Yes, she was empowered. Yes, it was one of the most consensual sex scenes in Game of Thrones history. Yes, she’s old enough to have sex. (Maisie Williams, who plays Arya, is 22; the character is 18.) These are all things I know to be true—and still, I did not enjoy Arya Stark’s sex scene last night with her friend and former traveling companion Gendry.
I’m not saying my reaction is correct or even that feminist. Objectively, I believe Arya made a strong, empowered choice with the autonomy she was afforded on her last night before the Battle for Winterfell. Arya needs no protection, nor does she need anyone telling her what to do with her body. And just a quick glance at Twitter tells me that many fans loved the scene:
Williams told Entertainment Weekly she’s happy with the scene too, though she thought the showrunners were joking when she first read the script. “At first, I thought it was a prank,” Williams says. “I was like, ‘Yo, good one.’ And [the showrunners were] like, ‘No, we haven’t done that this year.’ Oh f—k!”
Two episodes deep into the final season of Game of Thrones, I stand where I always have: very protective of Arya. That doesn’t mean she can’t or shouldn’t ever have sexual experiences—so if that reaction makes me garbage, I get it—but as I watched I thought about how we’ve seen her grow up way too fast in every other way, from seeing her father’s beheading at a young age to fleeing her nest and going scorched-earth on her enemies. Truly, the only way that Arya hasn’t been mature beyond her years is in sexual experience.
Arya (Maisie Williams) and Gendry (Joe Dempsie) on Game of Thrones
HBOHer story has always been about revenge and murder, slicing and dicing her foes with the grace and ease of an infomercial chopping device. The writers almost got through the whole series without sexualizing her—something I really thought they would do because of her one-track mind for retribution.
But they just couldn’t help themselves, could they? They couldn’t wrap this show without Arya Stark revealing herself to a man in the nearly textbook way that almost every other woman on this show has done before. (Seriously, the behind-the-naked-female-butt camera angles on this show are like clockwork. Why must the women always get undressed before the men?)
It felt jarring to me that this is the thing Arya wants to do before she dies, when that hasn’t been fully baked into her character until now. And I’m not alone in that opinion:
There’s something else about the scene that didn’t sit right with me. Again, I’m not saying I have the correct opinion—but I want to voice how I feel: The sex scene unintentionally prodded its finger into an old wound of mine. I’ve been pretty vocal on Twitter about my desire, as a queer person, to see more diversity of sexuality on this show. After all, there aren’t many characters on Game of Thrones with a queer experience. Yara Greyjoy is a lesbian character who flirted with Daenerys last season and nearly had a killer sex scene with Ellaria Sand, but she’s never gotten her due romantically. When Yara and Ellaria kissed, men literally burst into the room to kidnap them.
As a character with a less explicit sexual history, Arya was easy for me to relate to. She was a tomboyish kid who parlayed her brawny, raw power into a brute strength—and I loved that about her. Deep down, I knew the show wasn’t going to make her queer—but I was hoping we’d make it through the series without seeing her fall into a heterosexual romance in a way that felt forced to me.
