Umm...

what they expect me to say: “well, no, actually, canon supports it, because if you look back as far as season three, she’s been training for–”

anybody else: may i also please… have some candy

what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about a trained girl assassin doing an assassination?

what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about a girl discovering she can use a quasi-magical force in a universe where quasi-magical forces exist?

what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about having a gay superhero in a story that takes place in a world where gay people exist?

what’s so hard to understand about my original post? is it not obvious that i’m making a joke? a joke about the way that gatekeepers expect us to be constantly proving the “quality” and “merits” of us getting any scraps of representation at all? when we should not have to fucking do that?

i’m tired of being forced to do fandom homework for gatekeepers. i shouldn’t have to write a dissertation on arya’s training with the faceless men to establish the validity of her actions to people who’ve been watching the fucking show all along but just have such misogyny-soaked brains that they can’t recognize the difference between “bad writing” and “my own shitty internal bias.” there is PLENTY of shitty writing on game of thrones: nearly all of it! but this was a logical plot development, and yet fandom still lost its collective shit, because skilled women are somehow the most fantastical element of a fucking ice zombie story.

that dude asking “well why should there be a gay avenger?” is a perfect example: he wants his homework done for him. he wants an essay in 12-point font with one-inch margins outlining Ten Solid Reasons for the inclusion of a gay avenger and their Relevance to the Plot, but i will tell you what he deserves, which is to be told to fuck off. there should be a fucking gay avenger because there are fucking gay people alive on earth and that is IT. we’re alive in the world, and so we deserve stories. stories about people like us. it’s that simple.

the point of my original post is that i am done politely providing footnoted essays on why there should be heroic lead characters that i identify with. “rey’s a mary sue” is not a statement that deserves to be refuted with evidence, it deserves to be fucking laughed at, and i was.

I hope today is better and that this helps ❤️.

*please do not tag as ship*

Let me just get it on the record right now: Arya Stark killing the Night King is going to get a lot of shit, especially from the male book snobs. But let’s just take a moment and revel in the fact that they can complain all they want about how Arya didn’t fit into the prophecy as Azor Ahai because it still won’t do shit to change the fact that she is the prince that was promised. She brought an end to the Long Night. She did that.

Throughout the three years that I’ve been a member of this fandom, I’ve read all the books, watched every episode as soon as I could get my hands on it, watched all the theory/explanation videos, and from the very first time I was introduced to her in the books, I singled out Arya Stark as my favorite. On New Year’s Eve of 2016, my family adopted a puppy, who we named Arya Bark because she was everyone’s favorite character. I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit studying her every movement in an attempt to understand her character, and having this episode now, having her being the one who killed the Night King, I’ve genuinely never felt more proud of a character in my life.

So many people said that it would be Jon and/or Dany because they represented ice and fire, they were the heads of the dragon, they were Azor Ahai and Nissa-Nissa. But let me just say, this was 100% Arya’s moment because the Night King and the whole war between the living and the dead wasn’t about ice, it wasn’t about fire, it wasn’t about dragons or wolves, it wasn’t about honor and shame, it was about one thing and one thing only: Death. Throughout this series, we have seen Arya’s relationship with the god of death shift many times. In season one, under the training of Syrio Forel, she defied death. (“‘What do we say to the god of death?’ ‘Not today.’”) In seasons two through four, she witnessed death. In season five, she served death. (Valar morghulis, valar dohaeris.) In season six, she cheated death. (She spared Lady Crane and then defeated The Waif when she came to kill her.) And finally, in season 8, she faced death, and defeated it, once and for all.

This time last week, straight men everywhere took to twitter to talk about how “wrong” it was for Arya to lose her virginity because they still saw her as a kid (apparently violently murdering 50+ people and then wearing their faces didn’t do the trick). But she showed everyone in that episode that she didnt give a single fuck about what they thought, she saw what she wanted, she knew who she wanted to do it with, and she did it. She controlled the situation, but still gave Gendry agency (“I’m not the Red Woman. Take your own bloody pants off.”), which is honestly the only time in all of Game of Thrones that I can recall a woman losing her virginity in an empowering way on her own terms. And then this week, she showed us how you break the glass fucking ceiling. That moment when The Hound had stopped fighting and told Beric that it was pointless, that you can’t defeat death, and Beric pointed at Arya and said “Try telling that to her!”, my heart just swelled with pride. She never once let herself get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of wights that she was fighting, she just kept going. She knew that as long as there was still an enemy in front of her, she still had a job to do, and she didn’t hesitate to do it.

Can it wait a bit?

DM: okay so the High Mage, Viren, has got you hostage what do you do

Aaravos: I seduce him, and convince him to free me.

DM: Wha–

viren: what is it?? where are you going??