We got a lot of long-awaited reunions in the Season 8 premiere of Game of Thrones. Characters who haven’t seen each other in years, or at least a few seasons, met back up again. Sometimes those reunions were happy ones, while others were decidedly less so (Jaime locking eyes with Bran was a bit chilling). Arya and Gendry seeing each other in the premiere for the first time since Season 2 fell into the first category.
The meeting between the two friends finds both having changed significantly. Arya is now a consummate fighter and assassin with the power of the Faceless Men, while Gendry is also pretty decent with that big hammer of his. When they meet again, though, what Arya is interested in his Gendry’s capabilities as a blacksmith–which we’ve seen are pretty significant.
When Arya finds Gendry at Winterfell, she slips him a piece of paper, requesting he make something for her. The diagram is hard to parse, since it’s not especially detailed, but we can tell that Arya is asking Gendry to forge her a special dragonglass weapon, separate from the many swords and arrowheads he’s been making in preparation for the battle with the White Walkers. It looks like something special, and could hint at the fact that Arya will be a big part of the battle for Winterfell we know is coming this season.
The diagram itself doesn’t look like any specific weapon we’ve seen before, nor is it seemingly a callback to some other major weapon from the show’s history. But it looks specific to Arya’s skills, and her comment to Jon Snow about his sword Longclaw likely suggests why she’d want it–a full-size sword (or battle axe, like the Hound requested) is too heavy for Arya. Her skill comes from her speed with weapons like her sword Needle, and for fighting White Walkers, she’ll need something similarly appropriate.
The weapon itself seems to resemble a spear that comes apart in the middle, with at least one dragonglass blade at the end. It’s tough to see what the other end of the weapon actually is, whether another spear tip, a grip, or something else. But if we go into Arya’s history, we can make some educated guesses about how she’ll be using it.
Arya’s first combat training, other than what she might have learned from Jon Snow and Robb Stark at Winterfell, was from Syrio Forel in King’s Landing. The First Sword of Braavos emphasized fast, one-handed sword combat–Water Dancing, as he called it. We saw Arya use that style most recently when she sparred with Brienne of Tarth at Winterfell in Season 7, and she was able to stand up to one of the best broadsword fighters in Westeros during that fight.
The other combat talent Arya has is what she learned in Braavos at the House of Black and White. There she trained with the Waif, who repeatedly walloped Arya with a wooden staff. Even blind, Arya eventually learned enough to stand against the Waif, as well.
So a dragonglass-tipped staff that can also function as a pair of one-handed swords sounds right up Arya’s alley, allowing her to shift styles depending on the situation.
It’s possible Arya’s weapon is something else–the tease for Episode 2 showed Arya firing a bow, something we know she was also skilled at even as a child. It’s possible she’s requested special arrows (or even a spear) that could detach its head, but the idea of taking a spear apart and fastening on a new spearhead seems unnecessary. Every time we’ve seen White Walkers or wights killed with dragonglass or Valyrian steel, their death has been instantaneous. The White Walker Jon killed with Longclaw literally shattered. So it doesn’t seem that a spearhead is going to get stuck in an enemy, requiring Arya to detach and replace it.
Thomas Dunne, the show’s weapons master, hinted to Vanity Fair that Arya’s new weapon is “a showstopper.” It seems we’ll be waiting to see Arya bring that weapon to bear against the army of the dead before we know exactly what it is, though.
