Pretty Little Liars is one of the most iconic mystery teen TV shows of all time. It featured four high school bullies, Aria Montgomery, Emily Fields, Hanna Marin, and Spencer Hastings, being tormented by an anonymous villain who went by the alias A as they worked tirelessly to solve the disappearance of their group’s Queen Bee, Alison DiLaurentis.

Fans often accused Aria of being the evil black hoodie-wearing stalker. The writers made her so suspicious that Lucy Hale, who played the character, believed the show would eventually reveal Aria as Big A.

“I say Big A because three versions of A span the show’s seven seasons. Mona Vanderwaal became the original A in the season 2 finale, ‘Unmasked.’ The story then introduces Big A in season 6, episode 10, ‘Game Over Charles,’ when CeCe Drake takes control. The series concludes with Uber A, also known as AD, as Spencer’s evil British twin in the final episode, which fans widely criticized and ranked as the lowest-rated of all 160 episodes.”

The Favoritism

The pilot introduced Aria Montgomery before any of the other Liars. She also received the first A text while sitting in a classroom full of witnesses, whereas the others received theirs alone. The show gave her inappropriate romantic relationship more screen time than any of the other girls’ storylines, and positioned her as the ensemble’s main character, especially in the earlier seasons. On top of all that, she got it the least brutal when it came to torture from each rendition of A. 

Mona ran Hannah over with a car in one episode, and then saved Aria’s inappropriate student-teacher romance in the next episode by framing Noel Kahn, whom she had a crush on at this point. Rebekah from TVD dumped Emily because Mona wanted to be messy. She sabotaged several of Spencer’s relationships. Hannah had to ruin her father’s wedding, knowing he would probably abandon her in consequence. Emily lost any chance at a swimming scholarship due to an injury caused during a physical attack by A.

Cece drove a car into Emily’s living room, nearly killing her and her mama. She also almost cut her in half when she tied her up to that saw thingie in the Ravenswood episode and ruined her swim career. Cece framed Hannah’s only parent for murder and had that woman in jail for months. She had Spencer thinking she was a murderer on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, Aria was getting stapled to the walls with a wash-and-set. It was so disproportionate.

The Potential

 She had so much potential to be an iconic villain that the world would overanalyze and criticize for years and years to come. But of course, as they did with all the good potential villains, they wasted her. But what if they didn’t? 

What if the showrunners were more concerned with making a great story with a gut-wrenching twist and impactful storytelling over shock value and unpredictability? 

What if Aria was A?

The Alternate Ending

Agenda

For this post, I focus on clues that could have contributed to revealing Aria as A and explore how the writers could’ve executed them to create a stronger ending. I also rewrote the reveals, but the show already lays such a strong foundation that it doesn’t need much Raye rewrites overall.

Marlene King insisted that friendship served as the foundation of the show, so she never considered making any of the main girls A. But ma’am, be so fucking forreal. Aria was not as good a friend as the other girls. Granted, they were all shitty friends to one another at some point, but Aria was the worst of them. She slut-shamed Hanna after her mama’s crusty-ass fiancé victimized her. She would flat-out abandon the girls during times of genuine crisis to go be in Ezra’s crusty-ass apartment. Aria even joined the A team and trashed Emison’s nursery to protect the man who groomed her. So much for the strength of friendship. 

This rayewrite is very dark, so please get ready to clutch your pearls. There is no happy ending here. It is very dark and twisted, so if you don’t think you can handle that, this probably isn’t the page for you because we really do take things there on ScreamChats.

A Personality Disorder

There was a popular theory of Aria developing Dissociative Identity Disorder with A as one of her alters. Considering the story they went with was Cece Drake’s transition indirectly being the main cause of her becoming A, I think this would have been maybe a teaspoon better. If they were gonna produce strange and harmful content, they could have at least made it make sense within the confines of the story, ya know?

The show highlights mental health and explores how it affects Aria’s family. It shows her uncle struggling with it throughout his life, and it also depicts her younger brother experiencing his own push and pull with depression.

Many people who develop DID do so due to sexual trauma they experienced as children. Maybe someone abused Aria, either Byron’s brother or another family member, and those records surfaced during Mona’s murder trial. Many people speculated that Aria spent some time at Radley. Treatment for DID would explain why Eddie Lamb recognized her, but didn’t say much or elaborate, for fear of triggering an episode.

If Aria controlled Mona like a puppet master, then Mona could’ve dated Mike to gain leverage and secure a way out. Wouldn’t that make you look at the show so much differently?

With all that being said, Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the route I would have taken Aria’s character. I find mental illness to be a motive as insensitive and lazy. Let’s get into the evidence of Aria being A and the reveal I would have given her.

Evidence

There are so many small frames of evidence that Aria could have been A. For instance, the texts don’t start until Aria comes back from Iceland. There’s also the black swan dress and Marlene King constantly giving us Aria is A hints on Twitter. Aria always went missing in action, to the point where it feels strange that the show never directly calls attention to it.

In Season 3, Episode 7, “Crazy,” Hannah was being threatened by Wilden. He thinks Hannah’s blood is on evidence in Ali’s trial, due to fake evidence planted by “A.” She and Aria find the ouija board inside Hannah’s kitchen, and it says, “See how easy it is for me to get ahold of your blood?” Then, that’s when Aria visits Mona at Radley. Her visitations were somehow fixed right on time, even though Hannah was banned. Mona asked Aria if she wanted to play a game. This could have been her official recruitment to the “A team.”

The whole “Miss Aria, You’re a Killer, Not Ezra’s Wife” thing could also be considered a hint. This was a code Mona taught Hannah, where you take the first letter of random words put together, so they could talk about people without anyone else understanding. It translated to “Mona Knew.” What if what Maya knew was that Aria had been the villain all along?

Mona gave two other codes. The first code was Maya’s “away sleeping sweet,” until Garrett’s “all Rosy, count on me,” which was the URL to Maya’s website. The second was No one to save Ali from evil, warning Hannah that it wasn’t safe. In reality, she was speaking in code because “A” was listening to everything they said from a tape recorder hidden inside one of the dolls. But maybe she couldn’t speak plainly because Aria was the unsafe person maneuvering everything from behind the scenes.

A couple of episodes before the dollhouse, Aria Montgomery received an email saying that someone had finished a fence. That could’ve been the big electric fence that kept the girls trapped when they escaped the prom night from Hell.

In season 5, Alison got a text, “The truth can bury you in a New York minute.” This wasn’t signed by “A.” We know that Cece was in Paris by now, presumably linking up with Wren and Alex Drake. Which, sidebar, I will never understand how Wren met Alex and called Cece instead of Spencer. If he’s evil and in cahoots with Cece, it makes sense. But in canon, that’s not the case. Sure, he was friends with Cece, but Alex was Spencer’s twin. I get that he and Melissa were broken up, but was he upset that Spencer got back with Toby? It makes no sense.

Anyway, back to Aria, Alison, and the New York minute text. Aria was the one who killed Shana. She had the most to lose in that scenario, outside of Alison, of course, who had faked her death and cost taxpayers a bajillion dollars in the investigation that landed both Toby and Garrett in jail. Womp. Aria could’ve been the one to send the text.

I’m not saying Aria knew Alison was gonna go all “Gone Girl” and claim she was kidnapped. However, I do think Aria just needed Alison to keep the hell quiet about Shana and the theatre and Ezra getting shot, so Aria was gonna roll with whatever Alison came up with. She was just as panicked as the other liars about having to keep up with the lie, but that lie was better than the truth at least.

It makes more sense, too, because Aria is only super stressed about this for a few episodes. In canon, it reads as inconsistent writing, but in this timeline, Aria is haunted only by the possibility of something going wrong and of her getting caught. Sure, Mona took credit, but she’s already outed, so that’s easy for her to do without real consequence at this point. Plus, it gave her the power of Alison, so I’m sure she was happy to take one for the team.

Once she realizes that the police are on the completely wrong path, she stops thinking about Shana entirely. The girl is never brought up again, and I do wish that Jenna had confronted them about Shana.

It would’ve been interesting if, in the canon timeline, Cece told Jenna about Shana when they met in between 6A and 6B. Or maybe Jenna was lying, and they met years before. I remember someone saying that Jenna was scared of Cece in, like, season 3 or 4. So I’m sure Jenna was lying in season 7, when she told the girls how she met Cece by visiting her in Welby.

I also always found it fascinating how Cece hijacked the art gallery showcase. Imagine how epic it would have been, in hindsight, if Aria really had wanted to share her dollhouse work and had done it so cleverly that she had Tanner shitting bricks.

Now, how a middle-class teenage girl could pull off such extreme and expensive plots is a whole other topic. And to answer this, I would say that as much as I would love to give her all the credit, I just can’t. It makes no sense at all. So she would have to have a partner. 

Partnered with Ezra

First, it could be Ezra. Personally, that would be the only way I would keep this man in the show beyond, like, season 2. He should’ve BEEN in jail, baby. Bare minimum, once the book tea was spilled, A could’ve killed him. But we don’t live in a perfect world. So fine, let’s say in this timeline, he discovered Aria’s disorder organically and fully took advantage of her. 

Ezra came from money. Even if he dropped the Fitzpatrick name and ditched his mom, he still had access to resources. He had connections in publishing; who knows where else he had connections? He was able to pull off that whole apartment in Ravenswood and the cabin in the woods. He was clearly capable of more than he let on financially.

This would explain why the show always protected their relationship, even while the other girls’ relationships constantly fell apart. At multiple points in the series, the girls would go into crisis mode and take on individual missions, while Aria Montgomery simply hung out at Ezra’s apartment as if nothing was wrong. The show framed this pattern as normal and never directly called attention to it.

As for a motive, Ezra’s character was always motivated by one thing in this scenario. His writing. He was determined to write the best damn books he could. At least that’s how it would’ve started, until he realized how empowering the black hoodie made him feel.

Ezria Rayewritten

I think one fascinating thing about Aria and Ezra’s relationship is that they keep breaking up and getting back together. Typically, the whole thing makes me gag, but in this context, it’s gold. What if there was hidden context between each breakup that could add additional context to the eventual reveal?

In season one, Ezra was testing Aria to see how down for him she could be. He used classic grooming tactics with her, tricking her into believing she had all the power in their dynamic so she would feel in control enough to keep seeing him. In season two, Ezra saw her getting close to Noel Kahn, and then A got him suspended. Season three was Malcolm, and season four was the reveal of his book.

In my version of events, I would have Aria find out about Ezra’s book off-screen towards the end of season 3. The season 4 reveal would be a show that she had to put on for the girls, so as not to let on that she already knew. He would convince Aria that the best way to be a writer is to use real life as inspiration. Similar to the motive for Scream 5.

Ezria Finale

Any PLL rayewrite I do would have the black hoodie reveal in the dollhouse, which would be ten episodes rather than two. I would keep the season 4 reveal of Ezra writing his book. I would allow the liars and the audience to believe that was all he was guilty of, aside from grooming Aria, obviously.

In the dollhouse, I would do a similar concept to what I cooked in my PLL alternate ending video. Check that out here, if you haven’t already.

The final episode of the dollhouse opens with each of the girls waking up to bridesmaids’ dresses in their rooms. However, Aria finds a dress fit for a bride instead. Spencer receives a sash that reads ‘Maid of Honor,’ and A forces the girls to attend a wedding. This wedding replaces the canon prom event and takes place after the failed escape attempt, rather than before.

Once Aria walks down the aisle to meet a masked man, he will reveal himself to be Eggnog. The girls will all gasp in shock, and he will go into his full villain monologue. Aria would pretend to be shocked, afraid that revealing herself would mean losing her friends forever. Despite using the girls as inspiration for their book, she still loves them in her own twisted way. More similar to Mona than Cece.

Series Finale

In this scenario, I would do something pretty similar to the canon timeline. I’d have Ezra be incarcerated rather than put in Welby like Cece. I would have Aria be advocating for his release the same way Alison did for Cece. The difference is that Aria would do this in secret and wouldn’t ask the other liars for help.

Regardless, Ezra would be released on bail and killed on the same day. Aria would take on the persona of Uber A to discover his killer and avenge him. In the heartbreaking series finale, Aria Montgomery discovers that Spencer Hastings murdered Ezra to punish him for everything he’d done to them over the years, especially to Aria.

Aria would be stuck between avenging her ‘great epic love’ and murdering her truest friend. The decision would drive her beyond the point of sanity, and she’d take her own life right in front of Spencer, Hanna, and Emily, truly ending the reign of A over their lives.

All in all

I know the internet loves this “A” theory, but struggles with a logical motive without forcing mental health horror tropes. How did I do? Were you an Aria is A stan? Do you think Ezra was the right accomplice to choose?

I cannot wait to chat about it with y’all in the comments! If you’ve stayed this long, I think it’s safe to say we’re internet friends now.

If you liked this theory, check out my Wren is A theory post here.