Bad writing or fake arya?{spoilers}

[Lady Lyanna Mormont]

I'm hoping there's more to her storyline then her letting her guard down and getting stabbed, makes no sense. Then again, it could be bad writing.

1 minute ago, The Yung Wulf said:

I'm starting to think this too. Either Jaquen or maybe another FM that Jaquen dispatched to test the waif. Now that she failed to kill Arya without making her suffer, she failed the test.... potentially.... hopefully. I really don't want to find out that was actually Arya surviving multiple stabs to the gut.

I like that theory.

[Iona]

Naah, something definitely not right with this scene. The only problem I have with this "someone else was posing as Arya" theory is that I don't think the FM ever got her face. We saw Jaqen skinning a guys face off earlier and making threats, so I'm assuming the FM can only use a face that's been "donated" to them.

[TickTak7]

10 minutes ago, The Yung Wulf said:

I'm starting to think this too. Either Jaquen or maybe another FM that Jaquen dispatched to test the waif. Now that she failed to kill Arya without making her suffer, she failed the test.... potentially.... hopefully. I really don't want to find out that was actually Arya surviving multiple stabs to the gut.

Wut...?

The focal point of this story arc is Arya - why would the viewer care if the FM were testing The Waif? She's literally a secondary character that we have no interest in. 

I can assure you 100% that this wasn't Jaqen, or a focused test on The Waif that didn't include Arya. 

The reason why so much of this arc feels off, is because it's a terribly written arc. 

[throney]

Personally, I think both Arya being careless and Jaqen being Arya as examples of bad writing.

[dtones520]

It's either bad writing or a super crafty move by Arya that we will find out about next week. I just can't see someone surviving those stand to the gut without getting medical attention of the highest quality.

 

but even if Arya was going to let it happen, she had no idea what the waif was going to do. She could have just slit her throat and bye bye to Arya. So it just feels like bad writing all around. Unless that wasn't Arya at all. But who would sacrifice themselves for her like that?

[lakin1013]

If this really was Arya who was stabbed, this was horribly written.  

One possibility - We know Arya put down the second bag of money to the ship captain in order to show she could pay for a cabin.  We know she picked up the second bag and walked away.  This is to provide motivation to the captain that he gets the 2nd bag of money at dawn, when the ship sails. 

Arya puts the bag of gold back into her jacket (doublet? jerkin?).  Maybe the deepest knife thrust went into the bag of money.  Yes, there are superficial stab wounds but the deepest was deflected by the coins.  She could live with the smaller cuts. That is all I got, if in fact it was Arya.

[Trinket2]

I'd say bad writing, considering that bad writing is a common theme in the show.

[Les Météores D]

Soundtrack is another clue. fArya.

[Tagganaro]

Seems like really bad writing as of now...but we'll see if there's another twist coming.  As has been pointed out numerous times and made consistently obvious (either mistakenly if bad writing or purposely if they're crafting it this way), but the Waif seems like a total failure as a FM recruit in similar ways to Arya.  She has failed yet again when Jaqhen told her to make it quick and painless, which this certainly was not.

I have no idea where this is going though.  Very possible it's just bad lazy writing.

[Iona]

7 minutes ago, lakin1013 said:

Arya puts the bag of gold back into her jacket (doublet? jerkin?).  Maybe the deepest knife thrust went into the bag of money.  Yes, there are superficial stab wounds but the deepest was deflected by the coins.  She could live with the smaller cuts. That is all I got, if in fact it was Arya.

I thought about this too at first when the scene was unfolding, but as things went on and I saw how much she was bleeding I sorta gave up on it.

I'm really hoping there's another twist to all of this, not just one from a bloody knife.

[Noveson]

There's definitely something we haven't seen yet.  People really think that she's ditches A GUILD OF ASSASINS and then just walks around in broad daylight making no efffort to hide herself at all?  Seems pretty obvious to me that there's some sort of trickery going on...

[elbucho3]

26 minutes ago, Iona said:

Naah, something definitely not right with this scene. The only problem I have with this "someone else was posing as Arya" theory is that I don't think the FM ever got her face. We saw Jaqen skinning a guys face off earlier and making threats, so I'm assuming the FM can only use a face that's been "donated" to them.

Didn't the FM somehow have Arya's face when she went blind? 

[Future Null Infinity]

Next episode, she will be as good as new, believe in D&D powers

[RoamingRonin]

Who else would it be if it's not Arya?  Are we supposed to believe that Arya was killed off screen and someone else took her place? 

It's quite obvious Arya has been sneaking around stealing coins for a while to afford passage to Westeros. It's been enough time for her to change her attire. This whole time nothing has happened to her. She lets her guard down once and the Waif gets the drop on her. 

Just because you don't understand it or don't like it doesn't make it bad writing. 

[The Yung Wulf]

1 minute ago, RoamingRonin said:

Who else would it be if it's not Arya?  Are we supposed to believe that Arya was killed off screen and someone else took her place? 

It's quite obvious Arya has been sneaking around stealing coins for a while to afford passage to Westeros. It's been enough time for her to change her attire. This whole time nothing has happened to her. She lets her guard down once and the Waif gets the drop on her. 

Just because you don't understand it or don't like it doesn't make it bad writing. 

They have already showed that they are able to use Arya's face when she went through the blindness ordeal.

EDIT: I don't see why they would make a point of that if someone wasn't going to use her face at some point.

[Good Guy Garlan]

Arya spent two years in assassin school getting her MDA (Master of Deadly Arts) degree and she still knows nothing. Seems like everyone I went to college with. 

I'm gonna go with bad writing, unfortunately. At least, the sequence when she's paranoid and looking at everyone's face should've happened before she was attacked. 

[yakisikli123]

I dont think fake Arya or bad writing or a dream but maybe faking stab wounds and blood 

[Bran the Shipper]

I'd go with bad writing, especially since this isn't the first time bad writing has struck Arya's arc this season.  I'm referring to her drinking poison that was supposed to kill her if she wasn't truly no one, and then in the next episode we see that she is still Arya Stark.

In regards to Waif stabbing Arya, if that was Arya she is dying with no chance of survival.  Since the Waif is a trained assassin who specializes in poison (at least she does in the books, maybe the show just has her specialize in beating up new recruits), I find it highly unlikely that those blades wouldn't have been coated with an incurable poison.  Especially since she is under orders to make it painless, though she didn't do that which is weird enough, since she should be no one and have no real vendetta against Arya.  But then the show seems insistent on making the waif seem to hate Arya for no reason, so logic of how the faceless men are supposed to operate has already been thrown out the window.

If that is a fake Arya that doesn't discount bad writing, because we just saw that the Faceless Men get their faces by cutting them off of the dead.  Since Arya has not had her face cut off it is highly unlikely that the Arya who was stabbed wasn't the real Arya.  Maybe she got someone to wear a basic glamour, but that will seem kind of out of nowhere because Arya doesn't seem to know about any type of glamour beyond whatever the faceless men use.  There was that one sequence where she saw her face, but that was after she was suffering from the effects of misusing the faces and thus more likely some type of magical hallucination than actual evidence that the faceless men have her face.

As to why she would just be strutting around with no cares in the world, the Faceless men on multiple occasions told her she was free to leave whenever she wanted.  Yes Jaqen made the comment about how one way or another a face will be added, but that is one time and it had already been drilled into her head that she was free to leave whenever she wanted without repercussions. 

What I don't understand is why the scene wasn't written in almost the same way except not having Arya getting stabbed.  If she immediately suspected that the old woman was the waif and escaped before the stabbing everything would be fine writing wise and no less intense.  Plus then her wandering through the busy streets, suspicious that anyone could be the waif would make sense since she would not be mortally wounded at the time.  It just seems like it was written to be dramatic in that we don't know if Arya is going to die or how she will survive, except that we know she can't die and however she survives won't make sense.  I thought this was a series that wasn't afraid to kill off important characters, but the plot armor is becoming more and more apparent by this point.

[RoamingRonin]

17 minutes ago, The Yung Wulf said:

They have already showed that they are able to use Arya's face when she went through the blindness ordeal.

EDIT: I don't see why they would make a point of that if someone wasn't going to use her face at some point.

This person takes her face and doesn't know that Arya has a hit out on her? What's the purpose? 

[Iona]

26 minutes ago, elbucho3 said:

Didn't the FM somehow have Arya's face when she went blind? 

Can't really remember. But if it is so, then it makes things quite interesting. I seemed to notice the waif pulling off her granny-mask after she attacked Arya. If FM are capable of changing faces without using actual faces then the waif appears to be an amateur.