'Game of Thrones' is effectively killing two of our favorite characters

It was always a stretch for Game of Thrones to meet heightened fan expectations in Season 7, but when it came to Arya and Sansa Stark, they let us down royally.

The Stark sisters, together for the first time since Season 1, could have been a testament to the power of women on this show, evidence that family matters to someone in Westeros. Instead, their current arc is a disservice to both characters' development over the past six seasons, and it feels like little more than an attempt to stir up gratuitous drama.

After a hopeful initial reunion, without Jon or Bran to mediate between them (Bran is present, but he’s not all there, you know), the sisters fall back into their old patterns in a nasty way. Littlefinger is exploiting who they are on the surface -- who they used to be, even -- and so far neither of them is proving him wrong by behaving like actual complex human beings.

Sansa and Arya deserve better. We all deserve better, even with the rampant fan service plaguing this show. There's still a way out for these characters, but if they don't patch things up, it will be one of the darkest stories in Game of Thrones history.

When they met this season in the crypts of Winterfell, Sansa and Arya alluded to the separate harrowing experiences that led them to this point. They never do have that talk, the so-what-have-you-been-up-to-for-the-past-several-years conversation that would have caused them both a lot of pain but explained the triumphs and traumas that led to who they are today.

Instead, they revert to caricatures of the rivalrous siblings they were when they lived together at Winterfell. It isn't cute or even predictable in the way siblings usually regress around each other; Arya all but threatens to kill her sister, and we haven't spent enough time with them this season to follow the buildup to that extreme. Arya doubts Sansa, Sansa gets defensive, and instead of the sisters banding together as survivors on the path to beating Westeros’s habitual patriarchy, they're ready to turn against each other.

In Episode 5 “Eastwatch,” Littlefinger planted a scroll for Arya to find, written by Sansa (under duress) in which she asks brother Robb to swear fealty to her “beloved” Joffrey. For viewers and the more politically savvy characters, the note isn't anywhere near believable. Anyone who has followed Sansa's journey since Ned's death knows where her loyalties lie and what she's been through, and the note exploits Arya's immaturity.

It's not tough to see how the sisters could mistrust each other, but it feels inconsistent with their growth as characters. Are we supposed to believe that Sansa, who speaks candidly with Jon about his shortcomings as a leader, couldn't be bothered to have just one honest conversation with her sister? Is it really plausible that after having witnessed so many murders -- and engineered a few herself -- Arya Stark wouldn't smell a rat and realize she's walking into a trap?

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The plotline is tilling some fertile ground. In Arya's world, enemies attack with a sword; in Sansa's, they blackmail and manipulate you -- and neither sister has even the slightest inkling of how the other's worldview works. While Arya was off training at the House of Black and White (and learning to see things similarly), Sansa learned just how gray morality can be.

And certainly Game of Thrones has explored the consequences of its character's vulnerabilities – Ned lost his head for being his honorable self. Arya doesn't trust Littlefinger, but she can't begin to imagine what he's capable of. She writes off Sansa's deft handling of the fickle Northern lords instead of appreciating the nuances of the political game. She doesn't understand why you wouldn't kill someone who opposes you, whereas Sansa sees the benefit of outliving and outsmarting one's enemies.

That said, Sansa has a history of trusting the wrong people, with the result being that she now keeps things close to the vest. That might be why she didn't tell Jon about the Knights of the Vale at the Battle of the Bastards (or why she hasn't poured her heart out to Brienne), but it still doesn't account for why she turned to Littlefinger of all people for counsel about Arya.

Both Stark sisters know how it feels to be completely alone and have no one to trust, yet the show won't give us . Arya is the show's most prolific badass, but she's also a profoundly lonely person, and being with her brother and sister again doesn't magically solve that.

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We also shouldn't accept "realism" as a rationale for this plotline. As noted above, it isn't realistic based on these characters, even then, since when has realism been required in Game of Thrones? As L.A. Review of Books' Sarah Mesle put it: "We can have dudely gangs of misfits plunge into the wild on completely nonsensical plans, but we can’t have two sisters get along."

Now this being Game of Thrones, there’s every chance that Arya is trying to triple cross a double crosser, that she’s playing Sansa to play Littlefinger and lure him into a trap. So what did she mean by exposing her store of faces (eye roll) and threatening Sansa? Littlefinger didn't witness any of the arguments in "Beyond the Wall," so why trick Sansa and Sansa alone?

With one episode left in the season, that’s a whole lot to untangle, and a far more likely and awful outcome is that Sansa and Arya somehow hurt each other and Baelish lives on to continue his terrible ways.

The best thing this finale could do for our beloved Starks is to prove us wrong and bring them together. Please.

Alex Hazlett contributed to this article.