Game of thrones season 2 episode 8
We don’t necessary need a stake in every fight, but a twig wouldn’t hurt.
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But TV, while a newer medium, is decidedly more old-fashioned than prose. Martin no doubt takes pride in his calloused version of epic storytelling, ripe with ambiguity and laced with more bluster about moral equivalency than a freshman seminar on colonialism. But it’s another thing entirely after we’ve seen her walk untroubled through the hanging corpses she’s indirectly responsible for, the bodies of ignorant innocents swinging in the breeze like steers in a meat locker. Arya is easy to love when she’s a Muppet-eyed charity case, a step away from having a rodent bucket strapped to her scrawny chest or, worse, forced to listen to her chubby pal’s pie-in-the-sky palaver about dessert. Not only are we privy to the hidden fears and failings of ostensibly rotten players like Tywin and Cersei Lannister - thus humanizing their otherwise unconscionable behavior - showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss are also dead set on demonstrating the fatal cost of nearly every action taken by the people we actually do like. Rather that settling on the viewpoint of a central, sympathetic hero - we lost that privilege when Ned’s neck got nicked - the show has instead done something radical, giving us multiple main characters and, in the process, cursing us with the gift of perspective. Still, a great deal of the second season of Game of Thrones has seemed intent on trying to convince us otherwise.
![game of thrones season 2 episode 8 game of thrones season 2 episode 8](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/06/08/10/arya.jpeg)
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Whether you ask the president of the Seinfeld fan club or a wahoo in the cheap seats of a Kansas City Royals game, you’ll get the same answer: It’s hard to root for nothing.