due to his burns, this is very uncool, and so after trying to save Sansa Stark, who even though she’s in the clutches of the bullies, refuses to be saved because the Hound is scary and mean, he runs off and saves Arya Stark instead.

Arya and the Hound hate each other both because of that history, but also because the Hound continues doing bad things, though he teaches Arya some useful lessons along the way (and did the same for Sansa, though their relationship is much more clear-cut, and yet at the same time much more complicated, in the books) Then he gets horribly injured, is robbed and left for dead, gets saved by a very inspirational religious dude who also used to be a terrible person, and that guy gets murdered too, of course. The distraught Hound becomes a vigilante, and eventually ends up also joining the good guy team in order to kill the ice zombies.

Jaime Lannister and Sandor Clegane are both legitimately bad dudes at the start of our story, no doubt, no pulling punches here¹. But over the course of time, they both totally (and believably) become better people.

The thing I love about both these redemption arcs, that makes them stand head and shoulders above most other redemption stories I’ve ever encountered, is that both of the characters’ journeys are so unintentional. Neither of these characters ever has a sudden epiphany, they never have that moment where the klaxons blare and the guy looks straight into the camera and says “Hmm, I suppose I’ll be good now.”
It’s evocative of the journey us real people take towards redemption. Gradual. Practically subconscious. One step forward, two (or three or ten) steps back. Very few people in the real world are trying to earn redemption deliberately by balancing some invisible moral scale, it’s just a happy side effect of trying to be a decent person instead of a son of a bitch.

As we all know, the Game of Thrones tv show encountered some problems along the way, by which I mean it completely sucked by the end. So, both these redemptive arcs, so good on paper (literally) ended up fizzling on the screen. Both these dudes ended up right back where they started from and didn’t get redeemed at all.

Jaime Lannister and the Hound end up making less of a redemption arc, and more a redemption circle. They run back and forth across Westeros, and kind of seem like they might’ve changed, but then they end up right back where they started from, in the clutches of the very people who treated them the worst. Because they’re victims of their own mindsets, all the personal growth they made is erased, and they both die for their trouble.

The Hound’s death in particular I found pointless and cruel, since he ends up dying in a fire (his worst fear) because of his sadistic brother. But Jaime’s death of “rocks fall, everyone dies” because he went back for his terrible sister was also pretty pointless and cruel, and it left too many unanswered questions hanging.

Now, you may argue that it’s George RR Martin we’re talking about here, and pointless deaths are something of a specialty for the dude. But this wasn’t pointlessness in service of a higher purpose. It was just pointless because showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss needed to allot more screen time for Arya Sue to run around King’s Landing with the camera lovingly focused upon her every second.

I could have stood it if one of these two supremely excellent anti-heroes had not been redeemed. That would have been acceptable to me, if sad. But it kills me that both of these redemptive arcs ended in a redemptive cul-de-sac. Why did I even watch this stupid show anyway, to see two of the best characters I was rooting for the entire time learn practically nothing and die horribly?
So, I ask myself, are either of these redemption arcs even salvageable?

Let’s start by asking the obvious question – are both of them salvageable? Can both Jaime and the Hound be redeemed at the end of Game of Thrones? I’m inclined to think not, without resorting to un-GRRM levels of happyendingness. To keep true to the spirit of GoT, one of them has to meet their end failing to be redeemed. I think George would prefer it that way. But I do think we can, and indeed, SHOULD, see one of them get some kind of redemption, for the sake of quality television, if for no other reason.

Yes, quality television. Part of what made Jaime and the Hound’s simultaneous redemptive circles so egregious is that it was BOTH of them failing to be redeemed. They ended up dying in the exact same episode. In the exact same way – because they couldn’t let their toxic relationship with their sibling go. Even though they both had kind of managed the feat, then they go right back to the hands of their abusers for no real reason, and die.

No. Just…no.

After much thought, and a very long phone conversation with my son in which I had to explain that no, there are actually three different types of zombie-type-creatures in GoT now that I come to think about it, I’ve concluded Jaime is the guy who should fall short. He started off with too many privileges, and his assholery is just not justified enough to let him die a hero. The Hound, you can understand why the guy has some major issues, and it’s much easier for me to forgive him his trespasses than a gorgeous dude born with a golden spoon in his mouth who still shoves kids out of windows.

But to play devil’s advocate, I can see killing off the Hound unredeemed instead, because he was so effed up, so broken, that maybe he just can’t come back from it. After all, there’s more to redemptive arcs than just who deserves it more – in the real world, some people just can’t let their shit go, and in many cases the more someone has suffered the harder it is to come back from it. So even though I think the better narrative play would be to kill Jaime unredeemed and let the Hound die in some sort of redemptive way, or even survive, let’s fix both of them just to show it’s possible.

The unfortunate thing about the character of Jaime Lannister in the TV show is that nearly all his redemptive arc comes later than S4, during the Bad Times, when character development had been largely subsumed to the pursuit of coolness. So many of Jaime’s regrets, his qualms, and the widening gulf of his differences with his sister Cersei happen in his head, and are not terribly easy to dramatize for TV. Of all of the areas showrunners D + D fell short, Jaime’s redemptive arc, I must admit, surely had to be amongst the toughest to write for the screen vs. the page. (Fixing Cersei’s character arc rather than resorting to “Bitchez Be Crazy” would have gone a long way towards illustrating why Jaime did end up turning away from her and seeking redemption, but I’ll handle that in a different post).

It occurs to me that one of the most important and obvious things about Jaime Lannister is that he was the Kingslayer. When Mad King Aerys threatened to blow up King’s Landing with wildfire caches hidden around the city, Jaime killed him to save the lives of innocents, and then spent the rest of his life paying for his heroism by being immediately distrusted by everyone he meets for his trouble. (I still maintain it might’ve been interesting for Jaime to be the one to kill the Night King because he’s the Kingslayer – thereby redeeming his original assault on Bran Stark, by saving his life.)

So, when Cersei takes a page out of Aerys’ playbook and starts threatening to blow up King’s Landing rather than let Daenerys have it – indeed, threatening the fate of all of Westeros, since she refuses to help prevent the attack of the Night King – I think it would be a logical, albeit tragic step for Jaime to take to kill Cersei, in an echo of his previous actions. This is complicated by the idea that Cersei claims to be pregnant, but maybe she’s lied to Jaime so often that he can’t believe her this time, either…plus, though she’s been preggers for a while, she is not even slightly chubby, so. Or maybe, over the course of finding out Cersei had cheated on him with Lancel and several other people, and was banging sexy pirate Euron Greyjoy, maybe he didn’t care. (Yes, this is very uncool, but then again, we’re talking about a show, and a relationship, that is pretty effed up.)

Jaime taking out Cersei would have had way more narrative punch than Jon Snow killing Daenerys (I mean, what, were Jon and Dany together all of five minutes, yet we were supposed to believe it was some sort of epic love affair?) and it would have fit in the prophecy that the witch Maggy the Frog had told Cersei in her childhood – she would have three children, all would die, and she’d be killed by the Valonqar, or “younger brother” – a prediction she’d always taken to mean Tyrion, but could easily have meant Jaime, who was also younger, if only by a few minutes.

This would redeem Jaime, IMO. I doubt Jaime would survive the attempt, dying either at the hands of the Mountain immediately afterwards, or possibly he’d be killed by Cersei herself in the attempt. It might be poetic justice if she impaled them both onto the Iron Throne, making sure she takes her brother out with her in her last act of spite, and ensuring that Jaime gets his wish to die in the arms of the woman he loves.

And then, seeing Daenerys STILL decide to destroy King’s Landing even though Cersei is dead, renders her character even more irredeemable.

To be honest I could kind of understand Dany’s position, after everything she had been through in Meereen, to want to be sure that Cersei and all her supporters were wiped out. I personally had a hard time interpreting Daenerys as irredeemably insane for destroying a city she was attacking, bells or no, and Jon killing her for it seemed a bit much, not to mention out of character for Jon, who couldn’t bring himself to kill Ygritte or the King of the Wildlings. But Dany knowing Cersei was dead and STILL blasting all the smallfolk to ash? Saying something like “Why do I need King’s Landing, when I have Dragonstone?” or “Aegon Targaryen destroyed Harrenhal when first he came to Westeros”, proving that cities and countries have become nothing more to her than dots on a map? Then Daenerys really has become the Big Bad everyone had feared, and killing her seems in that case to be much more justified.

But of course this being Game of Thrones, we have other players on the field. Arya Stark has her kill list, and killing Cersei Lannister is on it in great big letters right up at the top. Since cell phones have not yet been invented, she doesn’t hear that Cersei was killed till too late.

In the show as originally conceived, the Hound and Arya leave Winterfell together, and up till the very last moment, the Hound is trying to convince Arya not to become a killer like himself.

For all his alleged violent brutishness, the Hound is still trying to do the right thing, trying to redeem Arya, trying to save her from following down the same path he did, even as he goes to his own doom. He succeeds, getting her to leave the Red Keep and return to safety. But what if Arya was pulling the same stunt on him? What if, over the course of time, they both become less and less sure of their mission? Even though the trip from Winterfell to King’s Landing was inexplicably made by two people on horseback in what sure seemed like a matter of minutes, even though it previously had taken months, because it’s an estimated 1400 miles, let’s roll with the timeline as presented by the show. Even if they only had a few days’ trip together instead of months, wouldn’t they have been like, conversing during that time?

Trying to talk each other out of it? Or themselves into it? It would have been so awesome to see where their heads were at during that time. It would have been so awesome if there was some doubt, some uncertainty.

Even if they rode silently side by side for 1400 miles and had no qualms at all, what if Arya made her leaving the Red Keep conditional?

After all, everything the Hound says about Cersei is equally true of his brother The Mountain – the dude could easily already be dead, or will be soon, no assistance required. Arya could have thrown that back at him, said she wouldn’t leave without him, she’d hold her breath till she turned blue or whatever, and I don’t think the Hound would have let her tag along to do the killing (he probably should have, TBH, they both might’ve made it out.) If she insisted, refused to leave without him, even attempted to throw down on the guy to prevent him from squandering his life, I think it’s very likely he would have escorted her out by force.

Brief aside – If you read me thinking out loud there and start mourning your precious Cleganebowl, if I’d had my way, Cleganebowl would have happened during the attack on Winterfell, removing the Mountain from the equation entirely. But it didn’t, and given that it didn’t, I think it would have been a fine thing if, when presented with the choice, the Hound chose saving someone’s life over his vendetta. Heck, I think it would have been a fine thing if he chose his OWN life over his vendetta. Give the dude a reason to live, FFS.

A character actually changing and growing? That’s what redemption is all about.

So, let’s say that Arya emotionally blackmails the Hound into leaving with her, either before or after they get to King’s Landing. Now what?

One of my very least fave parts of the penultimate ep of Game of Thrones (and this is saying a lot) is the sheer amount of time that Arya spends running around King’s Landing while it’s getting destroyed while other characters like Jon and Tyrion and Grey Worm (I would have particularly liked to see more of Grey Worm, who was all in on Dany’s mission) are doing, like, IDK, whatever. I get that D+D are trying to say something about how terrible war is – which, for a show that does more than its fair share of glorifying violence, seems a bit of a mixed message, but I digress. Surely, they could have shown the horrors of war through the eyes of some other characters instead of just Arya. It just is more of the over-focus on Arya Sue that really rubbed me the wrong way in the last couple seasons.

Anyway, during the time she spends running around King’s Landing, Arya tries and fails to save a mother and a little girl that die horribly by dragon fire. But imagine that now she’s accompanied by the Hound, who’s finally learned to care about something other than his own self-pity. He could have helped Arya save them, and died in the process. By fire, of course, since GRRM is a bastard and I’m writing this on his behalf. That would have been so sad – I honestly get sad just thinking about it. But his death would have meant something, something real.

At least I would have felt an emotion other than massive annoyance that basically the Mountain won in the end.

But for those who really just can’t live without a Cleganebowl and don’t like my original suggestion of having it at Winterfell during the fight with the Others, I got you covered.

Let’s have Arya get so upset by the Hound dying (I think it should take a minute, and he should be scared and in pain in order to explain why it is Arya would be spurred to take this step, GAH please stop making me think about this) that she decides to get revenge for him. She helps herself to the Hound’s face and goes back and kills the Mountain² and Cersei too, if Jaime pussed out – which of course he would have since he’s not getting redeemed in this scenario, going back to his errant ways.

In addition to being awesome, this would still satisfy the Valonqar prophecy because Sandor Clegane is the younger brother, and Arya Stark is the younger sister (the Valyrian wasn’t too clear on gender). And I would have accepted that, because like I said at the start, it’s ok if one of them doesn’t manage to be redeemed.

It’s just that I can’t stand to see both these guys end up right back where they started.

Now, you may have noticed something – both Jaime and the Hound end up kind of dead in these little scenarios that I’ve spun. But you know what? At the least, their deaths had some freaking meaning to them. They weren’t just done away with for fan service – “Cleganebowl hurr de durr” – or because “rocks fall, everyone dies.” These two awesomesauce characters could have completed their redemption arc, and it would have been glorious.

I mean, seriously, you’re telling me that allegedly professional writers couldn’t come up with anything for these two great characters other than “hey, guys, you know that person who wrecked your entire life? Well, they’re gonna kill ya eventually, despite all this personal progress you made to get over their abuse. You’re just gonna go running right back to them again and die in horrible pain. Oh, and by the way, screw you, viewers, you never should have cared about these two dudes yeah, we know they were pretty much the best two, but Ramsay Bolton needed every second of that screen time we gave him. And BTW thanks for your HBO subscription.”

And while sticking with the person who treats you like crap does happen sometimes in real life (ask me how I know), again I say – both of them? In the very same episode? REALLY?

The possibilities were endless here, it was a smorgasbord of awesome plot twists to choose from, it’s flabbergasting that all David Benioff and DB Weiss could come up with is “you guys, go do that same thing again, like you did at the start, only more fatally this time.”

I started off this piece talking about manufactured angst – where a writer makes up ridiculous scenarios because they don’t have the chops to tell a real story involving real character growth and thus has to fall back on some sort of extraneous drama like Superman’s kryptonite, or Daddy Issues, or Targaryen insanity instead. But over the course of finishing it I realize there’s something worse than manufactured angst.

It’s intermittent manufactured angst, where your character’s kryptonite is just out there lurking, dangling over their heads like the sword of Damocles, and whenever a writer feels lazy, they pull it out again. So yeah, you get some real plotting, and just enough real character development to make viewers really get wrapped up in the fate of the guy/gal, but it all gets erased whenever the writer can’t come up with anything original.

Intermittent manufactured angst is worse, way worse than regular old manufactured angst, because it shatters the fourth wall so badly. Like, okay, if I go into a Superman story and all of a sudden there’s kryptonite, I expect that. It doesn’t bother me that much. If you want me to believe that there’s really a Targaryen insanity gene, ok, I can do that. But in a higher quality production like GoT, an unexpected lump of kryptonite sticks out like a sore thumb. Even more so when you see Superman proudly saying “Wow, I think I’m finally over that kryptonite thing at great personal cost to myself!” and you get all happy for him only to have Lex Luthor say “Yeah about that…”

It just doesn’t work. A redemption arc only works if the character actually gets redeemed at the end. Otherwise, it’s just pulling wings off a butterfly to watch it squirm.

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1. The character of the Hound stays so remorselessly, unapologetically unpleasant it kinda broke my brain the first time I read GoT. I thought “wait a minute, this obvious bad guy is really fleshed out and complicated, undoubtedly they’re going to do that thing where now he joins forces with the good guys and becomes their loyal minion instead.” But no, that didn’t happen either. The Hound doesn’t ever undergo that total Hollywood personality transplant from horrible bad guy to pure-as-the-driven-snow good guy for no apparent reason, that so often plagues fiction of lesser quality.

   That having been said, in the book he was going to join forces with Robb Stark and is using Arya not as a mere ransom, but to get in the Stark’s good graces – possibly to get a chance to kill his brother. So maybe he intended to do that but got his trope twisted viciously by the baddest guy of them all – GRRM. We’ll never know. (I admit I’d like to have seen that alternate reality where the river hadn’t flooded and the Hound made it in time to fuck up the Red Wedding.)

2. “But you said Arya killed too many people already!” I did, but that was because the characters she killed didn’t make sense narratively for her to be killing them, hence rendering those kills Mary Sue moments. You will never, ever, ever hear me complain about Arya killing the Freys because that made sense. Arya killing Cersei and the Mountain also make sense, because they were on her list.

   I don’t hate Arya, I like Arya, Arya is cool as f*ck. I just don’t think she needs to be the primary focus of the entire show, that’s all, and certainly not at the expense of other characters. Besides, if I was running this goddamn show someone else (ANY one else, literally all of them made more sense than Arya) would have killed the Night King and either Brienne or the Hound would have killed Littlefinger at Sansa’s behest, thereby clearing Arya’s schedule for the Mountain/Cersei doubleheader.