might make a more effortful post later with actual quotes to support this reading but I'm increasingly thinking that Arya's arc post-AGOT, especially in Braavos, deliberately subverts her initial desire for 'adventures' and 'travel' and general curiosity. instead it gives us a horrific travelogue where she's tired and hungry and in rags and fearing for her life and watching people she cares for die and trying to turn her anger and desire for justice into a prayer for vengeance and trying to bury her grief and loss by stripping herself of her identity and throwing herself into a death cult even as she is miserable and completely alone. These are not fun experiences that Arya gleefully embraces because she's secretly a sadistic little girl (she is not), but lonely and difficult ones which give her a vantage point into different walks of life - in a way that demands an obliteration of herself. In some ways it's the opposite of a typical adventure story arc which is all about coming-of-age in a journey of literal discovery as well as self-discovery, where the protagonist has a former sense of self at the end of it. In Arya's case, that sense of self is something she is battling with - circumstances are demanding she sacrifice it, but she can't quite give up the last vestiges of Arya Stark. She keeps needle and she dreams of being the 'night wolf' - reminders of her home, the people who loved her, the magic that's specific to being a Stark, the sense of pack and community and belonging Nymeria has. I think a key thing to pick up on here is the presence of people and pack - Arya's curiosity is less about places and more about different types of people! Usually, travelling (over months or years) means letting go of stronger, more rooted social connections to meet people new, but Arya isn't even getting the latter and is deeply isolated in Braavos.

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

Just having thoughts about the og series starting with Luke, Thalia, and Annabeth's promise to each other about family and Nico making Percy promise to protect Bianca, his sister.