Game of Thrones: does Arya’s “green eyes” prophecy mean she’ll kill Daenerys?

Now that Game of Thrones’ Battle of Winterfell has been won, King’s Landing has been destroyed, and Cersei Lannister has died in the arms of her brother/lover Jaime, the biggest question heading into the series finale is which character or characters have green eyes? And further: Will Arya kill them?

Melisandre set the green-eyed guessing game into motion in season eight, episode three, “The Long Night,” when she gave Arya Stark a much-needed pep talk during the Night King’s siege. The Red Witch referenced their season three encounter when she saw Arya’s future and declared, “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me: brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever.”

Arya confirmed to Melisandre that since they’d last met, she had indeed shut some people’s eyes forever (translation: yes, she killed people). And among her more “notable” murders was that of Walder Frey, whom she dispatched in the season six episode “The Winds of Winter” — and who had brown eyes.

But at the time of Arya and Melisandre’s mid-episode chat, she hadn’t killed any particularly high-profile green- or blue-eyed beings.

Of course, that changed by episode’s end, when Arya killed the blue-eyed Night King, destroying his army of the dead and saving the forces of the living. With that villain out of the way, viewers began to speculate that Cersei would be next on Arya’s kill list.

Which brings us season eight, episode five, “The Bells,” — in which the emerald-eyed Cersei did die, but not at Arya’s hand, leaving Melisandre’s prophecy unfulfilled.

The result is that, going into Game of Thrones’ series, it seems that Arya still has one more big kill to pull off. She’s theoretically destined to ensure the demise of a character with green eyes. And it just so happens that a certain dragon queen may have green eyes too.

The interest in Arya killing someone with green eyes stems from a new interpretation of Melisandre’s previous revelation.

Before “The Long Night,” when Melisandre told Arya way back in season three that she would go on to shut brown eyes, blue eyes, and green eyes “forever,” fans wouldn’t have been wrong to interpret her statement as a reference to Arya’s then-future training to become a face-stealing assassin. It was certainly plausible that the different-colored eyes she referenced were just a general nod to the many people Arya would eventually kill.

But in the context of “The Long Night” and the Battle of Winterfell, the “blue eyes” that Melisandre mentioned could just as plausibly have referred to those of the White Walkers and the Night King himself.

Arya’s dispatching of the Night King now suggests that, instead of a more general “Arya will be responsible for many deaths” foretelling, Melisandre’s season three vision corresponds to the deaths of three specific people with different eye colors.

Arya’s two biggest kills to date have been the brown-eyed Walder Frey, the man behind season three’s Red Wedding, which brought about the deaths of Arya’s brother and mother; and the blue-eyed Night King. And when you take into account that there was a startling lack of villainous main characters left on Game of Thrones after the Battle of Winterfell (Cersei’s brothers Tyrion and Jaime both appeared to remain allied with the forces of the North) and how Arya and her sister Sansa have vowed to exact revenge on those who’ve betrayed their family, green-eyed Cersei Lannister seemed ripe for death.

But that changed in “The Bells,” as Cersei and Jaime died in each other’s arms, crushed to death by the rubble of the Red Keep. And that puts a target on another green-eyed queen.

In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which Game of Thrones is based, Daenerys Targaryen has purple eyes — a detail that didn’t make its way to television. On the show, the character is played by Emilia Clarke, who appears to have green eyes. Dany’s eye color is something that fans (a friend whom I regularly chat with after every episode has been texting me about Daenerys’s eye color seemingly every day for the past two weeks) have been pointing out since Melisandre’s prophecy snuck back into the spotlight this season:

To be clear, there’s been no official confirmation of Daenerys’s eye color on the show (it’s hard to think of lines about any character’s eye color, if I’m being honest), and sometimes it’s hard to spot eye color on television due to lighting and the fickleness of color correction and editing.

But there was a lot of focus on Arya in “The Bells,” especially as she came to the realization that Daenerys is capable of unspeakable terror, violence, and war crimes. There were several moments in the episode where Arya saw the carnage around her and then looked up at Dany swooping around on Drogon, connecting the two. She pretty clearly views Dany as an unstoppable evil, and the final scene of the episode, as she rides off on a white horse that has inexplicably survived, it seems as if it’s Arya’s white knight destiny now to stop the green-eyed dragon queen.