I agree with your Ned analysis -He is a lovable character, but certainly flawed. In your Uncleverse, does a grown Arya ever process who Ned was versus the ideal version she has of him? I would love to read a one shot where she is somehow confronted with what her life, if Ned had lived, would have been -that moment where she harkens back to the conversation about his expectation for her marriage. I could see that adding another interesting layer to her grief.
I’m glad you agree. In the same way that people can sometimes demonize Catelyn, they also tend to prop up Ned as a Cinnamon Roll Daddy, Too Pure for this World, which is wrong on so many levels.
Actually, funny you should mention the one shot idea. In First One’s the Hardest, there’s a scene on the beach where Arya confronts the uncomfortable fact that her current happy marriage to Gendry was only possible because Ned got beheaded, and if he’d lived her relationship with Gendry wouldn’t have happened.
When I was writing the fic, that scene actually was about Arya brooding over the “You will marry a high lord …” line, and how that did, on paper, come true, but it’s actually a completely different dynamic where she’s accomplished in her own right, she co-rules the entire region and not just the castle, and her husband is a legitimised bastard who drinks his Respect Women juice. She basically wonders if Ned would be proud or disappointed in her.
But I ended up cutting that and replacing it with the scene in the final version, because
That struggle would really take longer than the format of FOtH allowed
I wanted the scene to end with Arya naming her baby Ned, and that’s not really a natural conclusion to “My father was a noble but deeply flawed man, and the fact that he loved me did not mean he understood what was best for me.”
So I don’t know if I’ll ever end up writing that - I would set it a few years later in the chronology, for sure, maybe when Mycah starts displaying his own gender non-conforming traits - but I’ve definitely thought about it.
