Yeah, I get that, but come on - at some point there has to be a moral boundary that even the smallest of smallfolk are not willing to comply with. Even amidst the Bloody Mummers, Bolton distinguished himself in senseless cruelty, and his men followed suit.

Could that postern guard have been one of the good ones - a man who secretly wept over what he witnessed in Harrenhal, but made no effort to stop it, nor abandon the den of such atrocities for fear that he would be hunted down and severed of his feet, or that his family back home would be brutalized for his desertion. Maybe... I guess we'll never know.

LEAVE ARYA ALONE OK

I don't think it's that troubling that Arya kills the guard. It's impressive that she understood the need to GTFO of Harrenhal, and I don't fault her for steps she took to escape being trapped like a lamb in a murder castle.

The troubling element, as touched on in the podcast, is the lack of impact this murder has on Arya. She approaches it clinically and lets it roll off her like a handshake. I get that she's traumatized, I get that she's furious, and I understand that she's been conditioned to treat life as expendable. But I still think it's objectively troubling that Arya kills a man in cold blood and doesn't spare it a second thought, and it's a trend that Arya continues to perpetrate through her storyline.

I concur that Arya should not be dismissed under the blanket label of sociopath or psychopath and that we should definitely continue to invest in and attempt to understand her. I'm not familiar enough with the diagnosis for a sociopath to make that assertion, and I doubt GRRM intends us to. However, part of understanding her is to acknowledge the profound and dehumanizing trauma she is forced to endure. Obviously it is not her fault to be in such situations, but seeing what she sees and doing what she does will invariably have a dramatic affect on the mental state and formed worldview of a child. We can hope and root for her to maintain her humanity in the cycle of violence that she's wrapped up in. I think it is slightly naive, however, to think that a kid can do these things and then just grow up and move on with their lives. Some lasting damage to the "soul" will have occurred. I understand that it is a fantasy world and all of the characters experience extreme circumstances, but Arya appears to be on a particularly dark path. Yes, adult characters also do terrible things and I am willing to grant that they are shaped and scarred by them as well.

I still have sympathy for her and understand why she does what she does, but I no longer view her as a scrappy bright-eyed rapscallion that she once was. Witnessing torture, rape, war, and unceasing cruelty would affect anyone, especially children. Actually killing people face to face must be a powerful experience. When you add in magical face changing and professional lying and deception, then you have a potent concoction for dramatically altering and reshaping a lonely little girl. I don't know where the story leads and I don't see Arya as a monster, I also don't see her living happily ever after surrounded by friends and family with Needle mounted over the mantelpiece.

Very well said.

She's a traumatized child soldier, which is upsetting, but not a sociopath

I think that this is the case because she is presented to us as a nice girl who is put in increasingly bad situations and that endears her to us becaue she survives the hard way but that does not excuse anything bad that she does ultimately, and that is my stance with all the characters and what I'd hate to see is people swearing that she is right in doing something irredeemable possibly in the future, just because she gets revenge or what she thinks would give her gratification and we have to be mindful of the fact that all that motivates her is the desire to kill people who have no idea she even exists in some instances and I would be ok with that if the readership was aware of the fact that her wish is immoral, illegal and only destructive and I don't know if I want to cheer for that.

One of the few characters who has not done anything bad so far is Rickon ironically so if the Starks need a comeback, I think Rickon has at the moment more moral integrity than Arya because she has killed both out of passion and in totally emotional dead fashion. it's easy to throw away your humanity out of anger, it's hard to keep your moral code intact and so far Arya has not succeeded there for me, contrary to Sansa for whom survival was always the idea and who has achieved that by playing it relatively safe but at least she has retained her innocence mostly because so far she has not resorted to cold-blooded murder.

The injustices to the Stark family happened, they are completely right in wanting revenge but they cannot be allowed to act on these feelings because a social contract in the abstract would not be possible were we to allow murder out of thirst for vengeance and so far revenge has not really worked out for anyone. Unless the readers have given up on the kingdoms altogether endorsing murderers is not what I want to do. It's intesting to read but I don't agree with Arya's choices at all.

I really hate this idea that Arya is 'dead inside' and doesn't care about people or the things she does. She worries constantly about her mother not accepting her if she found out the things she has done. She looks after Weasel. She talks to people and cares about what happens to them. She thinks about her family constantly. As we get further along that starts to change but her whole storyline is about struggling with her identity and her choices. She has empathy for other people - some of that starts to be stripped away as a survival mechanism as the story goes along I agree but still. Arya particularly has sympathy and empathy for other women. She has Chiswyck killed because she hears of his participation in a gang rape.

This whole idea that she just kills people without remorse just doesn't stack up for me. I'm not saying I agree with every one of her actions but quite frankly if I had been through what Arya had I wouldn't cope nearly as well. It's morally complicated, but frankly so is every other character in this series.

All of the Stark kids have had to face some tough survival decisions, their choices are influenced by their environment. That's not to say Arya should have no culpability for her actions but seriously.

I guess it depends on how you interpret the final line of the chapter - "the rain will wash them clean again." To me, that always felt like Arya attempting to rationalise her actions, like "I've just done something really murky here, but if I push it to the back of my mind and try to forget about it, everything will be okay... won't it?" I definitely get how you could read it the other way, but she still show such compassion towards people throughout the first half of book 3, that the denial/repression route seems more plausible. And denial tends to be a big obstacle for most characters coming to terms with their past sins (certainly Jaime and Theon).


I still think she'll abandon the Faceless Man. Obviously she'll never go back to the way she was, but the fact that she keeps Needle hidden, and continues to have wolf dreams, seems to indicate that she's being pulled increasingly back into her Stark identity. There's echoes of it with a few other characters, like the way Dany tries to bury her Targaryen-ness in the catacombs beneath Meereen, before being forced to confront it again, when Drogon emerges in the fighting pits. I think Arya and Sansa will end up in the same room somehow, and that'll be the moment.

Realistically though, what effort could he make? I don't suppose Roose Bolton deals very kindly with conscientious objectors. I'm not suggesting the guy was a secret saint or anything - he was probably no better or worse than most of the other ordinary soldiers involved in the war - but I don't think he automatically deserves death just for who he serves (that said, regardless of what the guardsman actually deserved, I don't think Arya had a great deal of choice - a situation like this is more a question of live or die rather than right or wrong).

Regarding Arya and empathy, don't forget she is also saving Gendry and Hot Pie at this point, so it's clear she does still care about people she sees as her friends.

Rickon is totally my favourite Stark, but he does warg into a very angry wolf which eats people, so I'm not too sure what that says about his moral integrity

Arya is on the wrong side of the normal/sociopath bell curve.
Sorry.

We are blaming the murder victims now?

No, but being a child soldier is NOT being a sociopath. She is desensitized and traumatized, she may in fact have lost a great deal of her capacity for empathy and regret, but that doesn't make her someone who was doomed from birth to be a dangerous lunatic. The distinction is one worth making.

I'm not necessarily blaming her victim (though the "I was just following orders" defense has its limits, in my opinion), I'm questioning why this act carries such a different diagnosis than the dozens of similar (usually much worse) acts carried out by Jaime, Theon, Dany, Jon, etc. throughout the war.

If Jon had been captured by a bunch of wildlings, and he slit one of their throats to escape (and failed to dwell on it), would we label him a sociopath? No. But because of Arya's age and gender, she is fundamentally tainted in the eyes of many book-readers (even this early in the series).

There is a moral and legal difference between uniformed combatants waging war and murder.


Is the Bolton man carrying out an illegal order by guarding a gate or selling insurance? Why is he guilty until proven innocent?

She was not doomed from birth she actively sought her path.

How was Bran a uniformed combatant? Or those miller's boys? Or the aristocrats whose guts Dany dribbled over the walls of Meereen?

The armed and armored guard who Arya killed might not have been her lawful enemy (though he would eventually become so, I suppose, once he turned his cloak at the Twins), but he served a man who was Arya's enemy in every moral sense there is (a man who butchered people who surrendered to him, and clapped girls in irons for his soldiers to gang rape).

And again, I ask, what other choice did Ayra have - to stay and suffer the hospitality of Rorge and the Bloody Mummers? Had she remained in Harrenhal to die a slow, miserable death, would her soul have been saved?

You are making it about Jaime and Theon and Dany for some reason I don't fully comprehend.

Bran represents a clear and present mortal danger to Jaime.
The same way the stable boy does to Arya in King's Landing.
Bran's spying means the inevitable execution of Cersei, Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen. The very real potential for the ruin of House Lannister.
Not saying it's right. It is not. But this is not some theoretical discomfort of spending more time at Harrenhal under a different Lord.

Theon is directly responsible for the murder of the miller's children.
His conquest of Winterfell is conducted under what I would consider the laws of war.

Dany is a war criminal same as Roose et al.

Because, as I've said, Arya seems to be labelled a sociopath for what I would argue is a far more understandable crime than those characters.


Oh, come on. Arya's death in Harrenhal was far more inevitable than the ruin of House Lannister because of what Bran stumbled across. She learns the Lannisters would be returning soon in force, and that Roose would be leaving her under the care of the Mummers. She sees the heads on the walls and the girls in the stockyards, Arnabel threatens to rape her with a splintered broom, Biter sniffs at her as she passes, and she feels Rorge's eyes "crawling over her" all the time. Jaqen was the only one protecting her, and now he is gone.

And even on the microscopic chance that the Mummers left her alive, the Lannisters would surely execute her for helping with the mutiny. It was a row of dominoes lined up perfectly against her. We see what becomes of Harrenal under Hoat, and then Gregor. We see what Rorge and Biter do at the Saltpans. That would have been Arya. How can you call that "theoretical discomfort"?

Because that is what it is and she has any number of paths to alleviate her situation that do not include the remorseless cold blooded murder of an innocent.

Such as?

Slip out an undefended part of the comically largest most disorganized and undermanned castle in the history of castles.

Trick the guard to leave his post temporarily.

People calling Arya a sociopath - that means having no empathy. Which is not what Arya is at all. I'm glad that people are being more critical about their Arya feelings but this is a bit much for me. Each to their own though obviously.

http://www.psi.uba.ar/academica/carrera ... al/dsm.pdf

In part -



Was there remorse for the Bolton guard or insurance agent that I missed?

If it is a bell curve and not binary, I think it is difficult to argue that Arya is not on the wrong end of the curve and trending worse.

I am definitely not saying that Arya killing people is awesome or that it shouldn't be something that is morally troubling. Because it absolutely is. But I also think she is a 9 year old girl increasingly exposed to and desensitised to violence and that does things to people. That's also not to deny her agency and say she doesn't have choices in how she reacts.

Basically I just think it's complicated. Arya is my favourite character so I am probably over sensitive to criticism of her. I love Sansa but she was never placed in the same kind of situations as Arya.

If I was a traumatised abused girl given the same kind of power as Jaqen gives Arya I probably would have done a lot worse.

I definitely think Arya is becoming a darker character. But to argue that killing people and associating that with survival as a child soldier (which is essentially what she is and or is becoming) is mutually exclusive with compassion and empathy seems odd and to me not an accurate reading of her character. I don't wants to take over the whole thread with this discussion but Arya demonstrates empathy and compassion for others so many times in these books. This doesn't mean I'm condoning all of her actions by the way but her actions have seemed understandable to me given the context of her experiences. Yes in the abstract I think killing is wrong but the context is also important here.

Not to get all 'tumblr overthinking' on this but to act like the actions of the oppressed (Arya lives as a member of the smallfolk from book 2 even though she technically isn't one) is equivalent to the actions of actual oppressors doesn't quite work for me to be honest.

I thought this summed up my feelings on this pretty well: http://donewithwoodenteeth.tumblr.com/post/63635627256/arya-stark-and-compassion

She wrestles a lot with this option, and concludes that, even if he is a Northmen, Bolton cannot be trusted, because [Exhibit A]: everything he does or says is monstrous. And as it turns out, Arya's instincts were correct. She would have ended up being his prisoner, to be married off to Ramsay most like. Assuming of course, he even believed this declaration, and did not scoop out her eyeballs with being insolent.


Well, that's exactly what they did. They used the postern behind the Tower of Ghosts, the least visible, least guarded, and smallest of the castle gates. It only had one guard. I don't know what other option there was for the gang to take, short of digging under the wall with a shovel, or climbing over it with grappling hooks, but then the sentries would just see them. Harrenhal may be large, but Bolton still has enough men to post guards at its openings, and sentries along its towers and parapets. The difficulty people refer to is more about maintaining the castle during a siege, when its vast walls can be assailed from many different points at once.


She contemplates this as well. Had it been a Frey or a Mummer, she might have tried. But this one one of Bolton's own men, and she judged that he would see through any ruse (get it! ). Attempting to incapacitate him was also out of the question, since any cry would have roused the sentries stationed in the nearby Tower of Ghosts.

A sociopath is unable to display any empathy, towards anyone. Arya is often able to display empathy, usually to higher degree than most other characters (especially when it comes to the smallfolk). The article Maddy posted offers some choice examples:


In hindsight, she's probably one of the most inherently compassionate characters.

To the best of my understanding that is a completely inaccurate statement.

Robert Hare's 1999 definition of a psychopath is someone who has no sense of empathy or morality, whereas the sociopath in his eyes is someone whose conception of right and wrong is the main thing that sets them apart from the average person. hence, Arya would be more pof a psychopath at this stage, seing as she has lost her empathy and has a twisted view of morality, whereby killing is used to solve most issues in her life, hence why she killed daeron when she personally had no need to do so, as that would have been sam's duty and Westerosi laws wouldn't apply in Braavos anyway.

To be quite honest people playing armchair psychologist with fictional characters kind of annoy me a bit. Yes these are very realistic fleshed out characters but they are also characters. Applying labels doesn't seem like an interesting way to look at a character a lot of the time.