Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams revealed that she believed Arya Stark was queer for much of the HBO fantasy series' eight-season run.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Williams recalled her shock upon reading the script for Season 8, Episode 2, "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," in which Arya has sex with a male character. "The first time that I was surprised by Arya I guess was probably in the final [season] where she whips off her clothes and sleeps with Gendry [chuckles]," she said. "I thought that Arya was queer, you know? So… yeah. That was a surprise."

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Williams has previously described how she came to resent playing Arya Stark, a role she first stepped into when she was only 12 years old. "I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn't express who I was becoming... And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated," she said. Despite this, Williams insists she's very proud to have been part of the show and considers it the greatest thing to happen in her life.

Arya's sexuality was just one of several developments that made Game of Thrones' final season so controversial. Author George R.R. Martin, who penned the A Song of Ice and Fire novels the show is based on, recently commented on the intense fan backlash against Season 8, which he labeled "toxic." "I don’t understand how people can come to hate so much something that they once loved. If you don’t like a show, don’t watch it!" he said.

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Martin also opened up about how painful it was for him to write the infamous Red Wedding chapter in the third novel, A Storm of Swords, which was later adapted in Game of Thrones episode "The Rains of Castamere." The scribe explained that having to kill off characters he had come to love such as Robb and Catelyn Stark was incredibly challenging. Martin further noted that the Red Wedding chapter and its live-action adaptation tend to upset people, which he believes is an appropriate reaction to the brutal events they both depict.

The author went on to compare the Red Wedding to the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars: A New Hope, arguing that the former is more effective than the latter. "In the very first Star Wars movie they blow up the entire planet of Alderaan, which has, like, 20 billion people on it, and they’re all dead," Martin said. "But you know what? Nobody cares. Everybody on Alderaan is dead. Oh, OK. But we don’t know the people on Alderaan. We don’t feel their deaths. It’s just a statistic. If you’re going to write about death, you should feel it."

All eight seasons of Game of Thrones are available to stream now on HBO Max.

Source: Teen Vogue