Where Is Arya Stark In The ‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 8 Teaser?
Game of Thrones is set to return for its eighth and final season in April, 2019, just a few short months away. And while fans are undoubtedly about to be hit with a ton of promos and advertisements for the upcoming spectacle, HBO is currently keeping viewers on a strict footage diet. The Inquisitr shared the one quick peek that was released at the start of January. In that teaser for the network’s many upcoming shows, fans saw three seconds of Daenerys Targaryen and Sansa Stark meeting in Winterfell.
Of course, fans don’t want to try and read too much into what was or wasn’t included in those three seconds. But fans of the show were quick to note one important character’s absence. Daenerys and Jon Snow were accompanied by Ser Jorah Mormont. Sansa had Brienne of Tarth standing guard behind her. But Arya Stark was nowhere to be seen.
SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses Season 7 of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Please proceed with caution if you wish to avoid spoilers.
Season 7 ended with the Stark sisters standing together on the parapets of Winterfell castle, so where is Arya in Season 8? One obvious possibility is that she could still be in Winterfell and just wasn’t included in these two very short and specific teaser shots. But with Littlefinger and Ramsay Bolton both dead and the North secure (at least from human enemies), fans have to wonder whether Arya would stick around when she has other unfinished business to take care of.
#GameofThrones returns to @HBO this April. pic.twitter.com/1muHcwJIFJ
— Game of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) January 7, 2019
This leads to Arya’s infamous list of people that need killing. As TV Guide notes, it started with The Hound, who killed her friend Micah, the butcher’s boy, in Season 1. The list quickly grew once the Lannisters and Starks fell out following the death of King Robert. Meryn Trant was added for killing Arya’s dancing instructor, Syrio Forel. Cersei Lannister, Joffrey Baratheon, and Ilyn Payne made the list for their parts in executing her father Ned Stark.
Polliver, The Mountain, and Rorge were part of a torture squad in Harrenhal that killed Arya’s friends. Walder Frey and Tywin Lannister ended up on the list after orchestrating the Red Wedding, which saw a good chunk of the Stark family slaughtered. To round the list out, Melisandre, Beric Dondarrion, and Thoros of Myr earned their spots for planning to burn her pal Gendry as a human sacrifice to R’hllor.
Here’s who Arya thinks is still alive: Cersei Lannister, Ilyn Payne, The Mountain, Melisandre, and Beric Dondarrion. It isn’t clear whether Dondarrion survived the fall of the Wall at the end of Season 7, and Arya may not even be aware that’s where he was. As for Melisandre, she finished the season off by declaring her intent to return to Volantis. But Cersei, The Mountain, and Ilyn Payne are all conveniently located in the same obvious place. That’s led fans to think there’s a good chance Arya was missing from the Winterfell teaser scene because she’s on the way to Kings Landing to maximize the amount of revenge she can get before the Night’s King makes such mortal concerns obsolete.
But as George R.R. Martin likes to remind fans, words are wind. Anything is possible when it comes to the final six movie-length episodes of Game of Thrones. As Inquisitr reports, even Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner didn’t guess how Season 8 would turn out.
“Neither of us was right,” Williams admitted. “I don’t know if it’s gonna surprise people, but it’s just different to what you think it’s gonna be.”
