Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams Comments On Shorter Season 7

Arya Stark spent the last few seasons of Game of Thrones by her lonesome in her solitary venture to “find herself.” While most of her character arc didn’t seem that important to the central storyline, it did help her by way of self-discovery. By the end of season 6, Arya finally decided that she wasn’t “no one,” and that she was indeed a member of the Stark family as she slit Walder Frey’s throat in a moment of pure vengeance. Much to our surprise, Arya Stark hadfinally returned, but she still didn’t get the chance to reunite with Jon and Sansa.

With the official news that Game of Thrones is coming to an end sooner than we had expected, we’re starting to wonder how much we will be seeing of the new and improved Arya in season 7. Fans are biting at the bit to see her reunite with her beloved big brother (also cousin) and sister and learn of her true lineage. You know, so the Starks can RISE AGAIN and take the Iron Throne.

In a recent interview with Variety, Maisie Williams, who’s currently nominated for an Emmy for her role as Arya Stark, spoke about having a shorter season:

“It sucks for the audience because they love the episodes, but what we’ll never do on this show is drag it out, and I’m so thrilled about that. Too many shows start out about making a great show, and by Season 6 it’s about making money and all they want to do is write more episodes and make more money. This show makes a lot of money, and it would be easy for HBO to be like “we’re gonna do four more seasons and we’re gonna extend them to 12 episodes.” I really respect David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] for holding their ground and for HBO to be like “no… we’re gonna tell this story and we’re gonna end it and that’ll be final.”

Why, yes Maisie it does suck for the audience! While we see your point on series that have grown tired due to too many seasons, Game of Thrones still has plenty of storytelling to do based on the source material alone.

She went onto explain that all good things must come to an end:

“Good things must come to an end or they’re not good anymore. It doesn’t last forever and we’ve done what we came to do, it’s time to wrap this up, and it will have the ending it was always supposed to have, and that’s very special. David and Dan started writing this show knowing the end, not knowing that it might actually come around and we might be allowed to make that many [seasons] — at the beginning we were just willing to make one [season]. They started this with an end in sight, and so it’s exciting to be closing it… I’m just excited to see everyone again – we start a lot later this year because winter has arrived, so that can’t happen in sunny Belfast.”

Now we just have to wait and see if Game of Thrones ends how we all want it to, or if the showrunners decided to rip out our hearts and stomp on them once more. They did spoil us a bit too much last season with the happy endings like when Jon and Sansa hugged or when Ramsey’s rabid hounds ate his evil little face off.