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Episode 75: A CLASH OF KINGS, ARYA I-III: "On the Road" SHOW NOTES!

Added 2019-08-21 04:19:21 +0000 UTC

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the seventy-fifth episode of the Not A Cast, entitled: “On the Road: An Analysis of ACOK, Arya I-III,” in which Arya Stark wanders the war-torn Riverlands with her new companions: kids who try to rob her, adults who threaten to kill her, and her guardian Yoren, who beats her. It’s...it’s just so much fun to make new friends. 

This episode is brought to you by our Small Council: 

Thank you councillors very much!

Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

Scarlett, the Other Red Woman and small council Mistress of Whisperers asks:

First off, I absolutely love the podcast and I can’t wait to get to A Clash of Kings, if only because it gets me closer to A Dance with Dragons :)
“The Lannisters are proud,” Jon observed. “You’d think the royal sigil would be sufficient, but no. He makes his mother’s House equal in honor to the king’s.” (ARYA I, AGOT)
I was going through the early chapters again, specifically Arya I, and thought it was interesting that Jon was the first to notice that Joffrey divided his arms which makes me wonder if this is subtle foreshadowing of Jon doing the same once his parentage is revealed. You both have commented that Jon’s initial reaction would be anger and while I don’t imagine that he will come to terms with this fact quickly, I do think that he will come to accept it. Knowing how much Jon wants to be a Stark, I could see him making “his mother’s House equal in honor” to the Targaryens. What do you guys think?

Synopsis

Here I am, on the road again.
Here I am, upon the stage
Here I go, playing Arya Stark again
Here I go, turn the page (to ACOK, Arya I-III)

When Arya was back at Winterfell, they called her “Arya Horseface”, and she hated it. Nothing worse. But now, that goddamn Lommy Greenhands calls her “Lumpyhead.” Now, Arya’s head did feel lumpy, and all. Back in King’s Landing, Yoren put a knife to Arya’s scalp, telling her that he was taking men and boys to the Wall.

Now you hold still, boy.

There was only stubble and uneven tufts of hair left when Yoren was done with her. Arya would need to become Arry, and why is that? Because Yoren was taking her back to Winterfell.

“Gate shouldn’t be hard, but the road’s another matter. You got a long way to go in bad company. I got thirty this time, men and boys all bound for the Wall, and don’t be thinking that they’re like that bastard brother o’ yours.”

Yoren had the pick of the dungeons from Lord Stark, and the guys he was bringing north were of poor moral quality, half willing to turn Arya over to Cersei, the other half willing to turn Arya over to Cersei after raping her. So, Arya need to go piss in the woods, away from everyone else. And she should watch her liquid intake.

Strangely, getting out of King’s Landing had been pretty easy. The Lannister guards waved them through after Yoren called one out by name. No one even looked at “Arry.” They were looking for Arya of Winterfell. 

Arya never looked back. She wished the Rush would rise and wash the whole city away. Flea Bottom and the Red Keep and the Great Sept and everything, and everyone too, especially Prince Joffrey and his mother.

But she knew that Sansa was in the city. So, she stopped wishing for that and started wishing for Winterfell instead.

Remember that thing about how Yoren said the pissing would be the hardest part for Arya? Unfortunately, not the case. Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the most difficult parts about her journey … so far. They were coming with Yoren for the promise of food and shoes at the Wall. But then there were others too. Three dudes who were going to the Wall who had been chained to the cage and were being wheeled north. One had no nose, the other had sharp, filed teeth and weeping sores. And the other … ah, well, we must leave some things for a future reveal.

Five wagons left King’s Landing with supplies for the Wall, towed by plow horses. Yoren had two horses and six donkeys for carrying the boys north. None of the men in the party gave a shit about Arya, but the boys were a different story.

“Look at that sword Lumpyhead’s got there. Where’s a gutter rat like Lumpy-head get him a sword?”

Arya chews her lip sullenly and stays quiet, not wanting to go to Yoren for help. Hot Pie puts in that maybe Arry is a lordling’s squire. Lommy doesn’t think it’s even a real sword. 

“It’s castle-forged steel, you stupid, and you better shut your mouth,” Arya snaps.

Well, now the boys want to know where Arya got the sword. Did she steal it? Arya shouts angrily that she didn’t steal it. Hot Pie gets close and tells Arya he wants the sword. She doesn’t even know how to use it. 

Yes I do, Arya could have said. I killed a boy, a fat boy like you, I stabbed him in the belly, and he died, and I’ll kill you too if you don’t let me alone.

But she won’t dare do that now. Arya figures there’s other killers in the group, and she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself. Lommy brays that Arya looks like she’s going to cry, but no. Arya had cried in her sleep the night before when she dreamed about Ned. But she’s not going to cry anymore. 

“He’s going to wet his pants.” Hot Pie says. 
“Leave him be.” 

Another voice. A tall boy with black hair, strong arms, a broad chest and a polished horned helm rides forward. But Lommy ain’t afraid. He hype-man’s Hot Pie, saying that Hot Pie kicked a boy to death. And Hot Pie says, yeah, he tooooooootally did that, kicking him in the balls till he died. So, give the sword up. Arya offers Hot Pie her practice sword, but Hot Pie ain’t about that. He tries to reach for the real sword, and Arya smacks the donkey Hot Pie is riding with his stick, sending the animal bucking. Hot Pie is knocked to the ground, and Arya comes vaulting off her and whacks Hot Pie in the face, breaking his nose. She turns to Lommy and asks if he wants some too. He doesn’t. He raises his hands and squeals at her to get away.

But then the Bull shouts “Behind you”, and Arya turns to see Hot Pie grabbing a rock to throw at her. She ducks from the rock, then flies at him, hitting his hand, cheek and knee. Hot Pie falls down, his face covered in blood and dirt. He stumbles after Arya, and then she lunges at him, pushing her wooden sword between his legs. 

Yoren mercifully shows up then and pulls Arya off, telling everyone to shut the fuck up and behave or Uncle Yoren will tie them to the back of the wagon with the real criminals. Yoren then proceeds to drag Arya away from the rest of the party into the woods. Dragging Arya away seems to be something of a character trait for Yoren, doesn’t it?

“If I had a thimble o’ sense, I would’ve left you in King’s Landing. You hear me, boy?”

He then tells Arya to go take her pants off and go wrap her arms around the trunk of the tree. 

“You scream now. You scream loud.”

Arya stubbornly says that she’s not gonna, but then Yoren takes a stick to her, and she screams as he hits her three times. Yoren warns her that the next time she goes after her brothers with a stick, she’ll get twice what they gave her. But Arya thinks that these people aren’t her brothers. 

Yoren asks if she’s hurt, and Arya thinks Calm as still water before saying that it hurt some. Yoren has it that the boy is hurting worse. But really, Arya, it’s not Hot Pie or Lommy that killed Ned. And beating the dogpiss out of them isn’t going to bring Ned back.

But as for Ned dying when and where he did, y’know, that shit wasn’t supposed to go down that way. Yoren was in the plaza, because a very random, who-could-know individual came to drop off a boy with him and a purse of coin, stating that Ned was going to take the black. So, that’s why he was there.

“Only something went queer.”
“Joffrey,” Arya breathed. “Someone should kill him.”

Yoren says that someone will probably kill Joffrey, but not the two of them. All the same, chew some sourleaf, and it’ll help with the pain that I just inflicted on you. The sourleaf did help, but it tasted like shit. But she still had to walk as her backside was too sore to ride a horse. Hot Pie, though, had to ride in a cart, whimpering whenever the wheels of the wagon hit a rock on the road. Lommy stayed away.

That night, she lays awake watching the Red Comet. And though “the Bull” had called it the Red Sword, Arya thinks that it looks like Ice: her father’s greatsword. And the red was the blood of Ned Stark: the blood that Ilyn Payne split. 

When Arya finally fell asleep, she dreams about Winterfell and how she wants to see her mom, Robb, Bran and Rickon again. But most of all she wants to see Jon Snow. Maybe she could go to the Wall first before Winterfell and have Jon call her “little sister” and tell her that he missed her. She would have liked that more than anything.

In the days that follow, Arya travels from break of dawn to dusk through the woods, orchards, field, towns, villages, market towns. They make camp at night with the red comet still overhead. But as the party journeys north, they begin to find the kingsroad crowded with more and more smallfolk coming south. On foot or atop horses and carts, the smallfolk move south towards King’s Landing, away from the war.

But a lot of these people were armed with knives, dirks, scythes and axes. They had clubs, and they grabbed the hilts of their weapons as the Night’s Watch passed by, but they never struck. But one day, a “mad” woman began screaming at them from the side of the road:

“Fool! They’ll kill you, fools!”

The next day, a merchant offered to purchase Yoren’s wagons for a quarter of their value, but Yoren refused him. The merchant said that “they” will take what they want from you. 

The same day, Arya sees her first grave, dug for a child (that makes me feel something). And though the boys wanted to take the crystal put on top of the mound, Bull said fuck, no. The problem was most of the successive days, they saw more graves along the side of the road. Hardly a day passed without the graves.

One night Arya woke up terrified for no good reason y’know besides all the graves and the prophetic sign of destiny flying in the sky above her. The world was quiet that night, and Arya feels as if the world were holding its breath. Mm-hm, George. I see that you watched Return of the King. 

The next morning, Praed, one of the men going north was found dead. She thinks about how the absence of Praed’s cough was why the night prior seemed to silent. They dug his grave and dispersed his goods among themselves. One of the boys tossed a handful of acorns on top of Praed’s body so that a mighty oak would grow in its place.

That night, the party arrives at a village, and Yoren decides they have enough money to stop by an inn to wash and have a hot meal. But Arya isn’t going to dare having people discover she’s a girl, even if she smells as bad as Yoren does. Arya heads to the common room for a meal.

Inside, the men and boys going north get a round on the house from the innkeeper as they feast on pork pies and baked apples. You see, the innkeeper had a brother who had been forced into the Night’s Watch after he stole pepper from a certain Ser Malcolm.

Arya sips beer and eats spoonfuls of the pie, remembering how she sometimes got to have beer with her father and how Sansa made faces at the taste. 

It made her sad to think of Sansa and her father.

The inn itself has lots of people who are coming south. When Yoren states that they’re going north, everyone tells him that he’ll be coming south soon enough. Half of the fields to the north are burned out, and most of the smallfolk left are holed up behind walls. When Yoren makes the case that Tully or Lannister means nothing to him, and that the Night’s Watch is neutral in any wars in the realm, the innkeeper tells Yoren that it’s more than just the riverlords or Lannisters. There’s wild men come down from the Mountains of the Moon, and they don’t care about “the Night’s Watch takes no part.” Besides, the Starks in #InIt2WinIt. Ned’s son has come down to fight too.

Arya perks up at that. A blonde patron says that Robb rides to battle on top of a wolf, but Yoren dismisses this. And the wolves? Yeah, there’s a lot of them around the God’s Eye these days. The packs are about killing livestock. And there’s one giant wolf, a she-bitch from the seventh hell. 

Arya wonders if that could be Nymeria. She thinks about how she and Jory had chased Nymeria off with rocks and shouts, and Arya feels bad that some of the rocks hit the wolf:

She probably wouldn’t even know me now, Arya thought. Or if she did, she’d hate me.

When one man says that the she-wolf stole a baby from its mother’s arms, Arya erupts and says that’s not true. Wolves don’t eat babies. Yoren orders her to go outside and see that the horses have been watered. Arya emerges outside in a fury, angry that people are stating such utter … um, falsehoods? Hm.

“Boy,” a friendly voice called out. “Lovely boy.”

The voice belongs to one of the men inside the cage. Arya approaches. The prisoner shows her his empty cup and asks if he could have some more beer. And what does this particular prisoner look like?

He was the youngest of the three, slender, fine-featured, always smiling. His hair was red on one side and white on the other, all matted and filthy from cage and travel.

A man asks for a bath and says that Arya could make a friend, to which Arya replies that she has friends. But then one of the other men in the cage, the one without a nose who’s covered in black hair, says that she has no friends. The bald one with the filed teeth hisses at Arya, and she flinches back, yelling at him to stop. 

The handsome younger man apologizes and says that he didn’t choose his companions in the black cells. He asks whether she’s called Arry, and introduces himself:

“This man has the honor to be Jaqen H’ghar, once of the Free City of Lorath. Would that he were home. This man’s ill-bred companions in captivity are named rorge and Biter.” 

When Jaqen asks if Arry is charmed by Biter not having the ability to speak or write, she says, uh, no. Jaqen says “A man must weep.” Rorge flings himself at the metal bars, yelling at Arya to get him some beer, but Arya tells him to shut up. She draws her wooden sword, resulting in Rorge threatening to sodomize her with the wooden sword. Arya steps towards the cage. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Biter jumps to his feet, rushing at Arya, but the chains hold him a foot and a half from her face. She hits him hard with her wooden sword.

Biter reels back, and then he gets up throwing all his weight against the chains. He reaches and reaches and reaches for her, but the chains hold tight. Finally, he subsides.

“A boy has more courage than sense,” the one who had named himself Jaqen H’ghar observed.

Arya edges back from the wagons, and another hand grabs her shoulder. She whirls around and finds herself face to face to with the Bull. He asks what she’s doing, tells her that no one should go near the men in the cages. Arya says she ain’t scurred, but the Bull is scared of them. He directs her away from the cage, and she lets him lead her. 

Away from the cage, Arya asks the Bull if he wants to fight, and he stares at her. Finally, he says that he’d hurt her. He’s strong.  But Arya says, nu-uh. She’s quick. The Bull draws Praed’s longsword which is not a metaphor for sex at all in ASOIAF.

They start to square off, but then Arya notices that the Bull is looking past her.

“What’s wrong?”
“Gold cloaks.” His face closed up tight.

Arya is in disbelief, but when she turns she sees that six gold cloaks are galloping up on them in black ringmail and golden cloaks. She uses the things that Syrio taught her and notices that the men have ridden hard. She grabs the Bull and drags him behind a hedge to his surprise. 

As soon as the gold cloaks rein up, they yell at some of Yoren’s boys waiting to take a bath whether they’re going to take the black. Maybe, they answer. But they’d rather join the gold cloaks than the Night’s Watch. It’s cold up on the Wall. The leader of the gold cloaks dismounts his horse and proffers a warrant, stating that they need to take someone back. But then Yoren steps out of the inn.

“Who is it that wants this boy?”

From behind the hedges, the Bull asks Arya why they’re hiding, and Arya says that they’re after her. Meanwhile, the officer says that the queen wants the boy, and it’s none of Yoren’s concerns. The Bull asks why they’d want Arry, but she tells him to shut it. Yoren takes hold of the warrant and then dismisses it. 

“Pretty,” he spit. “Thing is, the boy’s in the Night’s Watch now. What he done back in the city don’t mean piss all.”

The gold cloaks don’t give a damn about Yoren’s refusal. They want the boy. Arya thinks about running, but she knows she won’t get far. She was tired of running anyways. She ran when Meryn Trant killed Syrio. She ran when Ilyn Payne killed her father. She really should go out there with Needle in hand and kill all of them and never run away again.

Yoren stands there all stubborn saying that they’re not taking anyone, and that there’s laws about this sort of thing. The gold cloak then draw his sword.

“Here’s your law.”
Yoren looked at the blade. “That’s no law, just a sword. Happens I got one too.”

The gold cloak arrogantly states that he has five men with him, but Yoren says he’s got thirty. Bad odds, hombre. Still stupid, still arrogant, the gold cloak flashes his sword asking who wants some. And then each of the boys draws weapons and approaches, shouting that they’re first. Even Dobber, naked form his bath steps up with his dagger. Hell, even Hot Pie grabs a rock to throw.

Arya could not believe what she was seeing. She hated Hot Pie! Why would he risk himself for her?

The gold cloak laughs, probably extremely nervously, then tells them to put their weapons away. None of them know how which end of the sword to hold.

“I do!” Arya wouldn’t let them die for her like Syrio. She wouldn’t! Shoving through the hedge with Needle in hand, she slid into a water dancer’s stance.

The gold cloak officer calls Arya a girl and says to put the blade away, but Arya yells that she’s not a girl. 

“I’m not a girl!” she yelled, furious. What was wrong with them. They rode all this way for her, and here she was and they were just smiling at her. “I’m the one you want.”

The gold cloak officer points his shortsword towards the Bull. “He’s the one we want.” But that was a mistake. Yoren unsheathes his sword and holds it to the gold cloak’s throat. 

“Neither’s the one you get, less you want me to see if your apple’s ripe yet. I got me ten, fifteen more brother in that inn, if you still need convincing. I was you, I’d let loose of that gutcutter, spread my cheeks over that fat little horse and gallop on back to the city. Now.”

The gold cloak drops his sword, and Yoren says they’re keeping it for the Wall. All the gold cloaks mount up, stating that they’ll be gone for now, but they’ll be back. And they’ll take Yoren and the bastard boy’s head.

“Better men than you have tried.”

Yoren slaps the rump of the officer’s horse, and the gold cloaks head on back south down the kingsroad. 

When they’re gone, Yoren angrily tells everyone they’ll be back, and they need to mount up and MOVE. He offers the gold cloak sword, and Hot Pie wants it. He gets it, but Yoren warns him not to use the sword on Arry. Yoren turns to the Bull and tells him that the Queen wants him bad. 

Arry was lost. “Why should she want him?”
The Bull scowled at her. “Why should she want you? You’re nothing but a little gutter rat!”
“Well, you’re nothing but a bastard boy!” Or maybe he was only pretending to be a bastard boy. “What’s your true name?”
“Gendry,” he said, like he wasn’t quite sure.

Yoren distracts everyone and says that he’s not sure why the Queen wants either of them. Regardless, they’re going to ride like the dragon’s on their tail. He gives Arya and Gendry the two coursers. Arya says that they gold cloaks promised to take Yoren’s head too which provokes a grunt and Yoren to say:

“Well as to that, if he can get it off my shoulders, he’s welcome to it.”

As they move farther north, Arya takes note that the kingsroad was little more than two ruts through the weeds. There were less people though; so, the narrowing of the road, not at all foreshadowing things to come, didn’t matter all that much.

But it did matter that the road went back and forth like a snake, sometimes even disappearing entirely before reappearing across rolling hills, terraced fields, meadows, woodlands and valleys. It’s nice terrain even with a crooked path. But Arya kept looking over her shoulder, watching for the gold cloaks.

That sense that she was being followed, led to her waking up at all times in the night at every noise. And now Yoren put sentries out to watch for things that might creep up on them at night. But Arya didn’t trust them. They were city boys in the country, and they were lost out here. Besides, Arya could sneak past them, using the starlight to guide her path at night. Hell, one night, she even climbed up an oak tree when Lommy was on watch and got right over his head, and he saw nothing.

Arya reflects on Gendry and how everyone thought he was special now because Cersei wanted him dead, but Gendry isn’t having any of that.

“I never did nothing to no queen. I did my work is all. Bellows and tongs and fetch and carry. I was s’posed to be an armorer and one day Master Mott says I got to join the Night’s Watch, that’s all I know.

Then he’d go jerk off, er, polish his helm while Arya, um, watched.

Lommy thinks that Gendry is a bastard, probably Ned Stark’s bastard, but Arya corrects him angrily. Ned only had Jon as a bastard. More than ever, Arya wants to dash off on top of a horse, but she realizes that no one would be able to protect her. There’s be no one to watch her back.

It was safer to stay with Yoren and the others.

One morning, Yoren announces that they’re close to the God’s Eye, and that they won’t be safe until they cross the Trident. He plans to take them up the western shore as he imagines that the gold cloaks will probably think they’ll head up the kingsroad. 

Heading west, the terrain changes. The farmlands became forests with smaller villages and holdfasts farther apart. And food was harder to find. Sure, Yoren had packed lots of food for the trip, but they had eaten it all by now. So, he sent two men (Koss and Kurz) to hunt while the boys picked berries. Arya once found a rabbit, killed it and brought it back. She got to eat a leg of rabbit that night which only prompted Rorge to laugh and call her “Lumpyface Lumphead Rabbitkiller.” Lovely.

Once, the party had been surrounded by fieldhands who demanded payment for ears of corn they picked, and Yoren angrily paid them.

“Time was, a man in black was feasted from Dorne to Winterfell, and even high lords called it an honor to shelter him under their roofs. Now cravens like you want hard coin for a bite of wormy apple.”

But the men had only called them “stinking old black birds” and told them to get lost. And though they roasted the corn in their husks, and that the corn tasted great, Yoren was angry -- too angry to eat. 

The following day, word came from their forward scouts of a camp ahead of twenty to thirty dudes. The banner was a spotted treecat. Yoren doesn’t know which side they’re a part of, but he decides to take the party the long way around them, costing them two days. More and more, Arya notices more guards and armed men in the fields, protecting their crops. Others patrolled on horses. Another time, Arya sees a man perched up in a tree with a bow. Yoren cursed at him when he drew his bow and watched them go past.

And then things get even worse:

A day later Dobber spied a red glow against the evening sky. “Either this road went and turned again, or that sun’s setting in the north.”

Yoren climbs a tree to check it out and says that it’s fire, but they’ll be okay so long as the wind is carrying it away from them. They watch the fire all the same, and Arya begins to smell smoke. That night, the fire grows brighter and brighter, and even though the fire is gone the next day, no one sleeps well. 

Yoren and his boys arrive at a village the next day where the fire had been and find a desolation of burned fields and blackened houses. Dead livestock are all around, and human bodies are impaled on sharpened stakes with hands drawn up tight in front of their faces as if to fight off the flames that had consumed them.

Yoren orders a halt and heads in scout out while leaving Arya and Gendry to guard the wagons. When they emerge, they bring a little girl and a woman. The girl was maybe two years old at most, and the woman had lost most of her arm, always whispering Please, please. Yoren put the woman in the wagon, and the atmosphere is tense and scary.

Arya and Hot Pie confess how scared they are to each other, and Hot Pie even admits that he never kicked any boy to death. He just sold pies. Arya rides far ahead of the wagon to avoid hearing the woman’s please, please or the little girl’s cries. She remembers a story about a man imprisoned by giants who fled the castle only to be taken by the Others. 

The woman dies that night, but even after they bury her, Arya still thinks she can hear please, please on the wind. Yoren orders no fire to be built that night, which yeah. But that means their meals are going to be dry beans, wild radishes and a funny-tasting water which Lommy insists tastes funny because of the bodies upstream. Arya drinks too much of the water anyways to fill her stomach.

In the middle of the night, Arya wakes up need to piss bad, real bad. She grabs Needle and moves out into the dark. She passes by Hot Pie on sentry duty who warns her that there are wolves about. She pretends to head back to go to sleep, but instead, she just waits for Hot Pie to move on. Then she heads out another way. 

Out in the trees, she lowers her breeches and begins pissing when she hears a noise. She thinks it’s Hot Pie at first, but then she sees eyes shining in the wood “bright with reflected moonlight.” She grabs for Needle, but then more eyes appear. A dozen pairs of eyes. A whole pack. One wolf emerges from the treeline, and Arya thinks it’s curtains for her. But then the wolf turns and runs back into the woods, and the rest of the eyes disappear.

Arya cleans herself up and then moves back to the camp to find Yoren. There, she tells him about the wolves and recounts the story of Nymeria and what would have happened if she brought the direwolf back to Castle Darry. But if she did bring the direwolf back, maybe then her dad wouldn’t have been killed. But Yoren has it that all the boys on this road are orphans. But then he reflects on which wolves they really should fear:

“The only wolves we got to fear are the ones wear manskin, like those who done for that village.”

Arya wishes she was home. She really was trying to be brave, but she was scared. Yoren, still in deep reflection mode, talks about how he’s only lost three men going up to the Wall in the past thirty years. And now? Now it feels more dangerous. 

Yoren sends Arya to bed, and she hears the wolves howling. But that’s not all she hears.

She could hear the wolves howling … and another sound, fainter, no more than a whisper on the wind, that might have been screams.

And that is ACOK, Arya I-III.

George is taking his time to do a ton of setup and groundwork for Arya’s ACOK arc. By the time we’re at Arya’s third ACOK chapter, Dany, Theon and Davos have yet to have a single chapter. So, what does that mean for Arya’s arc going forward and what is George communicating especially given what he did with Arya in AGOT?

Depth

Arya had the fewest chapters of any POV in book one, and while her characterization certainly came through strongly, her role in the big picture didn’t as much. After the sudden traumatic break with which her story in AGOT ends, her arc is wide open. Where do you go from there?

The clue is in her nickname. Not “Horseface,” the other one--Underfoot. So much of A Clash of Kings focuses on the civil war through the lens of the royal courts: Dragonstone, Winterfell, Riverrun, King’s Landing itself. We watch all the various intrigues therein unfold: intricate threats, feints and counter-feints, larger-than-life figures moving pieces around on the board.

Arya’s chapters are where we see how it feels to be one of the pieces. Her story in both ACOK and ASOS is about the fallout from the clashing kings, as it reverberates down to devastate the poor and the powerless. While Tyrion seizes control of King’s Landing, Arya trudges north through the city’s shadow. While Catelyn rides from the Riverlands to the Reach and the Stormlands and back under heavy escort, her safety never really in question, Arya is set upon by soldiers flying the crown’s banner who kill her smallfolk companions for no reason other than that they can. While Stannis and Renly argue about whose crown is bigger, Arya watches the people of the realm they both claim to rule raped and tortured and murdered on the orders of Gregor Clegane, an anointed knight. At every turn, her chapters work to strip down the pretensions of those set among the lords and ladies, and there’s a real anger in that contrast. This is where George most directly makes the case that the game is rigged.

And from what I gather, he started to make this case before he closed AGOT. If you all will recall from some of our prior episodes, ACOK was never intended to be a book until GRRM overwrote AGOT by some 300-400 manuscript pages. One of the reasons why we chose to combine these 3 chapters is that they feel like leftover material from AGOT that GRRM cut to ACOK. Here’s a very meta, in the weeds sort-of theory. I think these three chapters were once one chapter back in AGOT, but then when GRRM decided on making a “four book trilogy”, he ended up letting the narrative expand (or creep depending on your POV -- we’ll talk about that). 

That being said, I think the expansion of Arya’s single chapter into three chapters is a net positive for the story. Not to reference the now long-dead pitch letter too much now that we’re in ACOK, but the story George originally wanted to tell reads a bit standard. Kings fight, people die, Dany invades, war against the Others. All well and good, but the expansion of the story as seen in these 3 Arya chapters captures something that often gets left out of fantasy storytelling: what war is like for the non-combatants. Like the camera staying with Bran as Robb departs Winterfell back in AGOT, Bran VI, the camera staying with Arya as she enters a war zone, the growing sense of danger and doom just to the north shows readers the real impact of a war that the noble classes claim is about crowns, lands, gold or justice and how it crushes the innocent underfoot. Hey wait, Arya Underfoot ...

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

Sadly, this is not the only time someone tries to take Needle away from Arya. Polliver steals it later in this book and keeps it until the end of ASOS, when Sandor kills him and Arya takes it off his corpse. When she arrives in Braavos, the Faceless Men try to get her to surrender the sword voluntarily. You can see George working his way to the idea that “Needle was Jon Snow’s smile,” that the sword stands in for all her wistful memories of Winterfell and family (sorry, D&D!)

Biter's Untold Backstory!

Rorge owned a pot shop or bar in Flea Bottom, the really bad part of King's Landing. Rorge would stage rat fights, and dog fights, bear cub fights, etc., and make money of these fights. At some point he found young Biter, a big ugly kid with no parents or something like that, and took him in. Rorge starting putting Biter into the fights, fighting mastiffs and bear cubs, etc. And then he said something like "And all of this led to his winning personality! So there you go, that's the backstory for Biter that I haven't written yet, but I might!"

Arya and Gendry squaring off against each other outside of the inn reads as foundation for Gendarya. Swordplay as a metaphor for sex as seen in Jaime and Brienne’s chapters, Brandon Stark’s words to Lady Dustin, etc.

The random person who came to Yoren with a bag of gold and a boy is very likely Varys, as he tells Tyrion in ACOK, Tyrion II:

"Alas, no. There was another bastard, a boy, older. I took steps to see him removed from harm's way . . . 

Theory/Discussion

Will Arya and Nymeria meet again?? Ok, yes, obviously. But how will it go?

In 2014, George made an appearance on behalf of the Wild Wolf Sanctuary in which he hinted at a future for Arya and Nymeria:

"Wolves have been part of European folklore, of which America's descended, going back thousands of years. In Rome, Romulus and Remus — there's always been this relationship between wolves and men."

That relationship is seen time and again in Martin's series, and it's one that will Martin says will continue as the last two books are eventually released. Arya's wolf, Nymeria, in particular, will play an important role.

"You know, I don't like to give things away." says Martin, a grin spreading across his face. "But you don't hang a giant wolf pack on the wall unless you intend to use it."

Conclusion


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