You Might Think You Want An Arya Stark 'Game Of Thrones' Spin-Off, But You're Wrong
Now that Game of Thrones is over attention turns to how the production of those promised prequels are juddering along, but with Arya planning to set sail for "west of Westeros" there's a bit of a frisson around the idea of her carrying a post-Thrones sequel series on her own.
In an Instagram video, Maisie Williams' co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau threw his weight behind the idea. "I know they're doing all these prequels, but what about the sequel?," he said. "With Arya? How about - I'm just throwing something out here - how about a petition? An online petition to HBO that they do a sequel with Arya Stark."
Whether or not you buy the idea that Arya's gap year journey to find the Thai Full Moon Party beyond the seas is the sort of thing a person would do having just been reunited properly with her family after years of questing and murdering, it's admittedly a pretty delicious set-up for a spin-off. Arya's great, there's a big old world out there, and nobody knows quite what's in that unexplored land. You could do anything with it.
Let's not get our hopes up though. You might remember that the last time Williams looked like she was in line for a spin-off from a long-running fantasy property - she was in Doctor Who a few years back, and her recurring character ended up spinning off into space in a TARDIS which looked like an American diner - it ended up very conspicuously not happening.
But let's just say you get what you want, and it does happen. The weight of expectation would obviously be huge. Obviously, a Game of Thrones spin-off would be judged against Game of Thrones itself, unfair as that might be. You've also got to ask yourself why you want it, and what you'd want from it.
Arguably the more stifling presupposition loaded onto a sequel series would be that it would have to knit up with the rest of the mythos, with fans hoping that it would retrospectively sew up every hanging thread from the original series and give their particular favourite characters a happy ending.
What happened to Drogon? Do the prophecies still hold? Is Nymeria the direwolf still knocking about? How does Tyrion's joke about the honeycomb and the ass go? On and on and on it'd go, and that'd be an intensely difficult atmosphere for a spin-off to try to create its own feel, look and rhythms within.
Many fans would likely want an extended Game of Thrones universe, but to stand a chance of succeeding on its own terms it couldn't be an immediate follow-on, a 2 Game 2 Thrones. It might be easier if we let the dust settle and met Arya a few years down the line, perhaps, but running straight on from Thrones without any of its characters and locations but an umbilical link back to the series in its protagonist could end up smothering it.
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