Arya's mental illness

[Springwatch]

7 hours ago, Rondo said:

There is a congenital issue with Arya which made her susceptible to madness.  The life experiences which were terrible just turned on the potential for her mind to go.  Just guessing but it is the dreaded wolf blood.  The same which Lyanna and Brandon had.  Her life will be short.  

It is wolf's blood. But that's not the name of some dreaded mental condition (we're in a high fantasy novel here, not a medical text book) - it's more like a god's gift; from the little we know, it means eagerness and talent for fighting, and a passion for justice (e.g. knight of the laughing tree). A degree of blood-thirstiness too, and the direwolves only enhance that. But the main source I think is that wolf-headed figure in the spirit world, seen as wolf-headed Bran, wolf-headed Rob, wolf-headed dancer in Mirri's ritual. Something that can be separated from Arya.

[The Commentator]

Arya is a very disturbing character who is very easy to hate. That explains why many book readers don’t like her. I never found myself liking Arya. Her fans try to rework the story but there is no excusing the murders of Dareon and the old man. They had done her no wrong. They were just in between Arya and what she wanted.  Killing people, who were not a threat, had done nothing wrong to her is bad. Arya’s sanity has been damaged. I get that. Insanity is an accepted reason to get out of capital punishment. It means she’s still crazy. 

[Lord Lannister]

22 hours ago, Odej said:

I've finally read the entire thread and now I'm laughing my ass out as I realized that everyone, literally everyone, who argues that Arya is a little psychopath murderous bitch is a Daenerys Stan. 

Yeah, the same people railing against how murderous and immoral Arya is will be declaring how all must bow to the dragon goddess or die a fiery death.

It's less about applying morals consistently and attacking characters who are perceived as a rival to their favorites. 

[Moiraine Sedai]

On 6/16/2022 at 3:06 PM, the trees have eyes said:

 And yet most gang members or child soldiers do terrible things until they find an escape route, a safer place or a better way.

She has a kill list just like Beatrice Kiddo of those who wronged her family.  She kills for revenge (Raff the Sweetling), out of necessity (the Bolton guard at Harrenhall) or out of a belief that it is deserved (Dareon's punishment for deserting the NW is death).  Only the insurance salesman is an outlier and she considers a long time over why he might deserve it.

You can dislike Arya's character or her path, it's certainly dark and morally challenging but a homicidal maniac?  Nah

Rorge, Biter, The Mountain that Rides, Ramsay Bolton or Vargo Hoat are homicidal maniacs.

Arya is not a child soldier. She is a vigilante, operating outside the law. She’s a mentally-damaged person who wants to kill people because of some twisted need inside of her for revenge. She is not bothered with killing innocents, who’ve not harmed her family, to get the revenge that she wants.  She’s obsessed with it. 

[the trees have eyes]

5 hours ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

Arya is not a child soldier. She is a vigilante, operating outside the law. She’s a mentally-damaged person who wants to kill people because of some twisted need inside of her for revenge. She is not bothered with killing innocents, who’ve not harmed her family, to get the revenge that she wants.  She’s obsessed with it. 

You mean like how she kills Raff the Sweetling because he murdered Lommy Greenhands?  Or The Tickler for all those men, women and children - true innocents - he tortured to death.  Seems she means to kill the guilty to avenge the innocent. 

[MissM]

On 6/16/2022 at 4:09 PM, Odej said:

I've finally read the entire thread and now I'm laughing my ass out as I realized that everyone, literally everyone, who argues that Arya is a little psychopath murderous bitch is a Daenerys Stan. 

This place is literally the only forum that is OBSESSED with pushing this lie. The delusion is beyond a joke at this point. Most of the time it is literally only 5 people talking to themselves repeating the same BS lies over and over. The biggest problem Dany gets is her natural inclination to murderous psychotic madness (that's D&D depiction, not my book canon opinion) and look what they're projecting on Arya? It's pathetic. They malign Jon and the other Starks as well btw.

There are a million other characters in the books that have done FAR worse than Arya killing murders/rapist/oath breakers and aren't subjected to this ridiculous propaganda campaign by mad Targ stans who had to watch their fave burn thousands of women & children alive in 4K.

[MissM]

11 hours ago, the trees have eyes said:

You mean like how she kills Raff the Sweetling because he murdered Lommy Greenhands?  Or The Tickler for all those men, women and children - true innocents - he tortured to death.  Seems she means to kill the guilty to avenge the innocent. 

Who knew Raff (a child rapist) had so many fans? The ick is strong @Moiraine Sedai

 

[James West]

Obsession with killing is just a symptom of Arya's insanity.  It's not as if she will ever be normal again.  The more faces she wears the crazier she becomes.  The effect is cumulative.  A little bit of Mercy here and then the next, the next, and so on.  Beneath all of that is perhaps the worst of all her identities, that of Arya Stark of Winterfell.  The murderer who keeps a list of people to kill and dreams about doing so even in her sleep. 

[Daeron the Daring]

I like how there had constantly been a thread about this topic for the past 2 years and there are just people who can't accept anything other than their own radical views, on both ends.

[Jaenara Belarys]

4 hours ago, Daeron the Daring said:

I like how there had constantly been a thread about this topic for the past 2 years and there are just people who can't accept anything other than their own radical views, on both ends.

People are the most stubborn animals in the world. 

[James Arryn]

On 6/16/2022 at 11:09 AM, Odej said:

I've finally read the entire thread and now I'm laughing my ass out as I realized that everyone, literally everyone, who argues that Arya is a little psychopath murderous bitch is a Daenerys Stan. 

Well, I’m definitely not a Daenaerys Stan, and originally loved Arya, but I have been incredibly saddened by her descent into ~ effective psychopathy as a remorseless child murderer. 

[the trees have eyes]

44 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

Well, I’m definitely not a Daenaerys Stan, and originally loved Arya, but I have been incredibly saddened by her descent into ~ effective psychopathy as a remorseless child murderer. 

That's my reaction to Arya though I am more optimistic about her moral compass righting itself with better circumstances, or at least the absence of dangerous influences.  There's a tendency to exaggerate on the forums, e.g. Bran going Team Other, Dany being Aerys Mk2 rather than Rhaegar Mk2 (oh wait, The Show...), Sansa becoming LF Mk2, that lends to the most extreme interpretation.

Arya strikes me as more Beatrice Kiddo / Hit Girl (neither of whom I think insane) than Buffalo Bill / Eileen Wuornos.  But Braavos is a potential dark turn in her story: she is learning useful skills (for a violent world) and self-sufficiency but how she uses those in the future is in the balance.

[James Arryn]

56 minutes ago, the trees have eyes said:

That's my reaction to Arya though I am more optimistic about her moral compass righting itself with better circumstances, or at least the absence of dangerous influences.  There's a tendency to exaggerate on the forums, e.g. Bran going Team Other, Dany being Aerys Mk2 rather than Rhaegar Mk2 (oh wait, The Show...), Sansa becoming LF Mk2, that lends to the most extreme interpretation.

Arya strikes me as more Beatrice Kiddo / Hit Girl (neither of whom I think insane) than Buffalo Bill / Eileen Wuornos.  But Braavos is a potential dark turn in her story: she is learning useful skills (for a violent world) and self-sufficiency but how she uses those in the future is in the balance.

To me the murder of Daeron was a crucial descent. It was straight up murder, wrong on every level; legal, moral, ethical, and political. No one with modern sensibilities should defend it. It would be straight up murder with worrying indications if an adult did it. The fact that it was a child is deeply, deeply disturbing and I scratch my head wondering at the number of people who rationalize it. 
 

Legally, the NW is a questionable order of semi-slavery whose autonomy and authority over it’s members the 7K have agreed to. But Essos has not been consulted and there is absolutely no reason to suppose it’s writ extends there. Daeron was effectively a free man as soon as they arrived in Braavos. Anyone taking it upon themselves to meet out NW ‘justice’ beyond the 7K is pretty clearly a murderer from the legal pov. Forget, too, that Arya had incomplete knowledge and Daeron was given no opportunity to present a defence.

Suppose, for instance, that he had been ordered to pose as a drunken deserter ~ like Jon was with the wildlings. Improbable, but possible…as were many things beyond 11 year old Arya’s scope. Which (it pains me to have to say as it should be self-evident) is further reason 11 year olds should not be killing others they presume guilty of some crime. Ned killing the deserter at the beginning of the book was, as we readers know, morally ambiguous but done by the letter of the law. Arya didn’t even have that. Moreover, we only hear of lords in Westeros being given the authority to condemn deserters to death, not any relative. So even if Daeron had ‘deserted’ and been captured in the North there would seem to be no authority by which Arya could have undertaken to execute Daeron even there. In Braavos?

Moreover there are legal and political implications about his being in the NW at all. If we believe him…and generally we are seemingly supposed to believe most NW members about why they are there unless given clear indications otherwise…he was there because a woman out of his class had consensual sex with him. His being doomed to lifelong servitude for such an event is a perpetuation of despotic class supremacy we should not approve of. Now possibly he straight up raped the daughter of a high-lord, but if that occurred it’s imo unlikely he’d have survived the night. And someone would have to be either monumentally stupid or insane to do the equivalent of coming to Winterfell to play for Ned and then rape Sansa or similar, and Daeron seems very evidently neither. He also seems to be very much the cliche’d type of man whom noble women do welcome to their beds. 

So given that we have seen several other people sent to the NW simply for being a commoner who pissed off a noble, I think we can presume he was innocent of the crime for which he was ~ enslaved and, thanks to Arya, eventually killed. That’s just wrong any way you look at it.

And then you get back to part that most matters to us, the child Arya. Tough times make tough people, etc. and we are sadly supposed to be a bit numb to children having to kill to defend themselves. As the father of 2 year old twins, the idea that in 8 years my children might have to kill to stay alive could never be anything but monstrously tragic and disturbing. But Arya has gone well beyond killing to survive, she kills for a wide variety of reasons now, occasionally on a kind of whim, belongs to a murder cult and goes to sleep every night listing the people she wants to murder. How anyone can see that as anything but severely damaged and tragic baffles me. And we, inside her head, see very little in the way of remorse to begin with and none lately. That’s…bad. 
 

 

[Daeron the Daring]

4 hours ago, James Arryn said:

To me the murder of Daeron was a crucial descent. It was straight up murder, wrong on every level; legal, moral, ethical, and political. No one with modern sensibilities should defend it. It would be straight up murder with worrying indications if an adult did it. The fact that it was a child is deeply, deeply disturbing and I scratch my head wondering at the number of people who rationalize it. 

Strongly agree with you, but: I doubt it will end this way for her. 

[The Lord of the Crossing]

Arya doesn't deserve a happy ending after all she has done.  What she has become is the result of PTSD and her life choices.  Some kind of allowance for her suffering should be taken when judging her; however, she should not be given a happy ending.  It would suck if Arya gets away with it.  Arya and Jon should die in each other's arms in Winds of Winter and migrate into their direwolves.  That is what I believe is a fitting end for her. 

[Loose Bolt]

19 hours ago, James Arryn said:

To me the murder of Daeron was a crucial descent. It was straight up murder, wrong on every level; legal, moral, ethical, and political. No one with modern sensibilities should defend it. It would be straight up murder with worrying indications if an adult did it. The fact that it was a child is deeply, deeply disturbing and I scratch my head wondering at the number of people who rationalize it. 

When Daeron went rogue he became an outlaw. After all purpose of Men in Black is defend all realms of men so any watchmen who leaves his duties without permission becomes enemy of all men. So in my head canon Arya had right to kill him.

Besides in Westeros pedigree (blood) matters. So peasants can never legally sleep with any ladies. As "property" of her father even she did not had right to spoil her own value in marriage markets. So Daeron should had been happy that he could join to NW instead of being tortured to death.

Totally another thing is that we do know practically nothing about laws and how they are enforced in Braavos. So in my head canon people can do practically anything in there as long as they do not directly endanger any VIPs or their interests. Or nobody in B really cares about what happened to Daeron.

[James Arryn]

4 hours ago, Loose Bolt said:

When Daeron went rogue he became an outlaw. After all purpose of Men in Black is defend all realms of men so any watchmen who leaves his duties without permission becomes enemy of all men. So in my head canon Arya had right to kill him.

Besides in Westeros pedigree (blood) matters. So peasants can never legally sleep with any ladies. As "property" of her father even she did not had right to spoil her own value in marriage markets. So Daeron should had been happy that he could join to NW instead of being tortured to death.

Totally another thing is that we do know practically nothing about laws and how they are enforced in Braavos. So in my head canon people can do practically anything in there as long as they do not directly endanger any VIPs or their interests. Or nobody in B really cares about what happened to Daeron.

Braavos has laws. In fact the First Law of Braavos is no man, woman or child will ever be slave, thrall or bondsman. The latter is what Daeron was, until he stepped on Braavos, at which point his bond was nullified and he was a free man, murdered. 
 

edit: also, to clear up the concept of outlaw, that was a status that put you outside the law of the kingdom/principally/etc. in which you were so designated. It did not attach some special status that you carry with you everywhere, as those realms decide on their own laws. Calling it ‘the realms of men’ is sophistry, it is the 7K they protect and who abide by their writ. Beyond that they have no jurisdiction…that’s why outlaws often flee the realm in which they are outlawed, because outside same they are just like anyone else. That’s ‘running for the border’, if you like.

[the trees have eyes]

On 6/20/2022 at 2:37 PM, James Arryn said:

To me the murder of Daeron was a crucial descent. It was straight up murder, wrong on every level; legal, moral, ethical, and political. No one with modern sensibilities should defend it. It would be straight up murder with worrying indications if an adult did it. The fact that it was a child is deeply, deeply disturbing and I scratch my head wondering at the number of people who rationalize it. 
 

Legally, the NW is a questionable order of semi-slavery whose autonomy and authority over it’s members the 7K have agreed to. But Essos has not been consulted and there is absolutely no reason to suppose it’s writ extends there. Daeron was effectively a free man as soon as they arrived in Braavos. Anyone taking it upon themselves to meet out NW ‘justice’ beyond the 7K is pretty clearly a murderer from the legal pov. Forget, too, that Arya had incomplete knowledge and Daeron was given no opportunity to present a defence.

Suppose, for instance, that he had been ordered to pose as a drunken deserter ~ like Jon was with the wildlings. Improbable, but possible…as were many things beyond 11 year old Arya’s scope. Which (it pains me to have to say as it should be self-evident) is further reason 11 year olds should not be killing others they presume guilty of some crime. Ned killing the deserter at the beginning of the book was, as we readers know, morally ambiguous but done by the letter of the law. Arya didn’t even have that. Moreover, we only hear of lords in Westeros being given the authority to condemn deserters to death, not any relative. So even if Daeron had ‘deserted’ and been captured in the North there would seem to be no authority by which Arya could have undertaken to execute Daeron even there. In Braavos?

Moreover there are legal and political implications about his being in the NW at all. If we believe him…and generally we are seemingly supposed to believe most NW members about why they are there unless given clear indications otherwise…he was there because a woman out of his class had consensual sex with him. His being doomed to lifelong servitude for such an event is a perpetuation of despotic class supremacy we should not approve of. Now possibly he straight up raped the daughter of a high-lord, but if that occurred it’s imo unlikely he’d have survived the night. And someone would have to be either monumentally stupid or insane to do the equivalent of coming to Winterfell to play for Ned and then rape Sansa or similar, and Daeron seems very evidently neither. He also seems to be very much the cliche’d type of man whom noble women do welcome to their beds. 

So given that we have seen several other people sent to the NW simply for being a commoner who pissed off a noble, I think we can presume he was innocent of the crime for which he was ~ enslaved and, thanks to Arya, eventually killed. That’s just wrong any way you look at it.

And then you get back to part that most matters to us, the child Arya. Tough times make tough people, etc. and we are sadly supposed to be a bit numb to children having to kill to defend themselves. As the father of 2 year old twins, the idea that in 8 years my children might have to kill to stay alive could never be anything but monstrously tragic and disturbing. But Arya has gone well beyond killing to survive, she kills for a wide variety of reasons now, occasionally on a kind of whim, belongs to a murder cult and goes to sleep every night listing the people she wants to murder. How anyone can see that as anything but severely damaged and tragic baffles me. And we, inside her head, see very little in the way of remorse to begin with and none lately. That’s…bad. 

I agree with that, mostly.  I've made the same arguments against the murder of Daeron (and similarly regarding the murder of the Bolton guard at Harrenhall which boiled down to expediency).  What I don't see in her behaviour is the kind of straightjacket madness or psychotic murder of innocents which some seem to ascribe to her in these threads, e.g. "There is a congenital issue with Arya which made her susceptible to madness."

What she needs is a positive role model and I still hold out hope for her.

[Loose Bolt]

14 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Braavos has laws. In fact the First Law of Braavos is no man, woman or child will ever be slave, thrall or bondsman. The latter is what Daeron was, until he stepped on Braavos, at which point his bond was nullified and he was a free man, murdered. 

I assume that law has some exceptions and some people are always more equal than others. For instance soldiers, prisoners and poor has less actual rights than rich nobles. After all I am almost sure that sailors in navy can NOT leave their ships or soldiers in army their unit when their ships/military units are going to battle. Secondly it is very unlikely that somebody in Braavos could choose to not pay his debts. Or there must be some way to enforce those.

Or in my head canon B is a city where money talks and shit walks. So nobody in there cared what happened to Daeron.

[Quoth the raven,]

A positive role model!  She's not gonna find that among the Starks.  It's gonna take more than a role model to change her mind.  Advanced medication of our time and some serious psychotherapy along with prison time might help.  But those things are lacking in her world.  Arya is too defensive to benefit from talk therapy.  The poor psych will die from needle if he or she should say anything unflattering about her family.  Arya is so much worse in Dance than she was when she met the Dayne boy. She took offense when none was intended.  Nothing the boy said deserved an angry response.  Arya is a female version of Jon.  Very easy to anger.  Very short of fuse and explosive.