kind of annoyed about how little the fandom focuses on Arya's compassion and soft heart, when those traits are just as important as her anger (which if you ask me, is a secondary emotion to the grief and hurt she feels throughout the books, but that's a whole another discussion).
like I know cold assassin Arya is a popular Fanon narrative, but come on??? the books literally go against this interpretation of her at every turn?
After traveling for weeks in unhygienic, tiring conditions, she doesn't take a bath when she has a chance, and this is her reasoning:
"Arya did not dare, even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her clothes had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it didn't seem right to drown them." - ACOK Arya II
This is a girl with a bleeding heart that reaches and tries to hold everyone and everything in it!
Even people she feels repulsed by, the lowest of the low, such as the soldiers who raped and murdered--she still can't look away.
When she sees the northmen in cages:
"She looked at their filthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips. Wolves, she thought again. Like me. Was this her pack? How could they be Robb's men? She wanted to hit them. She wanted to hurt them. She wanted to cry." - ASOS Arya V
But still she gives them water. Despite everything, despite her own experiences with violence and threats of rape.
It's honestly no surprise that Arya's name in the TWOW chapter is mercy, because mercy is an even more prominent theme in Arya's chapters than vengeance. Arya has struggled with misogyny and severe abuse, starvation, losing her loved ones, and having to come to terms with the fact that there are awful, evil people everywhere, on every side of a war, but still she makes the choice to be kind to everyone. She chooses to open her heart to Gentry by giving him a rabbit leg, she chooses to take care of Weasel despite the fact that she's just a kid herself who desperately needs to survive and would probably have an easier time without having to take care of a toddler as well, she chooses to defend Samwell in Braavos. She chooses to give water to the suffering northmen not because she thinks they deserve it, but because she, as a person, cannot and will not look away from people who need her, no matter who they are, and that, in my opinion, is the crux of Arya's character.
yousharknotpass
izzy806
titsay
janainaart
germansingergirl
