Season 8 Ep3: Game of Thrones’ Battle of Winterfell, explained - Love Arya

If you found it difficult to follow what was happening throughout the long, action-packed, scene-jumping, and very literally dark Battle of Winterfell, here’s what went down: In the middle of the fight, Arya briefly confronted Melisandre, the Red Witch. It was a hostile encounter; after all, Melisandre was on Arya’s kill list at one point for being mean to her best friend (and eventual love interest), Gendry.

But during this meeting, as Melisandre recounted their previous one years earlier, she pointedly reminded Arya that she’d prophesied that Arya would take many lives, including those of beings with blue eyes. In other words, she seemed to be pointedly suggesting to Arya that Arya use her assassination skills to go after the Night King.

Arya was clearly paying attention, because in the episode’s climactic moment, just as the Night King was about to kill a thoroughly indifferent-seeming Bran Stark, Arya pounced on him out of nowhere and stabbed him with her trusty Valyrian steel dagger. It was the very same dagger that’s been knocking around Game of Thrones since the show began, and one thats has played an important role in both triggering and ending major events throughout the series.

Valyrian steel is one of the few things that can kill a White Walker, and when Arya stabbed the Night King with it — after Bran first conveniently lured him into a weirwood forest similar to the one where the Night King was created centuries earlier — he immediately shattered into pieces. (Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff confirmed during the “Inside the Episode” featurette for “The Long Night” that luring the Night King to the weirwood was crucial to his demise, at least partially confirming a long-held fan theory about how the Night King would be “unmade”.)

This prompted a domino effect throughout his entire army, as they were all destroyed in turn.

But why? Was taking out the Night King’s entire army really that easy?

Turns out, yes.

Love you Arya ....

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/28/18522047/arya-stark-long-night-king-death