Most assume Taylor Swift’s vengeful new single “Look What You Made Me Do” is about her long-standing feud with Kanye West, but is there another possibility? Could it actually be about Arya Stark?
While there is no hard evidence or an admission from Swift’s side, Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd made the connection, positing what is perhaps the most outrageous “Game of Thrones” fan theory to date.
Hibberd provides a surprising amount of evidence that the song was written from Arya’s point of view. Parsing the Right Said Fred-referencing single’s lyrics, he points to a number of lines that could connect back to the youngest Stark daughter.
Swift’s sing-spoken chorus, in which she repeats variations of the song’s title, “could be seen as a summation of Arya’s entire storyline,” he argues.
Indeed, Arya’s seven-season long quest for revenge has been fueled by the injustices committed against her and her family by others. So it could be argued that as Arya systematically murders every person who’s wronged her, they actually made her do it by executing her father, slaughtering her family, selling her friend to a witch, etc.
The other most convincing piece of evidence is Swift’s reference to a “list of names” with one underlined in red. Arya famously keeps a list of people she plans to kill, which she recites every night before bed.
A number of other menacing lines from the song could also apply to the noble preteen-turned- heartless assassin, including “I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time,” “I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me” and “Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.”
Then there are the connections that are a bit more of a stretch, but could be interpreted as “Game of Thrones” references if you squint and turn your head to the side.
These include Swift’s allusions to stages and acting (Arya once had a multi-episode arc in which she fell in with a theatre troupe), her reference to a “feast” (“A feast? Why that must refer to season 3’s Red Wedding at the Twins!”) and the line about “Kingdom keys” (Westeros is sometimes referred to as “the Seven Kingdoms” and the Starks rule over Winterfell, which presumably has keys?).
“So there you have it: Definitive proof Taylor Swift’s new single is about a Game of Thrones character,” Hibberd writes. “And if it’s not, well, okay, fine — then it’s about dissing Katy Perry, Kanye West, or Kim Kardashian or something. But is that really more fun?”