I think this has always been the hidden dark side to Arya’s arc.
The audience may cheer it when she cuts the eyes out of a pedaphile like show-Meryn Trant and tortures him before killing but when you think about it, it is pretty fucked up. You have to be in a very, very, very dark place to be able to do that. Even to a pedaphile.
Arya is traumatized. This is a little more clear in the books.
She has seen members of her household slain for no reasons: even the Septa who helped bring her up. She has survived on the streets. She has seen her father beheaded. She has starved and eaten insects to survive. She has witnessed atrocities right in front of her face on the road to Harrenhal: rapes, murder, child-killings, dismemberments, baby killings, horrific and unspecified torture for no reason at all; things that made all human existence seem completely meaningless, destitute and utterly bestial. In Harrenhal she was was physically and psychologically abused, and threatened with sexual abuse more than once; she witnessed gang rapes on women who had been put in stocks naked for anybody to have. She got to a point where she hid her personality down deep and became uncharacterisitically “mouse”-like and reticent. All this in the huge, dehumanizing expanse of the gigantic mega-fortress of spooky-ass Harrenhal.
The only thing that gave her a sense of confidence and control over her uncontrollable situation was murder, which she chose to exercise her uncompromising sense of justice.
But then she went to Braavos and was subjected to brainwashing and training that made her a literally supernatural killer, but also warped her way of looking at the world.
Meanwhile, Sansa has been on a different voyage: one less physically brutal, but psychologically tough: but one which has seen her getting a political educaton from Cersei, Joffrey, and Littlefinger.
Sansa also has a sense of justice and good but she thinks like a politician; inherently dishonest, in which compromises are made on the way to a greater goal.
Arya is not equipped to think this way. She is younger, she sees things in black and white.
She is not equipped to understand the kind of compromises that Sansa has made; the kind of compromises that any effective leader has to make. She reacts in an extreme and violent way
(Granted, she is coming off as stupider than in former seasons. Perhaps she is playing a subtle game in order to fully gauge Sansa’s intentions and she is not so stupid. But mostly, I think that the show has done a poor job earlier in letting is in on the dark side of Arya’s psyche, painting her instead as a humorous hero who kills the baddies without much repercussion for her soul or character.)
No comments:
Post a Comment