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Why is Arya so boring?


manchester_babe

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Arya isn't boring, but there boring things about her.

For one, there's no suspense to any of her chapters, because obviously she's going to survive and succeed, and be brilliant at anything she tries. She's pure hero. Her journey to triumph will be an interesting one, but not exciting because it's a foregone conclusion.

For two, her relentlessly alpha personality gets a bit tedious. She dominates her company like Nymeria reborn, or if that's not possible, she holds herself apart and waits for an opportunity. This is probably a winning strategy given her dangerous life, so not much prospect of change here.

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13 hours ago, Ralphis Baratheon said:

Big whoop. All Olenna ever does is insult and make fun of people. If Arya ever met Olenna she'd probably call her a dried up old hag who is still bitter she was passed over by the Targaryen she was betrothed too.

I recall another female Stark who is said to look and act like Arya, both the Crown Prince and future King were both bewitched by her looks and character.

Olenna's own husband basically committed suicide just so he no longer had to deal with her unpleasant deposition. 

dude, i'm just making a show reference. That being said i'm like 99% youngOlenna behaved like Margaery

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On 11/29/2017 at 6:02 PM, manchester_babe said:

Arya is boring. She really is. But why is that? 

Maybe it`s because you can only do so much with her. 

A mentally deranged killer is not unique in fiction nor in real life.  Arya is not as boring as Jon though.  It's hard to enjoy her story arc but she is more readable than Jon and Sansa.  She's weird and her story is not really good.

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5 hours ago, Ferocious Veldt Roarer said:

It's really sad that such perfunctory effort at trolling gets rewarded with so many replies.

A lot of people dislike Arya.  It's not trolling to express an opinion that her story is boring.  I find Arya almost as boring as Jon.  I dislike Arya.

Just because you disagree with an opinion doesn't mean they are trolling.  

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13 hours ago, A Ghost of Someone said:

I like Arya but the whole of Essos simply does nothing for me. Westeros is where it is at. It is her location that is boring, not Arya. Same with Mereen. I just do not give a damn. Get everyone to Westeros and I might enjoy their POVs better.

It's interesting that all if not most of GRRM main characters have been removed and Isolated from 'The Game' and manipulations of Kingslanding

 

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1 hour ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

A lot of people dislike Arya.  It's not trolling to express an opinion that her story is boring.  I find Arya almost as boring as Jon.  I dislike Arya.

Just because you disagree with an opinion doesn't mean they are trolling.  

I think what @Ferocious Veldt Roarer was referring too was the fact the OP made a post about why a character was boring but gave no reasons or examples for why they came to that conclusion . It really didn't warrant it's own thread as it was a random negative thought. 

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Lol Arya is actually a top 3 character for me in the books.

I love her decision making compared to most people I've found who like, but don't love, her decision making.

Ive said this many times but I can't stop.... She might be the only character (not just POV either I mean all characters) who survive her sequence of events as they unraveled. While a lot of it has to do with the decision making I mentioned I think her intelligence also is key. She's very Self-Aware more so than nearly every other POV. 

I never considered her boring bc I thought she's very consistently written and seems like she catches on to everything around her which reveals more to the readers 

 

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16 hours ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

A lot of people dislike Arya.  It's not trolling to express an opinion that her story is boring. 

As a general rule, you might have a point. In this specific case, however, "voice a strongly polarizing opinion, and don't bother to argue your point" is a textbook case of trolling, and lazy at that.

 

16 hours ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

I find Arya almost as boring as Jon.  I dislike Arya.

Just because you disagree with an opinion doesn't mean they are trolling.  

You are right. Posting "inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response" is what makes it trolling.

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On 11/29/2017 at 6:02 PM, manchester_babe said:

Arya is boring. She really is. But why is that? 

Maybe it`s because you can only do so much with her. 

You may be right.  There is only so much you can do with her. Arya herself is not an engaging read.   Perhaps Martin was inspired by the real life Manson family when he created Arya.   Lost girl joins a cult of crazed murderers. 

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12 hours ago, Ferocious Veldt Roarer said:

As a general rule, you might have a point. In this specific case, however, "voice a strongly polarizing opinion, and don't bother to argue your point" is a textbook case of trolling, and lazy at that.

 

You are right. Posting "inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response" is what makes it trolling.

Can you know the thread author's intent?  Are you a mind- reader?  :P

Writing "Arya is boring" is not off-topic. It's a fair point to discuss for those who wish to do so.   It's not inflammatory to me.  :)

 

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4 hours ago, Damsel in Distress said:

She's filler material like Sansa is.

I don't think she's filler, I think that she is mostly there to portray what and how the Brotherhood without Banners are doing around the Riverlands and such. And I also don't agree that Sansa is filler in ASOS, she had awesome chapters.

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15 hours ago, Knekse said:

I don't think she's filler, I think that she is mostly there to portray what and how the Brotherhood without Banners are doing around the Riverlands and such. And I also don't agree that Sansa is filler in ASOS, she had awesome chapters.

I agree. Arya, before she goes to Bravos, is a witness to the rape of the land. The free companies devastated some parts of France during the 100 Years War. There was wide-spread famine, lots of rape, death, and depredation, as a result. I think she is GRRM's primary expression of this particular mining of real history for his books.

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I love Arya as a character but I agree that there may be a problem with some of her chapters in SoS (and for me also in CoK). Let's try to figure out what that problem is:

1) It has been proposed above that she simply has too many chapters in SoS.

She certainly does have a lot of chapters in that book so let's keep this reason - the sheer number of them - in mind as possibly problematical. However I think it is pretty obvious that if all her chapters in that book were interesting to read then there would be no complaints about how many of them there are. So I think the number alone can not be the whole explanation. We also should look at the content.

2) I have been trying to figure out what has been bugging me - content-wise - about the Arya storyline in CoK and SoS since I first read it. I have come up with two points:

- the first one is that GRRM (I think) wants to keep her story comparatively realistical and believable at that early! point in her career. She is just a child after all with just some fencing training (but not a lot of it) and no assassin's training at all. He doesn't want her to come off as a super-heroine (yet). The yet is an important word if you ask me. I think it is clear GRRM means Arya to do something pretty superpowery later in her career and wants to set that up slowly, build up to the later payoff. So he has been writing her Clash and Storms chapters with the hand-brake put on so to speak.

This way of slow building while theoretically sounding logical has the practical consequence that it makes her CoK and SoS chapters a little hard to follow as there is not a lot of immediate payoff. She is slugging along, not really knowing what she is doing or where she is headed even. One has to be pretty dedicated to enjoy that I suppose.

That does not mean she is a bad character though. It is not a problem in all her chapters. Just some of those in these two books.

3) I have the impression that GRRM uses the Arya character in CoK and SoS partly to convey exposition to the readers (i.e. give us information he feels we should have but he has found no other way of giving to us). So in those two books he steers Arya to places and people he wants us to learn things about. Arya is the POV through whose eyes we get info about Harrenhal, Tywin there, Roose there, Jaqen H'gar, the Brootherhood, the Hound, the Ghost of High Heart. (And probably even more who I can't recall right now).

While this method (giving necessary info through a POV) sounds great in theory it does have the problem that it means that the Arya character in CoK and SoS does not really have agenda over her own plotline. She turns up where GRRM needs her to be and do what GRRM wants her to do in order to convey his exposition to us. Not where she wants to go and what she wants to do. And I suppose as a reader we somehow sense that and that makes watching her being pushed this way and that a little frustrating.

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On 12/1/2017 at 0:22 PM, Widowmaker 811 said:

I never liked Arya's plot.  It's absurd to the point of ludicrous.  

THIS!  Arya's plot line is ridiculous.  She's just not interesting to me.  I know we are meant to be disturbed by what she does.  People focus more on sex than violence and maybe that is Arya's role.  I just don't care for her and her story line.  Her story line is just there to shock the reader with ever escalating gratuitous violence.  Honestly, Arya just needs to die and her plot line to end.

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