She too was motivated by revenge, but chose to join the “Faceless Men” – a religious cult of assassins serving the Many-Faced God.
In some respects, Arya Stark fares well by comparison.
But compelling sexual attraction for both men and women still clearly played a major part in her portrayal.
LOTR TWO TOWERS 3.03 BOOK TO SCRIPT SERIES
Possibly the most interesting portrayal came from the BBC’s recent series starring Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh, Killing Eve, which featured Villanelle as a psychopathic yet also charismatic character who clearly enjoyed her work. They’ve been brutalised into acting against their feminine nature yet are also emotionally vulnerable and sexually attractive. Recent depictions such as Nikita, the “Bride” from Tarantino’s Kill Bill trilogy, or Black Widow of the Avengers present sympathetic characters who are assassins by default. Powerful and aggressive female assassins loom much larger in modern media culture, but these again tend to be highly sexualised characters. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, Rome Both acts involved seduction, deception and killing a victim while they slept, thereby conforming to the ideas which made physical violence “unsuitable” for women. Women were more likely to be accused of attempting murder via less direct methods viewed as suitable to their gender – poisoning, as in the case of Lucretia Borgia – or even witchcraft, as happened to Joan of Arc when the English were looking for an excuse to burn her for taking up arms against them.īiblical parallels could be drawn with women who employed their femininity to commit “justified” murder, such as Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes or Jael – who killed Sisera, the Canaanite general, with a tent peg. When women were accused of involvement in targeted murder during this period, their crimes seldom involved engaging in physical violence personally. Political murder was certainly not new, but devoting oneself to it as a vocation is usually associated with the development of the Nizari sect led by Hasan-i Sabbah in the early 12th century, later referred to as “assassins”. The idea of women acting as trained assassins was not a prevalent one in the medieval period. There are also many who expressed disappointment that Jon Snow – the male hero – wasn’t given the chance to face off against the zombie leader of the undead hordes.īut Arya’s role in this scene challenged convention, as all good fiction surely should.įrom a historian’s perspective, Arya’s transition from rebellious teen girl to implacable assassin inevitably provokes reflection on the representation of women who committed violent acts in the past – and the origins of very strongly gendered ideas which persist about them. But having survived seven series in which she honed her skills as a killer, this is surely absurd. Some fans referred to her as a “Mary Sue” – an idealised female character, a fiction within a fiction, who appears as a device to fulfil a plot line – on social media the day after episode three. The climactic ending to the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, in which Arya Stark appears in the very nick of time to perform an admirably gymnastic assassination of the Night King, just as he is about to bring an end to the world of humans, has set the internet buzzing both with delighted and disgruntled fans. Warning: this article contains spoilers about Game of Thrones, series eight, episode three…
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