The Curious Case of Arya's Face

This post does contain spoilers for the final episode of Game of Thrones season 5, and for the fifth A Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Dance with Dragons. You’ve been forewarned!

Masks of the Faceless Men

So, readers of ancient tomes, watchers on the wall, and people who ignore spoilers or don’t care about GoT/ASoI&F being spoiled, here we are.

I noticed something curious in the season 5 finale of Game of Thrones that did not fit with the books. I am well aware season 5, which was based primarily on George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, diverged a lot from the source material. It worked, because the story is going in the same general direction, but things needed to be altered to turn two approximately 1,000 page books into a 10 hour television season.

I won’t get into details about everything that was changed. That has probably been covered in other blogs. However, I haven’t seen any discussion of this one bit I’m thinking about. It’s probably out there, but I’m going to share my views on it anyway.

Okay, the writing should be beneath the fold (bottom of the webpage now), so anyone who really didn’t want to read spoilers should be gone!

We know the Faceless Men both subscribe to the religion of the Many Faced God, which says that all the gods of Westeros and beyond are just aspects of one, the god of death. They see death as a sacrament. People who are suffering and want to commit suicide go to the House of Black and White, the base of the Faceless Men in Braavos, and drink poisoned water that kills them painlessly. Another part of the sacrament is actual murder, but with strict rules, and is considered a mercy. It’s no surprise that the Faceless Men are also the most effective assassins in the world.

Their central ability is to be able to change the appearance of their faces and bodies to look like completely different people. In both the books and the show, there is a room in the House of Black and White referred to as the Hall of Faces containing the cured faces of those who committed suicide there. These are the masks the Faceless Men use to magically change their appearance.

Faces in ASoI&F vs. Faces in GoT

So, we know that the Faceless Men change their appearance by using the cured faces of those who died in the House of Black and White. The way this works differs in the books and on the show.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, when Arya Stark, Faceless (Wo)man in training, is ready for her first assassination assignment, her mentor takes her into the Hall of Faces, selects athe face of a girl from the wall, and puts it over her face. He then cuts a line across her forehead. Blood pours onto the mask and Arya starts experiencing visions of the horrible abuse this girl went through. The Faceless Man tells her that this is part of the process and to bear with it. In the end, Arya looks like the girl, with a damaged face and missing teeth. However, when she feels her own face, it feels like hers. It’s an illusion, probably using blood magic, which is among the most powerful in the world.

The cured face is no longer a physical reality, but is now part of Arya, and she can switch between her face and the mask at will.

In season 5, episode 10 of Game of Thrones, Arya “borrows” a face from the hall so that she can kill one of the people on her kill list, who happens to be in Braavos. After doing the deed, she returns the face to the hall, where her mentor, Jaqen H’ghar, and his assistant confront Arya about her deception; she has killed someone the Faceless Men were not hired to kill, and therefore went against the Many Faced God. Jaqen says that “only a life may pay for a life,” and kills himself by drinking the poisoned water. (Incidentally, Jaqen isn’t Arya’s mentor in the novels. So far as we know, Jaqen is elsewhere, among the maesters.)

Then another Jaqen comes out of the shadows to tell Arya that the man who just died is no one. (Each of the Faceless Men considers himself to be “no one.”) Arya pulls a Jaqen mask off the dead man to reveal a different face, and keeps pulling off masks, revealing other faces.

At this point, we see that any Faceless Man can use any mask from the gallery. As Arya pulls off mask after mask, the faces change from male to female and back.

In the books, it’s one mask per person, and that particular face is bound to the Faceless Man. On the show, a Faceless Man can use a mask and return it, so any one of them can use the same mask later.

So, how are there two Jaqens? One possible explanation is that the faces came from identical twins who committed suicide in the House of Black and White.

However, the last mask that Arya uncovers is her own face!

How is that possible? Arya didn’t have a twin, and she’s still alive, which means that the Faceless Men couldn’t have cured her face to make a mask out of it. The writers seem to have set up certain rules and then thought it would be fun to pull a “Luke Skywalker in the Dagobah tree” moment. Perhaps they wanted to foreshadow Arya’s death (I hope not!), or that Arya will indeed become “no one,” death of her ego.

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is this. As Arya pulls off the faces, she starts going blind and, rightfully so, starts to freak out about it. (Her blindness takes place at a different time in the books, but readers of ASoI&F know reasonably what to expect the outcome of that to be.) My guess is that the last face wasn’t hers, but she perceived it as her face, probably by a combination of the blindness and Faceless Men magic to teach her a lesson.

Still, it’s curious, isn’t it?

What do you think about Arya’s face being on the body, or for that matter, the two Jaqens? How do you feel about the TV writers changing how the Faceless Men use the cured faces? Let me know in the comments below!