down the rabbit hole

meera reminded bran of his sister arya. she wasn't scared to get dirty, and she could run and fight and throw as good as a boy. 

for a moment bran thought it was his sister arya … madly, for he knew his little sister was a thousand leagues away, or dead. 

the girl was the older and taller of the two. arya! bran thought eagerly, as he watched her leap up onto a rock and cut at the boy. but that couldn't be right. if the girl was arya, the boy was bran himself, and he had never worn his hair so long. and arya never beat me playing swords, the way that girl is beating him.

bran and arya stark for #branoween day four: family and heritage

She had thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but she learned better in that storehouse beside the Gods Eye. Eight days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command to march, and every day she had seen someone die. (ACOK, ARYA VI)

People don't truly understand how traumatic and horrible Harrenhal was for Arya,"She had thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but she learned better in that storehouse beside the Gods Eye." Every day, Arya witnessed people being murdered, women being raped, and people being brutally tortured, she was just an eight-year-old girl surrounded by monsters. Do you know how horrible it is to be in the same place as THE MOUNTAIN?

I love many aspects of the Mercy Sample chapter.

I love that the chapter opens with a wolf dream and a weirwood tree. And it closes with Arya who, in her head, puts aside the name of Mercy, to play the last part of the mummer's farce and do justice for Lommy. Lommy, a person that Arya didn't even like, but he was innocent and he's dead and this injustice doesn't matter to anyone but her. I love this, because it demonstrates more than clearly that all those people who repeat that Arya is No one from AFFC, were wrong then and now, in the TWOW, they are still wrong.

I love the description of Braavos shrouded in mist and the bridge of faces. And I like the description of Mercy's clothes which is very suspicious and strange. Mercy still wears Cat of the Canals' salt-stained boots and still uses a rope as her belt, but this time it's dyed blue, an expensive color. She wears a simple dress of undyed wool like a lowborn in Westeros would, but she wears a red-lined purple cape like a highborn in Braavos would. She dresses in a way that sums up much of her journey so far. The pockets of her cloak are filled with mysterious objects: a fruit knife, an iron key and a thin blade that does not belong to Mercy. They are pockets that represent the ability to compartmentalize identity Arya has acquired, and they are loaded with potential for the future.

I love the metatheatrical thing that allows Arya to wander among the ghosts and caricatures of the characters we already met: Izembaro and Robert, Bobono and Tyrion, Lady Stork and Cersei. But not only the actors, also the Snapper and Daena whose dynamic with Mercy is somewhat reminiscent of that between Septa Mordane, Sansa and Jeyne. I love the moment Mercy reminds us that despite all that has changed since book one, her stitches are still crooked. I love how Shakespearean Martin's writing is with the lines he puts in Tyrion's mouth.

Finally, I love the parallelism that is intertwined throughout the chapter between the events that will have to take place on stage at the Gate and the events that Arya lives now. For after seeing an Essosi girl being raped and killed on stage by Tyrion (a man of Westeros affiliated with the Lannister crown)… The city will awake the next day to find poor Mercy's room red with blood and a Lannister guard will be missing and it will be obvious to draw parallels between the two situations anf Raff will be accused of Mercy's murder.

This is all interesting because it shows us that the FMs are starting to use what they know about Arya for their own ends and those ends seem to be working in favor of Stannis and the retaking of Winterfell instead of in favor of the Lannisters. It also shows that even within a plan Arya is left with the right to choose how to implement it, showing us a less dogmatic side of FM and changing a bit how we generally think of them.

Overall it's one of my favorite sample chapters.

It's strange to see Arya use sexuality as a weapon so lightly, but it's no surprise. Arya is an intelligent character who has experience with prostitutes and courtesans. She knows Raff is depraved because he knows he participated in that young girl rape that Chiswick laugh about. The role that she plays with Raff is the part that she studied for the Bloody Hand, is the role of Shae.

Mercy could not be Arya's first chapter in TWOW, cause Martin doesn't write the chapters in order. And it's also more than probable that the chapter has already been modified and partially rewritten in recent years and that the version we will see published will be very different.

We know that 'Arya in Braavos' material is not lacking, Martin joked that he could write a novel just about that. And we know that the 5-year gap would have served above all to give the Stark children time to grow. As the books progressed Arya's chapters became fewer, yet the single chapter covers much more time. At the start a chapter saw days go by. Now the chapters in Braavos imply that Arya has been there for months if not a year already. This technique allows Martin to do time ellipses and age Arya faster by speeding up her narration. I don't think it's a coincidence that by checking the timelines of the chapters made by fans Mercy is chronologically later in time, more than all the others; the timelines of the POV characters are not aligned. I think this speaks to Martin's eagerness to make Arya grow up faster because of the things that await her later in the story.

We will have to wait and see… The simple answer is that Martin at the beginning of the story miscalculated the ages with respect to the actual time that passes during the events of the published books and now we live the consequences of that. In any case, he has already expressed the belief that "if a twelve-year-old has to save the world, so be it", and therefore it seems that he made peace with it.

- ACOK, ARYA VI

The girl wasn't worth a silver, he says . . . and damned if that old man didn't fetch a fistful of coppers, beg m'lord's pardon, and thank him for the custom!"

The men all roared, none louder than Chiswyck himself, who laughed so hard at his own story that snot dribbled from his nose down into his scraggy grey beard. Arya stood in the shadows of the stairwell and watched him.

It wasn't Harren, Arya wanted to say, it was me. She had killed Chiswyck with a whisper, and she would kill two more before she was through. I'm the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And that night, there was one less name to hate.

- ACOK, ARYA VII

“Her father beat her so often and so brutally that she was never truly free of pain or fear until she came to us.”

“Did you kill him?”

“She asked the gift for herself, not for her father.”

You should have killed him.

- ADWD, THE UGLY LITTLE GIRL

Just in case you guys didn't saw it

"Do it! The gift of mercy … avenge your little Michael …” “Mycah.” Arya stepped away from him. “You don’t deserve the gift of mercy.” The Hound watched her saddle Craven through eyes bright with fever. Not once did he attempt to rise and stop her. But when she mounted, he said, “A real wolf would finish a wounded animal.” Maybe some real wolves will find you, Arya thought. Maybe they’ll smell you when the sun goes down. Then he would learn what wolves did to dogs. “You shouldn’t have hit me with an axe,” she said. “You should have saved my mother.” She turned her horse and rode away from him, and never looked back once. -- Arya XIII, A Storm of Swords

How it works is like this: because Arya defends Mycah against Joffrey, we can understand Lyanna’s defense of Howland. Because Arya never once strays from wanting justice for her brutally murdered friend, we can imagine what drove Lyanna to masquerade as the Knight of the Laughing Tree. And because Arya doesn’t think twice about any of this, we can understand Lyanna's convictions.

Because Arya loves exploring and discovering new plants she’s never seen before, because she brings flowers to Ned out of love, we can understand Lyanna being "fond of flowers" as part of a curious and affectionate nature.

Because Arya is never impressed with Joffrey, we can understand Lyanna's immediate assessment of Robert. Because her siblings react to news of Arya's betrothals to unsuitable partners with "Arya won't like that one bit" & "she never will, not Arya" & "[i]f he tries to lay a hand on her, she'll fight him," we can understand the gulf that opened between Lyanna and her family after her betrothal. Because amiable Elmar Frey looked down on Nan the serving girl and Arya resented him for it, we can see Lyanna judging Robert based on how he treats Mya/Mya's mother.

Because Bran thinks Arya "wasn't scared to get dirty, and she could run and fight and throw as good as a boy," because he first assumes Lyanna & Benjen fighting are him & Arya, we can imagine Lyanna & Benjen's relationship.

Because Arya is wolf-blooded and we see that written out, we can understand Lyanna as well.

That isn't to say it isn't meaningful to Arya, having Lyanna scattered through her story. Arya's complex relationship with mentor figures is a post to itself, but in brief: legacies are passed down by people, to people, who then use them as a starting/turning point. Daenerys Targaryen understands the duality of her family's legacy through the fragments of Viserys as her brother, king, and abuser; when he dies, she is the last, and she births dragons. Jon Snow is groomed for command in the Night's Watch just like his uncle and ancestors before him, charged with protecting his homeland in the shadow of an eight thousand year old Stark dynasty. Tyrion is Tywin writ small. The last greenseer waited generations just to haunt Brandon Stark's dreams.

Arya doesn't have that. She has a direwolf, she's a warg, and she has the North in her face. Wolf child, blood child; scattered yet meaningful pieces of a puzzle. By connecting her to Lyanna who came before her, it's a lineage. It's no longer an accident. Arya isn't Lyanna any more than Daenerys is Aegon the Conqueror, or Jon Snow is any of his predecessors, or Tyrion is Tywin, or Bran is Bloodraven, or Edric Dayne is Arthur, or Arianne is Nymeria. These parallels to (pre-series) characters represent a benchmark to be surpassed, whether or not the characters realize it themselves, and in Arya's case is no less.

Day 4 | Wolf Blood

Arya made a face. “Joffrey’s a liar and a craven and anyhow he’s a stag”

“Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him.

“Love is sweet,dearest Ned,but it cannot change a man’s nature.”

Seeing through “Baratheons”

Characters like Arya, Dany, Brienne and Lyanna are loved so easily because of misogyny. All these characters symbolise masculine power, the idea of a hero saving the day with sword and fire and sheer power. They're the heroes because they save the world.

Women who stray from extremely restrictive, man-made traditional gender norms are not automatically masculine. None of those characters are trying to emulate men, they're just trying to exist without being forced into a box. Men do not have the monopoly on anger or violence, that narrative is extremely sexist.

Moreover, it's not even accurate that they survive by being strong and using a sword. I'll leave Lyanna out of this because we don't know that much about her in this aspect, but neither Arya nor Dany are warriors, they are two extremely intelligent girls who survive mostly because of their cunning. And a bit of magic, but this is a fantasy after all. The point is that it is very explicitly stated that Arya and Dany are not physicaly capable of overpowering people. Brienne is the only one who actually fights and even then, it's extremely reductive to paint her struggles with gender norms as just "she's masculine".

Also, why do you ignore the traditionally feminine aspects of these characters? Dany was a sex slave, was sexually assaulted multiple times, had a miscarriage, is constantly undermined because of her gender, she deals with administrative matters that you yourself counted as "feminine", and identifies as "mother". Arya was a slave because she was too weak to fight back, she's the only main character who did work associate with lowborn women like cleaning and cooking, she pretended to be a boy only to avoid getting raped and even then was sexually harrased, she's learning about potions and poisons with are seem as feminine weapons, she's using seduction as messed up as it is, she likes flowers, she likes to play with babies, she's good at managing a household which again, you identify as "feminine". Brienne is a romantic, she has a lot of romance in her arc, part of her wants to be a regular lady with a husband and babies, she's so sweet in general. And Arya, Dany and Brienne helped other women plenty of times, sometimes risking their lives for it. And Lyanna, she was either raped or took part in a romantic story, she literally died in childbirth, and you say she embodies masculinity??

All in all, your take is widely more misogynistic that what you were trying to criticize. If you see a woman wanting agency and to be themselves and you think "oh they're so masculine", you're part of the problem.

But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.

If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.

It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.

All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.

I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.

I could go on.

My nephew switched schools cause his teacher insisted writting with his left hand was wrong.

(ADWD, Jon VI)

(ADWD, Jon XIII)

(ADWD, Jon XIII)