Approaching the Haunted Media Project, I wanted to play to my strengths of not being the most technologically in touch person that I am and incorporating art into my piece instead. Mourning and grievance has been a topic I wanted to explore as pain is a human condition and the ways in which we go about dealing with loss through grievance are different. I found it fascinating how in T.V. shows related to fantasy, morals in that world are different from our present day world. Game of Thrones exemplified grievance and death due to the high number of deaths in the T.V. show. Other than the Starks grievance toward Ned, we rarely see the characters going through grievance because deaths, while tragic, are so normalized in the show. I wanted to explore the grievance and how our emotional and mental health might look like when they are physicalized and how we carry our remembrance of our lost ones in our bodies and memories. 
The dance, Arya’s Grief, captures my reflection and also my actual self as there are two sides to every person: what the internal self is going through vs. the performance of the external self. The dance captures the distance one goes through in order to get up and live with grief. In this dance, the “monster” tormenting or saddening the dancer is grief itself. “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy…giving them life and an uncanny independence” (Cohen 4). Arya feels this immense “fear, desire, anxiety” in this “fantasy” world of Westeros when she loses her brother and mother as she is just about to see them after a long time of separation. The monster’s body is essentially Arya’s, the dancer’s, body. The body quite literally gives life and independence to grief, fear, and anxiety as grief literally takes refuge in Arya’s sorrow. 
We first see the dancer in the mirror reflection curled up in a ball. The reflection, which is the internal self (the monster, the grief) inside the body, “inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again” (Cohen 4). Grief works exactly by inhabiting the “gap between the time of upheaval that created it,” which is at the Red Wedding, and “the moment into which it is received,” Arya swearing to avenge the deaths of her mother and brother by killing Lord Frey for what he has committed, only to be “born again,” as pain is a human condition and grief will be born again in time of another loss that Arya experiences. The whole dance sequence represents this timeline of the mourning at hand and Arya’s desire to get up and continue with her life but her inability to literally stand up, but once she does, only to fall down again as grief is “born again.”
Game of Thrones, as a T.V. show with elements of horror, “violates our assumption that we live in a predictable, routinized world by demonstrating that we live in a minefield” by unexpectedly killing off their main characters (Pinedo 21). Arya’s grief that is uncontained and exploding at times but also calm and painful, demonstrates that “we live in a minefield” as our lives could be overturned by death at any moment. By performing grievance through a dance, there is an element to my haunted media project that is a bit “self-indulgent, and, like so much else on social media…performative” (Garber). I wanted to take this aspect of grieving and literally turn it into an actual performance as a means to physicalize how grief possesses a person in mourning.
It’s also curious to see that her grief, due to the deaths of her family members, allows viewers of the series to be more empathetic to her taking the lives of other people. “Her gruesome murder of Ser Meryn in a brothel is the execution of a sadistic pedophile. Her elimination of Walder Frey and his sons rids the world of treacherous murderers. There is at least a strong utilitarian justification for the elimination of most of her victims. The explanation for these choices of Arya’s is forcefully presented without it becoming a justification…She relentlessly repeats the names of those for whose death she prays. This is not presented as a healthy state in which to be, but it is made understandable. We’re intended to empathize with Arya and share her hatreds” (Silverman 7). As everyone’s grieving process is different, Arya’s becomes the one of vengeance. Vengeance is also a form of reaching out to the dead as murdering in the name of a deceased person is also a way (at least in Game of Thrones) to come to terms with the passing away or the murder of a loved one. By showing “Arya” walking off at the end of the dance sequence, she continues with her life but the monster, grief, is “ready to stalk again” (Cohen 5). Grief always escapes and never truly goes away, seen by how “Arya,” despite her strength to continue with her life and rise up after the “Rains of Castamere” song, is still grief ridden, knowing grief is ready to stalk again in the future. 
In order to focus on the performative aspect of grievance and how our digital media comes to play with it, the camera is reflected in the mirror, showing how grievance, though inside us, is expressed differently when our digital media comes to interfere (or help) with it. There is an aspect of grief that technology has brought that makes people feel the need to express that they are in grievance or let others know just how affected they are by the death of a loved one. Those who do not post or express their grievance outwardly are criticized or seen to not be as affected, while those who also choose to express a lot through social media are also criticized for their grievance is seen as a mere performance. Either way, people have different ways of going about grieving that as long as they are not negatively harming anyone in their lives, different ways of grieving should be understood and accepted.
Works Cited
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).”
Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/.
Pinedo, Isabel. “RECREATIONAL TERROR: POSTMODERN ELEMENTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091.
Silverman, Eric J, and Robert Arp, editors. The Ultimate Game of Thrones and Philosophy : You
Think or Die. Open Court, 2017.