Velvet Mirrors

Why is it so important to some people to prove that Arya , who starts the series as a nine years old kid, is ugly? Even setting aside that canon dictates otherwise (Ned Stark, Lady Smallwood etc), why you are so fixated on this superficial aspect? Out of all the interesting points about her, your favourite topic is her supposed "lack of beauty"?

Mind you, this is just a sample of how the “stop obsessing over a child’s appearance and let Arya be ugly!” crowd reacts when Sansa is fan-casted as anyone they don’t consider stunning lmao

arya and ned with their younger sibling insecurity. even over a decade after brandon's death ned still feels bitterness about it. not unlike arya's own resentment. they both have one older sibling of the same gender who better embodies the expectation of a man and girl, respectively, in westeros. brandon was taller, more handsome and a better swordsmen than ned. in ned's own words he "always" knew what to do. sansa is beautiful and ladylike. she excels at the creative arts and courtesy that arya struggles to perform.

they were both set up for greatness. brandon as heir to winterfell. sansa as the prince's betrothed and future queen.

until brandon was killed and ned inherited it all. he was forced to step up despite being the second son who never asked for it to pass to him. arya is the second daughter and i think she will have to do the same and assume a similar role just like her father in the end. she might not feel entirely prepared for it either because she spent so long negatively comparing herself to another, but she will have to all the same.

when Arya returns to the North after having destroyed the Lannisters relationship with the Iron Bank of Braavos, walking around with a giant ass direwolf and said direwolf’s giant ass wolf pack on her heels, astral projecting into animals and practicing blood magic, all with Robb’s crown in her hands with her undead mother’s full blessing 

another round of "arya is ugly" discourse and fanart in the tags where sansa has milky white skin but arya is several shades darker in the same day

Notice how the "looks don't matter" crowd never say anything about Stansas who compile every moment she's called beautiful and salivate over it, even though a lot of said moments are coming from predators? Notice how they never talk about Arya being bullied for her looks or characters making judgments based on looks as a negative? Notice how they never talk about people in fandom thinking of characters as less important for being ugly? No, they only ever come out when it's time to misinterpret Arya and claim her stans are obsessed with looks for pointing out what's in the books

arya underfoot is my fave sobriquet in asoiaf. i love love love it. arya is “dubbed” underfoot by her father’s men. its a sign of affection between the men who served the starks and arya who took in interest in them. she had a close relationship with all of the people in winterfell and this name is an enduring part of that.

arya says fat tom came up with the name. its one of the last things hullen says with his dying breath. when his son harwin recognizes arya its what he calls her while holding back tears. even in adwd jon and theon both think of her as arya underfoot.

its a name arya likes which is why its frequently used in contrast with horseface - a name that made her feel like an outsider. arya underfoot, though, is a gesture of arya being embraced by her community. it really feels like the truest essence of her character.

#that it's earned and not handed to her for being a stark but for her active interest and care for the lives of the ppl in her community <3 (tags via @insomniarama)

lets hear it for jory cassel who lied to both his king and his lord to protect arya's wolf. he kept his word to arya underfoot <3

"Sansa = Ned 2.0 and Arya = Catelyn 2.0" is one of those takes where you can just tell people are more attached to the aesthetic than anything. "The Stark girls are most like the parent they look least like" sounds good on paper and people run with the idea, regardless of how it actually fits into the story. A majority of the justification relies on misinterpreting all of their characters + a healthy dose of fanon. What gets me is that this is the same fandom that insists that Lyanna, only compared to Arya in the text, is equal parts Arya and Sansa but Ned and Catelyn, two fully fleshed-out and complex characters, have to be more like one girl or the other? There's just nothing in the story to justify being so adamant about these comparisons. Arya and Sansa have parallels with both of their parents but at the end of the day, they are unique characters with their own stories. I'll never understand why people want to flatten these complex characters down to their most basic tropes and fit them into restrictive boxes just for a "poetical~" comparison.

#notice how these takes never come with actual evidence from the books to make direct comparisons from the text?#/ned is a gentle quiet poitican/ and he physically attacks someone + constantly shows his frustration and voicing his opinions#our first introduction to him is him executing a man and we know he's done so several times that year#he says that his toddler son needs to grow up and stop being afraid of a giant wolf cause /winter is coming/ and Northern life is hard 😭#/Cat is a feral wild woman/ and her chapters are full of her holding her tongue and trying to mediate situations#people literally switch their characterizations cause the second a woman shows emotion she's /feral/#and a man can be the most wild unhinged character ever and still be /kind/ and /gentle/#like yeah fanon sansa is fanon ned 2.0 and fanon arya is fanon cat 2.0 but their actual characters are more complex then that#the only valid /2.0/ comparison is between Lyanna and Arya but somehow she gets split between Arya and Sansa 🥴#my hourly frustration at this fandom not caring about the story and only being here for /the vibes~/#like Ned hates Tourneys and protests one as a waste of resources while Sansa is planning a Tourney and using resources while winter#is arriving and smallfolk are going hungry...but she's Ned 2.0? Where? How? Huh?#And yeah Ned deals with politics in KL but that's relatively a small aspect of his character#and even him constantly speaking his mind and challenging Robert directly is the exact opposite of Sansa's approach 😭#/courtesy is a Lady's armor/ vs. /I'm gonna tell Robert he's an idiot right to his face/ oh yeah totes the same#Arya is the character following his advice and guidance for a reason just saying#like if Sansa was doing the same I could see it but she..isn't? Her approach is much closer to Catelyn's than Ned's#I don't understand why people have all of the sudden decided that the Sansa/Cat parallels are shallow when they're#very similar characters and Sansa's current plot actually revolves around that fact#obviously they're not exactly alike but no two characters are or even meant to be...their comparisons are still very valid#tired of being expected to accept an idea just because enough people repeat it

The “Can I be a king’s councillor and build castles” to “Lady of Winterfell and helping to rebuild the North after the Long Night” pipeline is real

#i simply think the character that has lived and worked and suffered with the smallfolk at the hands of the crown’s violence#and has personally experienced starvation and poverty and traveled and worked with the smallfolk’s resistance that protects and aids them#and takes her revered father’s lessons on leadership to heart and often takes the lead herself even with people older and bigger than her#and constantly tries to help and protect others and understands the power that her name and position holds in achieving that#and whose experiences over the series has given her intimate knowledge of both kingdoms her family is trying to rule#and has learned multiply languages and customs that would make trading with braavos and other parts of essos for aid easier#and is being trained to lie and read ppl and gather/analyze/and utilize intel professionally and definitely better than anyone in her famil#and has a direwolf named after one of westeros greatest leaders and that has become the leader of hundreds of wolves herself#and has the stomach and resolve to get her hands dirty and make the hard choices that justice and rule demands when winter truly comes#is being prepared to lead and play an important role in the future of her house and not just sail away or become a guard or die (tags via @insomniarama)

theres a lot to compare/contrast between arya and jeyne as "arya" and dany and "aegon" as aegon. neither fully realizes it, yet, but both arya and dany have pretenders they are going to have to deal with. jeyne has claimed arya's identity after her presumed death. aegon has claimed the identity of dany's nephew who was murdered as an infant. both of these are going to interfere with arya and dany's own identities and their objectives.

"I've been skipping two of the most important character POVs since the first book, am I missing anything?"

Honestly though, this is taking me out because I just know this is how a lot of people actually "read" the books. At this point the books have been discussed so much people just assume they know enough to skip through certain parts and that's exactly why we have so much misinterpretation in this fandom. People are getting their information through second-hand sources instead of the books themselves 😭

this is honestly pretty funny because skipping Arya and Bran’s chapters is legitimately how like 96% of “House Stark stans” analyze the series. I guess it’s a bit refreshing that they’re being honest about it now lmao

Can somebody give me the page and exact quote where it is referenced that Arya has dark olive skin and her siblings have rosey white milky skin? I want the receipts now please

I feel like the fairly recent tendency of fanartists giving Arya and Jon (and by extension, Ned) darker colored skin is to make the continent of Westeros seem more diverse? It also ties in with the decent amount of takes I've seen where people insist that the Starks are “indigenous-coded”, which considering how their ancestors committed genocide against the Children of the Forest makes these takes interesting...ly awkward. Then there’s the segment of people who just straight up pretend like the Starks/Northerners were never really white at all, and are Central Asian or something and George didn’t realize this as he was writing lol

And I don’t think racebending as a form of transformative fandom is a bad thing, but in the case of Arya vs her siblings it does get uncomfortable once you dig even one millimeter deeper into it because part of the reason Arya feels so alienated by the women in her household is because she’s told she’s ugly and not acting like a proper girl by their standards. 

So a brown, supposedly “indigenous-coded” Arya who shares the typical looks and interests that are more accepted by an “indigenous-coded” North is considered ugly and unruly by her white, Southron mother. The same mother will then sing endless praise about the beauty of her docile, light-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, “delicately featured” daughter Sansa....and this fandom can’t connect the two dots together to figure out why this is not good. 

It’s already a bad reflection of Catelyn in canon where they’re all white, and it’s ten times worse when you try to slap on a “the Starks and the First Men were actually brown” angle. It might be interesting if this fandom ever tried to properly analyze the racial aspect of having the “Stark look” be brown, including things like colorism within a mixed Northern/Southron family and the inherent vilification of darker people but they don’t. They just dip white characters in brown paint, pretend like the character dynamics and their implications would be the exact same, then pat themselves on the back for their efforts in diversity. It’s tiring to say the least.

sansa stans when arya is kissing sansa’s ass:

sansa stans when arya has one independent thought:

Did they just air quote trauma????

Why do Arya fans get really suspicious of I like both Stark sisters.

Exhibit A for the jury

And when Arya stans didn’t like season 8, they were accused of hating “healthy” relationships between sisters and that the fact they were “angry that Arya didn’t kiss Jon’s ass (and Dany’s)” proved the only reason they liked Arya before was to hate on Sansa.

I now know why the idea that courtesy is the answer to every conflict is so prevalent in the fandom. You have a handful of tumblr intellectuals who would rather discuss if Arya should have been feeling guilty about killing the Bolton guard or the degree of it ( he is just a guy standing around, we don't know anything about him, hey maybe he doesn't get paid enough to stop 3 prisoners from leaving!), rather than acknowledge that Arya had gone through hell to survive and she more than any other Stark kid knows the cost of war. Arya's list is called fucked up ( they add the "understandable" adjective immediately after but reiterate that it's fucked up). And the prevalent idea then, in use of all these words is equating Arya to violence. Which is why all those incorrect quote posts of 'Arya's every solution being violence' get so many notes.

I think one of the reasons why the theory that Arya will go away at the end of the story because she’s too far gone to assimilate back into society is so unconvincing is because she literally spends the latest two books (AFFC and ADWD) doing that very thing! Like her training hasn’t been about her being a reclusive murderous hermit. She literally spends the two books talking to people, making friends, integrating into new cultures. She’s around people all the damn time! And even if we bring up her ACOK and ASOS arcs which were rather dark in nature, she’s still around people interacting with them, still being a part of society (even if she’s quite low on the totem pole in those books).

Arya is a character who feels so strongly and whose arc is often dictated by how she interacts with the people around her. So to take that away from her is not only a bad understanding of her character arc (not to be condescending or anything), but it’s also not very satisfying as far as character/narrative progression goes. Because if the narrative has proven so far that even in her darkest moments, Arya can laugh and love and be such a passionate member of society, how then does it make sense for her to go away and be on her own?? How does that make sense when AFFC and ADWD prove that she still loves being around people?

#this is one of the biggest points for me #bc yeah grrm couldve very easily had her become increasingly anti social and withdrawn #and affc/adwd wouldve been the time to do it #but he doesnt lol #despite everything #she is still consistently able to form friendships #her sociability actually recovers in braavos bc its not a warzone #thats what she values cat of the canals so much #and ''mourned'' the loss of her #it makes zero sense that she will return to WF #and be unable to connect with people #she was able to be an active member in a community on another continent where she barely spoke the language ffs #her arc is defined by strong social ties #it gets treated as a general house stark quote but #the pack survives is HER mantra for a reason (tags vis @gendrie​)