Arya Stark had sex. Plainly speaking, that shouldn’t be a point of contention for anyone. An 18-year-old woman, Arya has been on her own since she was 11 years old, survived countless kidnappings, escaped death more than once, and even learned to become absolutely No One. She is deadly, proving time and time again she’s not one to be messed with, eliminating her enemies and those who threaten her family without thinking twice. And, yet, a young woman wanting to consensually experience coitus has Game of Thrones fans heated. Since the second episode of the final season of Game of Thrones aired, the Internet has been ablaze with critics of the sultry scene. Some have blasted showrunners for sexualizing Arya, while others have lamented the use of sex as a way to prove the youngest living Stark is no longer a child. While it’s true that character development can be written in a number of ways that doesn’t include “losing virginity” as proof of adulthood, Arya’s decision to have sex is one that should be respected, not chastised — especially when it’s one of few examples of consensual sex on the show. In the same episode that Arya has sex, Ser Brienne of Tarth reveals she was once captured and nearly raped. Arya’s own sister, Sansa, was repeatedly abused by her husband, Ramsay Bolton, for a majority of the fifth season. Iron Throne contender and dragon mother Daenerys Targaryen was also raped by her husband, Khal Drogo, early on in her story arc. Arya’s first time having sex was one of the rare occasions that female-focused pleasure has been at the forefront of the show, and one of the few times sex wasn’t used as a weapon. With so many of the show’s powerful women surviving rape attempts and suffering at the hands of abusers throughout the eight seasons, we should be celebrating Arya’s sexual agency, not questioning it. But beyond the scene’s powerful impact, it’s hard to understand exactly why fans are so shook by Arya having sex. We’ve watched as Samwell Tarly and Gilly had sex on a boat despite his vows of chastity, and audiences didn’t flinch when Jon Snow and his aunt enjoyed a rendezvous in an isolated, snow-covered land while the Targaryen dragons watched. Apparently breaking sacred vows and incest are perfectly acceptable forms of sexual expression, but a young woman wanting to have sex before a life-threatening battle is a no-go. It turns out, fans of the show seem to be more okay with the same character murdering the sons of Walder Frey, baking them into pies, and serving them to their father before slitting his throat than Arya having sex. Arya’s choice here can make you uncomfortable, but the fact of the matter is, teenage girls have sex and that’s perfectly OK. They have agency over their own bodies and can make the decision to have sex — if that’s what they would like to do. Despite what some critics have said, Arya isn’t prioritizing a romance in the midst of a battle, she’s trying to reclaim some sense of normalcy that was stripped from her the moment her father was beheaded in season one. In fact, her sex scene with Gendry humanized her, reminding us that, after all she’s been through, she’s still a teenage girl looking to explore her sexuality. If Arya Stark wants to cross sex off her bucket list ahead of the presumably bloody Battle of Winterfell, let her. Besides, it’s about damn time showrunners gave the baby Stark a storyline that didn’t involve a gruesome murder. Related: Maisie Williams Reveals She's Part of the BTS ARMY<doc-sep>“Hang on—how old is Arya Stark?” Is a question you might have asked yourself Sunday night, when the teenage assassin played by Maisie Williams jumped the bones of noted Westeros hottie Gendry (Joe Dempsie) on what might be the last night of their lives. In every other way, this story is kind of classic. Two people who have been staring at each other for a few seasons finally getting it on when their fear of losing each other overrides everything else—that’s TV Drama 101. Change the setting a bit, and it’s an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s great to see Arya getting hers, if this is what she wants, and certainly she deserves some happiness where she can find it. But still, for a large subset of the population, there’s something that sticks out about this scene. Game of Thrones has played fast and loose with time and space, and Arya’s age specifically. In the George R.R. Martin books, the story begins when the character is just nine years old, and she’s barely aged over the course of five novels. (It’s much easier to make time move slowly when child actors aren’t growing like weeds in front of your eyes.) On the show, Arya was aged up to 11 for the first season; thanks to Williams’s gamine face, she’s plausibly seemed to be a young teenager ever since. Especially in recent seasons, the way this show has measured the passage of years has been . . . convenient. Initially, the show was painstakingly careful to create a realistic sense of time for the viewer—remember how long it took the Starks to get to King’s Landing? As it’s outpaced the books and been forced to plot its own journey, those fine details have given way. Take, for instance, Gilly’s baby, living proof of the show’s confusing timeline: Little Sam was born in Season 3, but still appears to be a babe in arms as of Season 8—maybe a toddler, at most. “Obviously, the passage of time is murky on the show for lots of reasons,” veteran Thrones producer (and this episode’s writer) Bryan Cogman conceded in a conversation with V.F.’s Still Watching podcast on Monday. “Obviously, Tommen grew up really fast.” (The eventual boy king was first played by child actor Callum Wharry; from Season 4 until the character’s death, he was played by the older Dean-Charles Chapman.) Perhaps because everything has grown so confusing, the characters have stopped specifically defining their ages—though hours before Sunday’s episode aired, an HBO Twitter account tweeted a joke that indicated Arya is officially 18 now. That makes her just old enough to consent to sex without anyone making a fuss about it. But there’s a huge difference between announcing, via tweet, that a character has reached the age of maturity and writing a character arc over eight seasons that makes this maturity obvious. What’s most perplexing here is that while Arya has murdered, spied, escaped, and infiltrated—with the unnerving, cold heart of an assassin—we’ve never actually seen her go through the oft-wrenching process of female-bodied puberty. She’s never spoken about menstruation, or her changing body, or her new, weird feelings. Many viewers don’t see the character as an adult woman because the show hasn’t given us the arc of a preteen or pubescent girl, though it has given us similar story lines via Sansa—who, to her dismay, got her period for the first time in Season 2—and Ygritte, who in Season 3 proved her mettle to Jon Snow by pointing out that “girls see more blood than boys.” Puberty is, of course, a crucially transformative time for girls—and it comes with a host of negative side effects. In the non-fantasy realm, it corresponds to plummeting self-confidence; the mechanics of menstruation can force some girls out of physical activities they once enjoyed, one week out of every four. Nearly every other female character on Game of Thrones has been defined by such an experience; two of the show’s youngest female characters, Sansa and Dany, were both forced into marriage at a precocious age precisely because they were deemed to be post-pubescent. Arguably, Arya’s violent initiation into adulthood replaced puberty for her; her time in Braavos seemed to be a coming-of-age, albeit a meandering one. If anything, though, that points to even more dissonance between what Arya used to be and where the show has put her. Arya’s defining story for the last several years has hinged upon how deeply inhumane she has become, a killer intent only on finding her marks. That Season 7 interlude with Nymeria (remember Nymeria?) and the period of time where she gave up her own name indicated a lot of internal anguish, the sort that naturally follows after watching one’s own father being beheaded, then coming achingly close to reuniting with one’s mother and brother before they were killed, too. I wonder where all those feelings have gone, now that Arya’s back at Winterfell; certainly, if she’s trying to get close to someone she cares about on the last night of her life, you’d think that some of them would come spilling out. Yet Arya is eerily calm and controlled about sex with Gendry. In its own way, this might be an interesting take on compulsive, risky behavior from traumatized individuals—Arya’s always been eager to prove herself. Then again, based on V.F.’s interview with Cogman, Arya and Gendry’s sex scene was simply supposed to be about hormones. “Teenagers have sex,” he said. “She’s not a kid anymore.”<doc-sep>It's a coupling viewers have been rooting for since the early seasons Game of Thrones Fans Can't Get Over Arya Stark's Sex Scene Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones showed how every character in Winterfell spent the night before next week’s battle against the White Walkers — and Arya Stark certainly blew off some steam. Arya (played by Maisie Williams, 22) lost her virginity to longtime crush Gendry after he forged her custom dragonglass weapon. Talk about foreplay. Get push notifications with news, features and more. Demanding to know if he’d slept with the Red Woman, she asked for details of his sexual history since they’d parted ways as children in season 3. Game of Thrones Gendry and Arya | Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO “We’re going to die soon. I’d like to know what it’s like before that happens,” she said bluntly before grabbing his face and kissing him. Later, the camera panned to them lying in bed together as the dead arrived. It’s a pairing fans have been rooting for for years, especially given how their union would unite the Stark and Baratheon houses as their fathers had once hoped: Gendry is the bastard of late King Robert. Some people were shocked to see Arya (who they’ve watched grow up) strip down on-screen. Of course, that’s part of life, and it was super empowering to see this bad-ass character embracing her sexuality before (hopefully) saving the world. RELATED: See the Game of Thrones Cast: Then & Now maisie-williams Credit: Shutterstock (2)<doc-sep>“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the second episode of Game of Thrones’ eighth season, was a mostly fun and enjoyable piece of table-setting and fan service, a moment of harmonious stillness before the impending battle against the White Walkers begins. But it also provoked a bit of unexpected debate, thanks to Arya Stark’s decision to lose her virginity to her longtime best friend Gendry, in a scene where she declares her intention to have sex before she dies and enlists him as her partner, much to his delight. Many fans supported Arya taking control over her sex life, lauding Game of Thrones’ approach to consensual young adult sex and expressing happiness that Arya/Gendry, a popular fandom ship, had finally come to pass. But others weren’t so comfortable with sexualizing a character who’d started out on the show as a child. The ensuing conversation canvassed a lot of ground, covering everything from Game of Thrones’ characterization and pacing issues to cultural expectations about the way we sexualize young women. Ultimately, however, the reactions seemed to reveal more about the complicated, contradictory ways that viewers have reacted to Game of Thrones’ frequent depiction of sex — as well as a failure to understand how this particular sex scene fits within Arya’s overall character arc. Arya’s sex scene is fully consensual and reflects her character’s proactive, confrontational approach to life Though we met Arya when she was still just a small girl — she was canonically 11 in season one — Arya is now 18 years old in the show’s universe. (Maisie Williams, the actor who plays Arya, is currently 22.) For perspective, Daenerys Targaryen was somewhere between 15 and 17 at the start of Game of Thrones’ first season, when she was married off by her brother to Khal Drogo without her consent and raped on her wedding night. By contrast, Arya’s scene is fully consensual; she initiates the encounter and makes it clear to Gendry that she wants to experience sex before she dies, in the classic vein of countless teens facing impending death by apocalypse. Arya’s sex scene reflected her character in a number of ways. Because she’s one of the characters we’ve watched literally grow up on Game of Thrones, she’s also one of the characters who’s evolved the most over time. We’ve watched her go from being a rambunctious, spoiled tomboy to an outcast, disguised as a boy and struggling to survive, after a series of political events tore her family apart. After that, she channeled her love of swordfighting into a quest for vengeance, famously illustrated by her ritual of falling asleep every night by reciting all the names on her kill list. Arya has largely been an active player who’s able to fight, defend herself, and outwit much bigger and tougher opponents. (In the books on which Game of Throne is based, one of her nicknames is Arya Underfoot, a moniker that indicates her tendency to literally slide between the legs of opponents and beneath obstacles that are larger than she is.) Now, as an adult who’s crossed off several names on her list — frequently in horrifically violent and sadistic ways — she seems to have learned to relax a bit and focus on supporting and protecting her family instead of automatically exacting bloody revenge on every enemy she runs across. But she’s still completely in charge of her own actions. The scene in which she proposes to have sex with Gendry is true to Arya’s character in this regard: After a few scenes in which she openly flirted with him — by teasing him about his weapon-making ability and sharing banter-laced callbacks with him to their very first interactions in season two — she goes to him, proceeds to disrobe, and informs him that she wants to know what sex is like before they both die (probably soon, sob). She’s straightforward and direct, and she stays in control the whole time. (She even tops.) In this sense, it’s one of Game of Thrones better sex scenes, entirely about her character rather than objectifying her for the viewer. Viewers, however, were still weirded out. The scene provoked complicated responses from viewers who watched her grow up onscreen Fans of Game of Thrones had lots of mixed feelings about this development, and many were quick to express those feelings on social media. Some were supportive of Arya getting to have sex like any other young adult — especially with the guy many of them had shipped her with for several seasons: Us finally watching Arya and Gendry get together #GameofThronespic.twitter.com/wmdtjE06SL — Teddy (@_yoTeddy) April 22, 2019 Thanks Arya, excited to finally see myself* in media *someone who propositioned the first person she had sex with with "I wanna have sex before I go to college, you wanna do it?" — Jaya Saxena (@jayasax) April 22, 2019 Others were uncomfortable, because they had watched Arya grow up onscreen, after all, and it was disturbing to suddenly see her in this light: When you’ve been waiting for Gendry and Arya to get together for 4 seasons and it finally happens, but then they start getting naked.... pic.twitter.com/KUqJpfrqIc — Josh Clark (@jsc8892) April 22, 2019 Some pointed out that her sexual awakening seemed out of the blue: Arya has *never* shown even the slightest inkling of being interested in sex; yes, she was into Gendry, but in a schoolgirl crush/friend kind of way. To go from that to, “Hey I might die tomorrow let’s bone” feels... very off. — Lux Alptraum (@LuxAlptraum) April 22, 2019 And some also pointed out that Arya’s life experiences up to this point have undoubtedly left her traumatized, noting that it’s not necessarily great for her to be having sex in that state: she's not OKAY, about her body or control or intimacy, but the ep appeared to gloss the not-okayness of the sex — sonia_saraiya (@soniasaraiya) April 22, 2019 Meanwhile, plenty of people observed that a lot of the hysteria over Arya having sex smacked of hypocrisy and sexism.<doc-sep>
Editor’s Note: Holly Thomas is a British writer and editor based in London. She tweets @HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN. (CNN) — A sex scene on “Game of Thrones” doesn’t normally constitute news. Sex is practically punctuation for the HBO series – more noticeable in its absence than its presence. But this week’s episode, which saw Arya Stark – played by 22-year-old Maisie Williams – do the deed for the first time with her long-time crush Gendry, has invited some extra attention. In the scene, Arya first asks Gendry about his sexual experience (he’s had sex with three women), then expresses her desire to have sex. She kisses him, takes his top off, pushes him onto some kind of sack, then orders him to “take your own bloody pants off.” It’s a powerful and refreshing piece of character development for Arya, but – judging by the reaction of many viewers – it also bears the weight of gendered expectations around virginity and sex on-screen, which we would do well to be rid of. Holly Thomas Holly Thomas Some found it uncomfortable to see the former child character, who we first met in Season One at age 11, give such a visceral demonstration of her new maturity. Others celebrated seeing Arya assume agency in a show which habitually objectifies young women, uses their bodies as political currency and often deploys sex as a weapon against them. And still others expressed surprise that the keen assassin even wanted to have sex at all – isn’t she satisfied by all that killing she seems to enjoy so much? Arya, HBO assures us, is now 18. She’s spent most of her time in Westeros until now taking brattish, bloody vengeance on her enemies. Were she male, the audience might assume that a virile young warrior would want to kick back and indulge between executions. It shouldn’t be surprising that Arya can contain more than one urge in her human body. But as even Williams pointed out in an interview about the episode, much of the value of this scene was in proving her humanity – “an emotion we’ve never really seen her engage with.” Though she had obviously grown into a young woman before our eyes, her sexual desire wasn’t a given. Arya’s latest escapade is nevertheless a welcome step in the right direction. Historically, for blockbuster films and TV shows – including “Game of Thrones” – straight (and usually white) men losing their virginity has been framed as a heroic high-five with adulthood. For straight women, it’s often been a nerve-wracking rite of passage, which regularly sees them submit to male “expertise” during their “first time.” “Titanic’s” Rose DeWitt Bukater, “Twilight’s” Bella Swan, “Gossip Girl’s” Blair Waldorf, half the cast of “Cruel Intentions” and so many more millennial role models were shown the way by “worldlier” male counterparts. Even Daenerys Targaryen’s initial discovery of her sexual power – after losing her virginity through rape in season one of “Game of Thrones” – is made by way of learning to please the husband who raped her. In getting on top of Gendry, Arya bucked the trend of showing deference to a sexual partner – and also dispensed with that ton of sexual anxiety we’re trained to expect from young women. The sense of jeopardy around the “first time,” which for male characters is normally couched in immediate terms of performing well, is often portrayed as more profound for women and girls. The loss of virginity is rarely as simple as “having sex for the first time.” Virginity is too often understood in heterosexual terms – and for people in female bodies, penetrative sex with a man is often seen as the definitive means by which virginity is “lost” and a new womanhood “gained.” On-screen, this often comes at a price. In “Juno,” the film’s 16-year-old namesake gets pregnant the first time she has sex. On TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Buffy’s boyfriend Angel loses his soul, and kills several of her friends, after she sleeps with him in Season Two. In the “Twilight” series, Bella’s vampire boyfriend Edward makes it clear that there’s a high probability he’ll get over-excited and eat her if they get too intimate.