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Episode 91: A CLASH OF KINGS, ARYA V: "The Wasteland" SHOW NOTES!
🕑 Added 2019-12-09 15:00:03 +0000 UTCHello 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 ninety-first episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “The Waste Land: An Analysis of ACOK, Arya V,” in which Arya Stark and her companions learn to never trust anyone over 30.This episode is brought to you by our Small Council:
- Hand of the King WolfmanZack
- Grand Maester Timbob
- Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N.
- Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves
- Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
- Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
- Jancy O, Lady Commander of the Night’s Watch
- Lord Gene, Master of Coin
- Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
- Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
- Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
- Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
- Lord Micah: Warden of the West and the Kraken’s Bane
- Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
- The High Bearded Priest
- The Blue-Ringed Octoling
- Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
- Lady Xena Valyrian
- Hedrigal, Captain of the Air Ship Arrogance
- His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
- Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
- Laurence, Prince of Dorne
- Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
- Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
- The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
- Lady Stephanie
- Lord Wryinn
- Lord Anonymous
- Lord Carlos
- Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
- The King's Cook, Nolly (No-lee) Olly (Oh-lee), Master of Cannoli
- Ser Sourcedelica
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!QuestionLady BWord, our Sworn Sword riddler, asks:
Hey Guys
I’ll begin with the confession that I’m super duper behind on my podcasts these days, but I am on pt. 2 of the red comet episode and all of the Stannis/Robert conversation perked a question; do you think Robert would have willingly used magic to have Rhaegar killed? Stannis being the anti Robert I think not, for me it sounds more like an avenue someone like Tywin would take if the option was available. Curious to hear your thoughts. Loving the podcast (even if I am a slacker listener).
So, thank you Lady BWord for the question.If you’d like to ask us questions that we’ll answer here on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to subscribe as a Sworn Sword of higher patron at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF. But enough about patreon. Onto Arya V. When we last checked in with Arya, she had just escaped the fiery horror of the Lannisters. Let’s hope she doesn’t encounter more Lannisters in this synopsis of ACOK, Arya V! SynopsisAt the top of a tree, Arya looks at a nearby village near a small stream and a pier. And unlike all of the other places of former human occupation, this village appears to have people in it as smoke is rising from some of the chimneys. But wait, why has every other place they’ve visited been empty?
All the other places they’d come upon had been empty and desolate. Farms, villages, castles, septs, barns, it made no matter. If it could burn, the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, they’d killed. They even set the woods ablaze where they could, though the leaves were still green and wet from recent rains, and the fires had no spread.
Just the usual war conduct, guys. We can’t impart our modern values into … oh wait, only immoral toads believe this. Fuck the Lannisters.Gendry thinks that Lannisters would have burned the lake if they could, which, yeah. Lake of Fire. You wonder if George is communicating something about the Lannisters with the imagery from the book of Revelations. All the same, Arya knows Gendry is right. The Lannisters had burned the town by the lake they had escaped from back in Arya IV.Arya flashes back to right after the battle and how her and her companions had crept back into town only to find blackened houses and corpses. Lommy warns them that they shouldn’t have returned to the town, and that Amory Lorch would return to kill them all. But thankfully, Amory was long gone. They arrive back at the holdfast they defended from Lannister scum, and see the horrors awaiting them:
One look was enough for Gendry. “They’re killed, every one. And dogs have been at them too.”
“Or wolves.”
“Dogs, wolves, it makes no matter. It’s done here.”
But Arya’s not about to leave before seeing if Yoren made it out alive. They couldn’t have killed him. He was too hard to kill. Oh, honey:
The axe blow that had killed him had split his skull apart, but the great tangled beard could be no one else’s, or the garb, patched and unwashed and so faded it was more grey than black.
Moment of silence for Yoren: a true man of the Night’s Watch and our archetypal forebear to Brienne. No chance and no choice.Arya notices that dead Lannisters and Night’s Watch recruits have been left out alike. Amory didn’t give a shit. But Arya sees that four Lannister red cloaks lay dead around Yoren. So, he hadn’t gone down without a helluva fight, and Arya is feeling things:
He was going to take me home, Arya thought as they dug the old man’s hole. He was going to bring me safe to Winterfell, he promised. Part of her wanted to cry. The other part wanted to kick him.
Gendry says they should head over to the guard tower as Yoren had left three recruits up there. When they arrive, they see that the Lannisters couldn’t get into the tower. And they couldn’t burn the tower either. Thankfully (for the moment anyway), they find Kurz, Cutjack and Tarber still alive in the tower -- though Kurz isn’t doing so hot having taken a wound during the battle. Back up in the tree, Arya still considers whether they should approach the town. The town might have warmth and provide shelter, but it might also have Ser Amory Lorch in it. The problem is that Arya is too far away to really make anything out -- though she does hear a whinny of a horse at one point. But maybe there’s a hint of who’s in the town:
The air was full of birds, crows mostly. From afar, they were no larger than flies as they wheeled and flapped above the thatched roofs.
To the east, God’s Eye was shimmering, and this lake almost called to Arya, but she didn’t dare go and bathe in the lake for fear of revealing herself to be a girl. So, she dangled her feet into the water on some days. And though she’d been walking barefoot for a while, and her feet had hardened from the calluses, the water and mud felt good on her toes.Arya sees a small wooded isle on the lake and watches as three black swans fly over the lake. She thinks she’d like to be a swan, but maybe she’d like to eat the swans instead. Of late, her diet consisted of a disgusting acorn paste that Kurz taught them how to make along with worms and bugs they found in the ground. She didn’t mind the bugs so much as she used to eat them back in the day to make Sansa scream, but the worms weren’t great. Her companions, the crying girl (now named Weasel by Lommy) and Hot Pie, threw up when they tried the worms. And Gendry and Lommy didn’t even try the worms. Speaking of Kurz, he had died recently from an arrow to the knee, no, shoulder. They buried him under a mound of stones. Cutjack claimed his sword and horn. Tarber got his boots. And when they had gotten the booty, they’d left the kids behind that night, probably thinking they’d survive without a “gaggle of orphan boys.” Arya thinks they probably would survive, but she still hates that they left.Below the tree, Hot Pie makes a dog call, and Arya gets down from the tree to find Hot Pie, Gendry, Weasel and Lommy waiting for her. She reports that a fishing village is ahead, and that someone is there. Weasel runs up and grabs Arya’s leg, and Hot Pie says they should go check it out. The people there will give them food, right?
“Might be they’d kill us too,” Gendry says.
“Not if we yielded,” Hot Pie said hopefully.
Gendry dismisses Hot Pie as sounding like Lommy. And speaking of Lommy, he ain’t doing so hot. He’d taken a spear wound to the knee, er, leg. He was able to walk for the first day, but by the second day, he was limping with help. By the third, he had to be carried. Lommy states, in what will be a refrain for this chapter, that they need to yield as that’s what Yoren would have done. Gonna have to disagree with your assessment, Lommy. And Arya disagrees too. She’s sick of hearing him bitch. But Hot Pie thinks that Amory would have spared everyone. He even said so. Would a Lannister bannerman lie, I ask you? Have the Lannisters ever operated in bad faith? No, I didn’t think so. But Gendry disagrees:
“Knights and lordlings, they take each other captive and pay ransoms, but they don’t care if the likes of you yield or not.”
Hot Pie says they probably have fish to sell, but Arya’s not sure about that. She saw the crows and thinks something is dead in or near the water. Hot Pie thinks it’s fish, and Lommy says let’s roast those crows like chickens and eat them. But Gendry says “no fires.” Everyone is hungry, complaining and bickering, but finally Gendry silences everyone. He needs to think. Lommy tells him to “yield”, but Gendry only tells him to shut the fuck up about the yielding.Having scrunched his face up a bit and had a think to himself, Gendry decides that he needs to go scout out the village and figure out what’s actually down there when the sun is setting. But Arya says she’ll go. Gendry is too big and noisy. So, Gendry decides they’ll both go.
“But what if you don’t come back? Hot Pie can’t carry me by himself, you know he can’t …” Lommy complains.
“And there’s wolves,” Hot Pie says. “I heard them last night, when I had the watch. They sounded close.”
Arya was aware of the wolves too. She was sleeping in a tree when she was woken by them howling for an hour the night before. Hot Pie complains about not having a fire and that they’ll leave him, but Gendry insists they’re not going to pull a Cutjack and Tarber on them. They’re just going to have a look around. Lommy, if you can believe it, states that they should yield, and that if they see any leg potion, they should bring some back for him. Strangely, Gendry says that he’ll pick some up if they see any, and I don’t get the sense that he’s being sarcastic here. But they need to get going. Also, Hot Pie needs to keep Weasel in place so the girl doesn’t follow them. With that, Arya and Gendry head off with Gendry’s long strides outpacing Arya’s shorter strides. But then Gendry stops.
“I think Lommy’s going to die.”
Arya isn’t surprised by this. Kurz was a bigger, stronger guy, and he died from his wound. So, how’s a kid like Lommy going to survive an even worse wound? Besides, whenever Arya carried Lommy, she noticed that his wound was smelling gangrous, and his skin was hot to the touch. Arya thinks they need to find a maester, but Gendry knows better. Maester are only in castles, and they wouldn’t help some peasant like Lommy. Arya gets all shocked and offended, thinking that Luwin would help anyone. But Gendry insists again that Lommy is going to die, and that they need to leave him and others behind. They’re the only two capable ones in the party.
“Even if you are a girl.”
Arya freezes and states very loudly that she’s not a girl. But Gendry knows better. He didn’t notice it when they were thirty strong, but now with just a few survivors, Gendry has receipts. For instance, he’s noticed that Arya never takes a leak in public. She always goes out by herself. When Arya continues to protest, Gendry demands that she pull her cock out and show it to him. Arya refuses, saying she doesn’t need to go piss now. To try to distract from her lack of penis, she says that Gendry is hiding something too -- why the gold cloaks were after him. And he won’t tell anyone why.
“I wish I knew. I think Yoren knew, but he never told me. Why did you think they were after you, though?”
Arya bit her lip. She remembered what Yoren had said, the day he had hacked off her hair. This lot, half o’ them would turn you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they rape you first. Only Gendry was different, the queen wanted him too.
Arya says she’ll show him hers if he’ll him his … mmm, maybe will need to workshop that line. She says that maybe they do an information swap, but, truly, Gendry doesn’t know. So, Arya is faced with a decision. She could kill maybe kill Gendry with Needle, but that was no sure thing. He was big and strong. The subtext. We’ll get to that. So, Arya decides to tell him the truth, with the condition that he can’t tell Lommy and Hot Pie. Gendry agrees.
“Arya.” She raised her eyes to his. “My name is Arya. Of House Stark.”
Gendry goes white-eyed, saying that this was the name of the Hand of the King, the one they killed for treason. But Arya says he wasn’t a traitor. Ned was her father. Yoren was taking her back to Winterfell. That’s why she was here.
“I … you’re highborn then, a … you’ll be a lady.”
Arya looks at herself and thinks that no one would call her a lady if they saw what she looked like. She says that her mom is a lady, her sister Sansa was a lady too. But she never was.
“Yes you were. You were a lord’s daughter and you lived in a castle didn’t you? And you … gods be good, I never …” All of a sudden Gendry seemed uncertain, almost afraid.” All that about cocks, I never should have said that. And I been pissing in front of you and everything. I … I beg your pardon, m’lady.”
Arya hisses at him to stop, wondering if he’s teasing her, but Gendry gets stubborn, saying he knows his courtesies, m’lady. Arya warns Gendry that if he says m’lady in front of the others, they’ll know that she’s a girl.
“As m’lady commands.”
Arya slammed his chest with both hands. He tripped over a stone and sat down with a thump. “What kind of lord’s daughter are you?” he said, laughing.
“This kind.” She kicked him in the side, but it only made him laugh harder.
But now they need to get to the village to scout it out. They arrive as is about to set, and Gendry smells what he thinks is rotten fish, but Arya know better. They decide to split up with Arya going east and Gendry going west. Arya last sees Gendry thinking hard.
He’s probably thinking he shouldn’t be letting m’lady go stealing food. Arya just knew he was going to be stupid now.
Arya closes in on the village, and the bad smell, again not fish, grows worse. She slips through the bushes, stopping to listen each time as she gets closer. And the smell grows worse.
Dead man’s stink, that’s what it is. She had smelled it before, with Yoren and the others.
South of the village, Arya finds a “thicket of brambles”, and she gets through the hedge, finds a whole and looks at the village from up-close, and it’s just your lovely, normal, every day litany of Lannister war crimes.
Beside the gently lapping waters of Gods Eye, a long gibbet of raw green wood had been thrown up, and things that had once been men dangled there, their feet in chains, while crows pecked at their flesh and flapped from corpse to corpse. For every crow there were a hundred flies.
It’s a goddamn feast for crows two books early.The wind coming off the lake twists the remains of one of the corpses in its chains -- the one with the face mostly eaten off by crows. And the horrors don’t end there. The crows and probably wolves had been at the corpses.
She made herself look at the next man and the one beyond him and the one beyond him, telling herself she was hard as a stone. Corpses all, so savaged and decayed that it took her a moment to realize they had been stripped before they were hanged.
There were six corpses in total, and Arya reminds herself of Syrio’s Fear cuts deeper than swords refrain. The dead men couldn’t hurt her. The people who got these people dead could, though. Arya sees two goons in mail halberks standing guard with two poles for standards had been placed in the ground. Arya can’t quite make out the banners seeing maybe a white or yellow one and another that’s probably red. She figures the red one for Lannister crimson.
I don’t need to see the lion, I can see all the dead people, who else would it be but the Lannisters?
Suddenly, there’s a shout, and Arya sees that the Lannisters have a captive. She can’t make out who it is at first, but then she notices that he’s wearing a bull’s head helmet. Oh shit. It’s Gendry!
You stupid stupid stupid STUPID! She thought. If he’d been here, she would have kicked him again.
Arya witnesses the Lannisters doing some, shall we say, enhanced interrogation of Gendry by asking him questions and beating him when he doesn’t give the answers that they want. One of the guards takes the helmet off Gendry and starts wearing it himself. Then they drag Gendry to a storehouse and toss him inside. But as soon as the door is opened, a little boy runs out. He’s immediately tossed back into the storeroom. And this next quotation goes out to every Tywin fanboi:
Arya heard sobbing from inside the building, and then a shriek so loud and full of pain that it made her bite her lip.
Fuck you, Tywin Lannister.A gust of wind comes up and lifts the banners. Turns out the one is the Lannister crimson as Arya had already known, and the other is yellow with three shapes running across the field. Arya’s seen this sigil before, but she can’t place it. But for now, she can’t think about that. She needs to bust Gendry out of Lannister jail even if he was an idiot. She observes for a while, noting the changing of the guards and that the Lannisters bring back a deer. They skin the deer and cook it. Arya thinks the smells of the roast and dead men mingle queerly in her nose. But she gets a good vantage point of everyone the Lannisters have in this village. She thinks she might spring Gendry when it gets truly dark, but night only brings the changing of the guard. She withdraws.Arya picks her way silently through the woods with the Gods Eye to her left. She hears the howling of the wolves, but then she comes across Lommy and Hot Pie still waiting around for her. Weasel comes up and hugs her leg. Lommy asks where Gendry is, and Arya reports that the Lannisters have him, and they need to go rescue him. But the boys ain’t about that -- especially factoring in that there’s twenty soldiers in the village.
“You only need to fight one. I’ll do the other, and we’ll get Gendry out and run.”
“We should yield,” Lommy said. “Just go in and yield.”
But Arya refuses. She’s not going to leave Gendry behind, even if Lommy wants to. They need Gendry to help carry Lommy. So, Arya puts the question to Hot Pie. You gonna come kill a dude with me? Hot Pie isn’t sure at first, but he finally agrees. So, Arya and Hot Pie head off but not before telling Weasel to stay with Lommy. But Lommy has a question.
“What if the wolves come?
“Yield,” Arya suggested.
Lol, love it.It takes a long time for Hot Pie and Arya to make their way back north. But they finally make their way to the brambles and catch sight of the village. Arya warns Hot Pie that there’s corpses hanging up, but don’t be scared of them. They need to move in quiet and slow. They crawl through the briar patch, and begin crawling under the gibbet. Unfortunately, one of the crows lands on Hot Pie’s back, and he gasps, leading to one of the guards to ask who’s there.
Hot Pie leapt to his feet. “I yield!”
He throws his sword away as the birds shriek around him. Arya tries to drag him back, but Hot Pie gets free and runs, shouting that he yields. Arya leaps to her feet, Needle in hand, but then all the Lannisters are around her. She tries swinging her sword, but someone takes the sword from her, and then the same Lannister war criminal punches her in the face. On the ground and probably concussed, Arya hears voices over her. And though she’s hurt, the emotional pain is worse:
They took Needle. The shame of that hurt worse than the pain, and the pain hurt a lot. Jon had given her that sword. Syrio had taught her to use it.
Another Lannister war criminal yanks her knees, and Arya sees a monster standing over Hot Pie.
Three black dogs raced across his faded yellow surcoat, and his face looked as hard as if it had been cut from stone. Suddenly Arya knew where she had seen those dogs before.
At the Tourney of the Hand, Sansa had pointed out all the sigils and identified one as belonging to Sandor Clegane’s older brother, a man larger than Hodor: Gregor Clegane, the Mountain that Rides. Arya’s head falls as she hears the Mountain tell Hot Pie that he needs to take his men to the others. Arya’s led away from the village with four Lannister soldiers back to Lommy who immediately yields. One of the Lannisters asks where the girl is, and Lommy states that the girl fled when she heard people coming.
Run, Weasel, Arya thought. Run as far as you can, run and hide and never come back.
One idiot asks where Beric Dondarrion is, and Lommy’s like, fuckin’ who? Disappointed in their inability to bring horror on the one hero in Westeros, a Lannister spearman walks over to Lommy.
“Something wrong with your leg, boy?
“It got hurt.”
“Can you walk?” He sounded concerned.
“No,” said Lommy. “You got to carry me.”
“Think so?” The man lifted his spear casually and drove the point through the boy’s soft throat. Lommy never even had time to yield again.
The man, Raff the Sweetling as we’ll find out later, chuckles.
“Carry him, he says.”
And that is ACOK, Arya V. Well, I’m officially hot, Emmett. It takes a lot to get me angry, but there I was finishing this synopsis near midnight on Friday, November 29th, and I was hot. I still am. Fuck the Lannisters. Fuck Tywin. Fuck Gregor Clegane. Amory Lorch. Hell, fuck Tyrion I believe they call that war Lannister too.DepthThis chapter is where you really see how well Arya’s storyline in ACOK works in context with all the rest. Of the four chapters since last we saw Arya, we spent three in King’s Landing with the fourth in Winterfell: the game of thrones being played at the highest of levels, even as some POVs have more access to the levers of power than others. And now we’re back in the shit, back in the muck, back in the turbulent blood-soaked sediment of war with Arya Underfoot and her dwindling band of war orphans. The contrast could not be stronger. The powerlessness and helpless injustice throughout this chapter works so effectively to undercut the pretensions of the storylines taking place at the top. How invested should we be in the political infighting in Bran II and Tyrion IV when this is the Westeros the Stark-Lannister war is creating? What worth Ser Dontos’ protestations of chivalry when this is what anointed knights are up to in the Riverlands?The only two saving graces among anointed knights are Beric Dondarrion who is actively helping the smallfolk and Edmure Tully who has allowed some of his riverlords return home to defend themselves against Lannister marauders. But that’s it. Everyone - our villainous Tywins, Tyrions and Cerseis and our heroic Robb Starks and Brynden Tullys - are playing the game of thrones while the people die or are relegated to horror. This is not a pleasant chapter. Oh, sure, like you said, Emmett. It’s written well! It works as both a mid-season cliffhanger and a culmination of the first half of Arya’s ACOK story. It also vaults Arya’s coming Harrenhal arc forward. But there was a line that stuck out to me. When the Lannisters are cooking the deer: the smell of cooking meat mingled queerly with the stench of corruption. Good word choice on George’s part. That stench of corruption, that smell of meat and corpses fusing together. It’s so visceral and horrible. And it’s what the game of thrones has brought to Westeros. To paraphrase Aerys II: Let Joffrey/Robb/Renly/Stannis/Balon be king of cooked meat and charred bones. Or more succinctly, your boy Euron crystallizes the sentiment in AFFC: men are meat.
- Aftermath of the battle
- At the end of Arya IV, she was left crying as it all came crashing down on her; as this chapter opens, her tears have dried, and she has to face the aftermath
- Right before Arya flashes back to the village, we get this line that runs under everything that happens in the chapter:
- If it could burn, the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, the Lannisters had killed it.
- We have entered a state of total war, and George will go HAM on the psychological as well as geographical effects in Arya’s next chapter
- Again, the politics seem to crumble in the rearview mirror, paling next to the realities Arya and her companions are now facing
- The Lannisters aren’t framed as an army of men so much as a swarm of locusts
- And again, like we talked about in Arya IV: what is the strategic or tactical advantage at this point?
- The riverlords are back in their castles, and Robb still hasn’t marched on Harrenhal from Riverrun.
- Any tactical advantage has been accomplished already. So why the continued atrocities?
- This is personal on Tywin’s part -- as personal as sacking King’s Landing after the city peacefully opened its gates to his during Robert’s Rebellion.
- And in that context, Team Underfoot isn’t trying to get to Winterfell or the Wall anymore, nor sabotage the enemy like Beric Dondarrion’s daring irregulars
- They’re just trying to survive another day, crawling along inch by inch, their existence reduced to whether they should steal food or simply beg for it
- As with AGOT Arya V, the focus is on how hunger hollows you out, flattening your mental state, aggravating your emotional state, turning every conversation into this exhausting circular grind about yielding and waiting and starving
- Obviously these kids have done nothing to deserve this, but really no one deserves this: it’s not a crucible that makes you stronger, but one that melts the humanity like flesh off your bones, as we see throughout the chapter
- Hunger may be the single most powerful motivator, and it’s not ennobling
- Even before the road grinds them down, the tone is set by the remains of the village; everything is destroyed, almost everyone is dead, and they’re unburied
- Amory’s callousness toward even his own again cements the Lannister army as being above and beyond the normal conduct of soldiers
- Thinking again of Jaime’s musings on Steelshanks Walton here
- Hot Pie begs them not to go, Lommy swears Amory will kill them next, even Gendry wants to turn back as soon as he sees the state of things
- But Arya has to see for herself, and she sees the unimaginable
- One last time, in the face of all the norms of Westeros and the dreams of her childhood wilting like the wheat left rotting in the fields, Arya asserts Yoren’s belief that his black cloak meant something, that the Watch takes no part
- Yoren could make her look away from Ned’s death, but he’s not around anymore to make her look away from his. He held Arya’s last fragment of innocence in his hands, and it died with him
- Yet he went a hero to the end, taking four down with him, a badass like Syrio even though the imagery isn’t nearly as romantic
- So Arya is caught in between, wanting to mourn, needing to hate him
- I wonder whether GRRM is playing off his own feelings -- maybe about the death of his father.
- It’s hard for Arya losing a second father-figure. Those feelings of anger and sadness over someone dying before his time is something I experienced when I was a kid and lost my own father.
- George writes the emotions of a kid who doesn’t know how to process grief well. I relate!
- The new fellowship
- With another authority figure down, and the dubious guidance of Jaqen H’ghar still a couple Arya chapters away, our hero is left spinning with no support
- The last layer of adults don’t even merit a goodbye; they bleed out and vanish in the flashbacks, and Arya keeps going, hating them but barely surprised
- It’s easy to forget about Tarber, Cutjack, and Kurz, but it’s the sheer simplicity and swiftness of this particular evil that makes it haunt me
- They’re the one silver lining to the battle’s cloud, the remaining adults left unscathed who can maybe, maybe, complete the quest and get the princess back to her castle:
- Cutjack opened the door at Gendry's shout, and when Kurz said they'd be better pressing on north than going back, Arya had clung to the hope that she still might reach Winterfell.
- But then George’s favorite twin threats come into play: unfortunate fate and the callousness of desperate men
- Kurz manages to pass on just a little knowledge before he dies, enough to allow the kids to scrape by on acorn paste and animal calls, but not enough to get them to safety
- And you get the sense that he was the only one insisting on taking the kids along and the others had no choice because they were depending on his skills
- When he dies, Tarber and Cutjack strip him for supplies and abandon the kids to starve, no tools to help them survive. A slow death, with no dignity and no hope.
- It’s so cruel, and yet you know decisions like this are being made all across the Riverlands right now. It’s not like the baroque theatrical cruelty employed by Tywin’s pet monsters, which is deliberately designed to stand out as OTT
- This is the sort of cold calculation you can imagine otherwise average people making, the kind that is often the focus of apocalypse/zombie stories
- War empowers the bad, corrupts the average, and grinds the truly bone-deep good people down to said bones; look no further than Beric Dondarrion
- The sad truth is that no one is immune; the same crisis recreates itself on a smaller and smaller scale, applying to Gendry as much as Tarber and Cutjack
- Arya hates the adults for abandoning them, but Gendry is becoming swayed by their remorseless logic; why should they all die, instead of just Lommy?
- The rejoinder is that if you sell your soul to survive the war, you will have lost that for which you fought the war in the first place: humanity itself
- Who would Arya and Gendry be on the other side of abandoning Lommy like they were abandoned? Down that road lies Amory Lorch and Gregor Clegane
- Early flashes of What is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom? Everything, Davos said softly.
- Reducing life to a numbers game or sheer moral darwinism, we’re left with the endstate of the innocents and children dying.
- This is where “true knights” are needed most!
- Sansa’s later reflection that Knights are sworn to defend the weak, protect women, and fight for the right, but none of them did a thing applies.
- Swap out the word knight with adult.
- Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
- Yielding
- The slow horror-movie tone of this chapter really took me on reread, with the Lannister men as the monsters waiting at the end, and like a lot of great horror movies, the focus is on how group ties among humanity slowly dissolve
- That’s best expressed through the question of yielding. Lommy and Hot Pie want to surrender because they believe they’ll be cared for and fed
- This isn’t purely childish, as adults in later Arya chapters will express shock and dismay at how the Lannisters are treating them (and growing awareness that ironically only Beric’s outlaws are attempting to uphold the mores of Westeros)
- It’s a belief that the war is taking place on the surface and the “real” Westeros is still there underneath, but what this chapter communicates is that “real” Westeros is a shadow on a wall. It only exists if everyone believes, and the Lannisters don’t
- Mores don’t enforce themselves, men do, and while George shows us the long-term costs of practicing power the way the Lannisters, Boltons, and Freys do, nothing shakes the sight of these starving kids’ last illusions ripped away
- Lommy and Hot Pie really seem to believe that Amory Lorch would’ve let them live if Yoren had just yielded, and while that’s immensely frustrating for both Arya and us, you can understand the need for an organizing principle, something to do
- And Arya herself felt irrational rage at Yoren even as she mourned him. Feelings!
- Still, Gendry has the right of it: "Knights and lordlings, they take each other captive and pay ransoms, but they don't care if the likes of you yield or not."
- And y’know as much as George turns up the medieval institutions to “11”, historically-speaking Gendry (And George) are absolutely correct.
- Military historian John Keegan, writing in his excellent The Face of Battle, wrote: As the English continued to gain the upper hand, King Henry received news that the French were attacking at the rear of his army and that French reinforcements were approaching. King Henry ordered that all French prisoners be put to the sword - an order his knights were reluctant to follow as, if kept alive, these prisoners could bring a healthy ransom
- Thinking it through, it’s ingenious that George has the Arya chapter immediately following the Sansa chapter.
- Sansa “yielded” to Queen Cersei, and she lives in the nightmare of court. She survived the slaughter, but all of Ned’s party at court died -- save for Sansa and Jeyne.
- Even as they scorn his failure, they still want to believe in a Westeros that will not murder them or leave them to starve...like Tarber and Cutjack did
- The Lannisters are here to remorselessly strip those protections away, and George builds to that with all the horrible imagery you mentioned earlier
- Even more heartstopping is the glimpse we get of life inside that storehouse
- Some places like Asshai or Harrenhal broadcast their evil from miles away, and that has its own kind of power and resonance
- But it’s also important to show how banal places hide unimaginable horrors within. How many buildings have we passed that play host to human trafficking?
- That little boy doesn’t get away, Weasel does; it’s all random, no control, no exit
- It’s striking how casual the Mountain’s Men are the horrors and slaughter they’re performing on the defenseless.
- Oh sure, you get Raff’s famous “think so?” line in response to Lommy saying he has to be carried before running him through with his spear and then chuckling and making fun of Lommy after he’s committed child-murder..
- But it’s more than Raff the Sweetling, more than the Tickler’s ordinariness. It’s efervescent among this group of soldiers. This line struck me on re-read: When she tried to bite, her teeth snapped shut on cold dirty chainmail. "Oho, a fierce one," the man said, laughing. The blow from his iron-clad fist near knocked her head off.
- The banality of evil is more than a business casual of your Adolf Eichmanns or Good Germans just doing their jobs or following orders.
- It’s also having a laugh while punching children with a mailed fist or later on, thinking the rape and murder you and your leader performed was both awesome and a funny story that everyone laughs about.
Foreshadowing/GroundworkArya never forgets Lommy’s fate: she adds Raff the Sweetling to her list, and makes good on that in “Mercy.” Beric’s name crops up once more, as the object of Lannister search ever just out of reachThe name Weasel that Lommy gives the crying girl in this chapter becomes one of Arya’s monikers she wears in ACOK as she realizes that she can’t use “Arry” anymore on the road to Harrenhal or risk bringing further suspicion on her. And her third name she gives to Roose Bolton in her penultimate chapter: Nymeria or Nan. Aw.Theory/DiscussionLet’s talk the Gendry-Arya relationship. Do we think it’s done well? How about in the show? Where do we think it’s headed in the books? Better than Jonarya!
- In ACOK, it’s a juvenile he’s hawt motif at work
- I get the sense that Arya is enjoying Gendry’s bristly beard coming in as she thinks in this chapter.
- And she’s always thinking and saying how strong Gendry is in this chapter.
- Later on in ACOK, Arya will love looking at a shirtless Gendry at the forge at Harrenhal who is on the cusp of being muscled like a maiden’s fantasy as his father was in his prime.
- And their interactions after Gendry outs Arya as a girl are kinda cute -- kid-teasing/flirting!
- And that’s totally fine that Arya is mostly attracted to Gendry’s physical attractiveness, and that their relationship is cutesy! Arya is a juvenile! Gendry is a teenager. And hell, it’s fine to be an adult and attracted to people’s physical attractiveness. (This is America)
- But Arya won’t stay a juvenile forever.
- As we talked about back when we covered Arya I-III a few months ago, GRRM commented on the future of Arya and Gendry:
- My friend asked him about Gendry and Arya meeting back up and when will Arya get her moonblood to which GRRM answered “soon”… and GRRM had an interesting response to Arya and Gendry meeting back up. I will let her tell you the answer. But I do know he said of Arya and Gendry that, “I’ll visit them again.” - So Spake Martin, Balticon Report 2016
- Will it happen similar in the books? Maybe! Probably! At least, I think they’ll have sex. Though I think it’s more likely that Edric Storm will be granted Storm’s End. So, I think Gendry proposing marriage to Arya based on him becoming Lord of Storm’s End won’t happen.
- Ultimately, I think the relationship is done well in the context of two juveniles who are forming a bond based on their difficult circumstances. And adversity can sometimes lead to romantic feelings developing between people.
Conclusion
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