Game Of Thrones: The Real Reason Arya Stark Killed The Night King

Season 8 of "Game of Thrones" was, to put it bluntly, not very good. (It was actually so famously bad that fans demanded, via petition, that the entire thing be rewritten and done all over again after the series finale, "The Iron Throne," aired in May of 2019). One of the many points of contention amongst fans to this day is the Battle of Winterfell, the epic (and expensive) battle that takes place in the third episode of Season 8 ... partly because the legendary, seemingly unkillable Night King (Vladimir Furdik) is killed very easily by the fierce young assassin Arya Stark (Maisie Williams). So why did this task fall to Arya instead of a character like, say, Jon Snow (Kit Harington), who faced off against the Night King multiple times throughout the series?

James Hibberd's oral history of the series — "Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series" — addresses this question, and as showrunner David Benioff put it, they avoided Jon because it felt too predictable. "It had to be somebody with believable access to Valyrian steel," Benioff said, referencing the Valyrian steel catspaw dagger that finds its way into Arya's possession in Season 7 (Valyrian steel is one of the few natural substances in the fictional realm of Westeros that can kill a White Walker). "We didn't want it to be Jon because he's always saving the day [...] Ultimately it wouldn't have felt right if it was Jon or Brienne [Gwendoline Christie] or the Hound [Rory McCann]."

Not only does Arya have a dagger capable of killing the Night King in her possession, she's also spent a large chunk of "Game of Thrones" up until the Battle of Winterfell training with stealthy face-changing assassins in Braavos. We know Arya is a killing machine, but it's not like Jon Snow is some sort of weakling in battle, and he also has Valyrian steel by his side (Longclaw, the ancestral sword of the Mormont family). It's perfectly reasonable that Jon, a character with a previous connection to the Night King that Arya simply doesn't have, would be the one to take down the Night King ... but Maisie Williams says she was absolutely delighted by David Benioff and his fellow showrunner's D.B. Weiss' attempt at subverting audience expectations

"[Kit Harington] expected it to go [Jon Snow's] way, too, and he even said, 'It was going to go that way. Someone told me in season three that I was going to kill The Night King,'" Williams told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2020 interview. "And then, he read the script, and it was Arya the whole time. (Laughs.) Yeah, I think it would've been too obvious. I'm glad that it was Arya, honestly. I think I had the best storyline of the final season."

There's a valid argument to be made that Arya Stark killing the Night King makes very little sense — and actually, we'll get to that in just a moment — but Maisie Williams told Entertainment Weekly in the aftermath of the episode that she stands by the twist. "It was so unbelievably exciting," Williams told the outlet in April 2019, saying she was incredibly worried about how it would be received. 

"But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn't deserve it," she continued. "The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that's so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, 'Well, [the villain] couldn't have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.' You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, 'Mmm, should be Jon though really, shouldn't it?'"

Williams went on to justify the entire thing by discussing a moment in the episode, titled "The Long Night," where Arya reunites with Carice van Houten's Melisandre after last encountering the Red Priestess in Season 3. In that episode, Melisandre tells Arya she will "shut many eyes forever," and in "The Long Night," she reminds Arya that that includes "blue eyes" — like the Night King. "When we did the whole bit with Melisandre, I realized the whole scene with [the Red Woman] brings it back to everything I've been working for over these past 6 seasons — 4 if you think about it since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White," the actress said. "It all comes down to this one very moment. It's also unexpected and that's what this show does. So then I was like, 'F**k you Jon, I get it.'"

To be frank, the version of Jon Snow we see in the Battle of Winterfell doesn't seem like a guy who's set to defeat unimaginable evil — thanks to the assassination of multiple character arcs throughout "Game of Thrones" Season 8, this hapless Jon bears little resemblance to the guy who slaughtered a high-ranking White Walker in the show's Season 5 episode "Hardhome." Sure, he takes down a lot of wights, but at one point, Jon faces down against Viserion — a dragon that once belonged to Jon's aunt and lover Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who was killed and turned into a zombie in Season 7 by the Night King — and just ... yells at a giant undead dragon for a while. Still, Kit Harington told Entertainment Weekly in Maisie Williams' interview that he was surprised that Jon didn't get to take down his longtime enemy ... but accepted it.

"I was surprised, I thought it was gonna be me!" Harington said at the time. "But I like it. It gives Arya's training a purpose to have an end goal. It's much better how she does it the way she does it. I think it will frustrate some in the audience that Jon's hunting the Night King and you're expecting this epic fight and it never happens — that's kind of 'Thrones.' But it's the right thing for the characters. There's also something about it not being the person you expect. The young lady sticks it to the man."

Here's the thing. Jon Snow does act like sort of a moron in "The Long Night," but that doesn't change the fact that, as cool as it is to watch Arya leap out of nowhere and defeat the Night King, it really should have been Jon. It actually doesn't make narrative sense for it to be anyone else. It's a pretty simple matter of setup and payoff here, because throughout "Game of Thrones," Jon — who joins the Night's Watch in Season 1 and guards the realm from the far North, where the White Walkers and wights reside in the coldest reaches of the land — is the only major character fully aware of the threat posed by the Night King and his army. In fact, none of the other main characters even actually encounter a White Walker or a wight before Jon does (he kills a wight midway through Season 1), and he and the other Men of the Night's Watch are so concerned with the looming danger of a massive undead army that they're completely ignorant to the other characters squabbling over the Iron Throne of Westeros.

The point is that, narratively, Jon should have been the one to kill the Night King, and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' attempt to subvert expectations doesn't really work here. It would be like if, at the end of "Harry Potter," someone like Luna Lovegood killed Voldemort instead of Harry. (Spoilers for "Harry Potter.") Still, Maisie Williams got her big moment — as did Arya — and fans will just have to live with it at this point.

"Game of Thrones" is streaming on Max now.