Dance with Death: Interpreting the symbolism of Arya and the pale horse

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But, you say, we see Arya walking around in the trailer for “Episode 806.” She’s alive! I can’t argue with that, and there is certainly a logical explanation for it: like Arya, Harry Strickland’s horse was knocked senseless but survived. Injured, disoriented and suffering from shock, it regained its footing and struggled through the skeleton-filled ruins until it found another living creature: Arya. The horse and Arya immediately bonded and made their escape out of the city of the dead.

It works. I’m okay with that. But it also means the showrunners played us like a violin, making sure we saw Strickland’s horse go down, then used the same animal plus a truckload of ancient, ambiguous, subconscious-stirring, death symbolism to mislead us.

In this scenario, the ancient, mythic symbols — the pale horse, the pale rider, the hellscape and the roasted hand clutching the toy horse — they were simply impactful visual tools employed to reinforce the viewers’ experience of the death and destruction wrought by Daenerys. Fair enough. it was all fantastically cool. And I don’t want Arya to die, anyway.

Of course, this sequence is such a collision of mythic allusions and metaphors that you can easily interpret it almost any way you want. Arya might be dead: I have offered you my theory and offered my arguments to support it. The most likely outcome is that Arya and the horse are very alive, their ashen aspect signifying them as agents of death, and that they’re heading for Daenerys.

"“You tell ’em I’m comin’, and hell is coming with me!” (Kurt Russell, as Wyatt Earp in Tombstone)"

Yet, what if Arya is dead? If this is true, and her appearance in “Episode 806” is actually the wandering of her ghost or a newly Red-God-resurrected warrior, then Arya’s passing is the most cinematically stunning, magical and symbolically powerful death ever seen on Game of Thrones.

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