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Originally Posted by ChrisV
Arya was not ever "cool and badass", that's wholly an invention of D&D.
ehn, she kinda is?
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She was stubborn and brave and had a keen sense of justice
ya
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but not badass. She was a scared little girl who became enmeshed in violence, horror and revenge fantasies.
ya she lost about 100 father figures in a row there
and then her family
and her friends
i mean she was precious & adventurous
she went through a lot of ****, and turned ruthless
her not becoming an emotionless psychopath like Jaqen is kind of the point, no?
they wanted her to surrender all humanity, and she refused
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And Arya, this puts it well:
arguably Arya’s narrative throughout the series is a deconstruction of the traditional fantasy protagonist. Consider the following: Arya is born into a noble household that is betrayed and overthrown, forcing her to assume a false identity
faceless men also tried to get her to surrender her identity, and she refused
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the result isn’t so much an upward slope of competence and empowerment and self-understanding, but a conga line of psychological trauma, identity loss, and an inability to deal with problems outside of violence (even as many of her revenge targets die unrelated deaths).
she seems to be slowly regaining her humanity
she seemed much colder & stoic in s7
like how bran is all aspy
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Because D&D are such dullards, they instantly switched the arc back to the traditional fairytale one. Arya watches her family die, is driven into a life of desperation, initiated into committing horrific violence and finally ends up in the grips of a death cult, who... [D&D take over]... train her up to be a total badass with a sword! And now she's serving up Frey Pies! YAAAAAS QUEEN!
ya, could have been better
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The series is deeply skeptical of violence. It's not super awesome and cool that a young girl got trained up as a ****ing assassin of a death cult lol.
ya, show lost some emotional depth & perspective
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Originally Posted by ChrisV
Another way to look at it is that the Faceless Men were offering her what she dreams of: power, agency, revenge. The ability to work violence against her enemies.
but they didn't
that always really bugged me how jaqen pitched it as a fun murder club where you get to kill whoever you don't like, and then she gets there and they're like
"ah no actually you're just some murder slave for hire, now let's start beating you for like 3 years for whatever reason"
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The cost they demand is her identity. The choice is between being Arya Stark (because Arya also constantly dreams of having a family again) and committing herself to death and violence.
oh yeah that reminds me i wanted to mention the tully aspect which tends to get overlooked
family, duty, honour
"family comes first?"-bran
arya is probably the stark most about family
over & over she's about family (even her unbearable sister)
anyway ya, so she separates from her brothers, loses her dad (and other father figures), flees from her sister, loses her mom, loses her oldest brother, loses her friends/crush (
"i can be your family"), loses dogs, and whatever else i'm forgetting at the moment
her last tenuous grasp is the sword she got from ... her cousin
that tie is the last thread, so close, almost gone
but she is arya stark of winterfell
it's a better line than i thought actually (though the 2nd part needed work)
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Then D&D take over and she just gets both, lol. Jaqen just goes "u r noone now!" and she's like "Actually I'm Arya, tyvm for the training" and waltzes out of there to go work violence against her enemies.
i'd prob argue that revenge being part of her deal is acceptable
(esp if she thinks that her entire family is dead)
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Once again, just no hard choices for our characters, no consequences (Faceless Men are just like yeah cool, you go do you), no downsides to violence, immediately just a charmed life for Arya where she gets to have her cake and eat it too.
i see a couple ways that this could be fine, for me anyway
probably could have been sharpened though, ya