Quite a long time ago, a young lady sat on the means in the Tower of the Hand. Close by was Lord Eddard Stark, current Hand of the King and the glad if to some degree bewildered dad to Arya Stark. His kid was now taking each exercise of her "moving educator"— her sword ace—to heart and rehashing verbatim that swordsmen should ponder felines, since "they're tranquil as shadows and as light as quills." For Ned Stark, it is endearing to see Arya so cheerful, yet he is dubiously disturbed that she sees this sword battling as in excess of a basic extravagance. At the point when discussion of things to come comes up, he tells his girl, "You will wed a highlord and guideline his manor, and your children will be knights and sovereigns, and rulers."

Arya is unequivocal in her answer. "No, that is not me." From that minute on, regardless of whether it was not totally clear to Lord Eddard or the a large number of perusers and watchers who were embarking on a long voyage with Arya Stark, the tyke's predetermination would benefit her far from the normal jobs of aristocratic women in primitive settings. Furthermore, on Sunday night's scene of Game of Thrones, "The Long Night," that fate took an amazing yet, by and large, fitting turn.

The young lady who did not have any desire to run a château was currently the woman who might spare one—Ned's to be accurate. Beneath Winterfell, Ned Stark himself might've been slithering out of the grave because of the powers of otherworldly obscurity introduced constantly King, yet Arya was the one to put a conclusion to it when she turned out to be as calm as a shadow and light as a plume by getting the drop on the Night King and uncovering another Syrio Forel exercise to the cold blue devil: viewing isn't seeing, and keeping in mind that he watched her come at him with a Valyrian knife in her left hand, he didn't see she truly intended to murder him with it by means of the right.

It's an adventure that has been eight seasons really taking shape, yet there are those internet grumbling that Arya Stark is a "Mary Sue" and did not merit the "right" to slaughter the Night King. Such are the occasions we live in that fandom's, especially male fandom's, feeling of qualification ends up domineering. Arya, the woman who was at one time a young lady that shunned the customary way spread out for her by even the most altruistic parts of the male centric society, demonstrated a dissenter who could alter the course of history—it's as yet insufficient.

There are of course those who wanted Jon Snow to be the one to kill the Night King. There are also those that believed he was the prince who was promised, or Azor Ahai reincarnated. But these are just prophecies, and time and again Game of Thrones has reminded us words are wind. Stannis Baratheon also believed himself to be Azor Ahai, and look how destiny turned out for him. Arya found a way to make her own destiny, and in doing so she rewrote how the game is supposed to be played. Game of Thrones always goes for subversion, and the noble hero of light vanquishing the champion of darkness, perhaps with Jon Snow even wielding a flaming sword, is the storybook ending that would’ve left Arya as the wife of a highlord. This isn’t that storybook, however, and Arya would not play the role expected of her. She has always shattered convention, hence her shattering the Night King is kind of perfect.

Arya is a peerless assain, but if you think that makes her a flawless Mary Sue, you must've missed the heavy price that came with it, as seen in season 7 when she first reunites with Hot Pie. Forget the siblings she hadn’t seen since season 1, as it was alongside Hot Pie, Gendry, and Lommy that she was most in her element, dressed as a boy and going on what should’ve been Dickensian adventures across the riverlands. But as the riverlands burned, Lommy was murdered and Gendry nearly tortured to death by the Mountain. Still, Arya kept her relative innocence by the time Hot Pie and Gendry abandoned her and went their own ways. But upon reuniting with the former in season 7, she was a hollow shell of the girl she was, unable to make a discernable connection to one of her last friends beyond a pitch black joke about baking her own pies nowadays. The trauma that she earned alongside her skills left deep scars that crippled her to the point of considering her sister a possible enemy.

Arya has regained some of her humanity in recent episodes, not least of all by finding peace and even kinship with Sansa, the older sister she once loathed, but she is still a product of the hard lessons she learned. Lessons such as Syrio Forel telling her, all the way again back to that first season, “Remember child, this is not the dance of the Westeros we are learning, the knight’s dance of hacking and hammering. This is the Braavos dance, the water dance. It is swift and subtle.”