Marcuse wrote:Here's another musing from the middle of book 2.
When Arya is travelling with Yoren and the Night's Watch recruits North, they travel through the Riverlands which have already been scarred by the conflict between Houses Lannister and Stark. They see the tides of people fleeing to King's Landing, they see the burned villages and broken bodies scattered around. Then they come to a certain place, and discover a pair of survivors. One is an old woman missing an arm, who will only say the word "please" over and over again. The other, who is the subject of my post, is a two-year old girl who won't stop crying.
While the woman is basically ignored by the narrative, the crying girl (as she is referred to) is continually mentioned in the story, right up until Amory Lorch and his men kill Yoren and Arya, Hot Pie and Gendry escape through the flaming barn. She never stops crying, and Arya finds this annoying and feels no sympathy for her. When the battle is upon her, she's gearing up for the battle and finds the girl hugging her leg, desperate for someone to keep her safe. She angrily throws her off and sends her away, and that's the last time we hear from the little crying girl.
There's a couple of ways to read this. The first and most obvious one is that she's a metaphor for Arya and her innocence. The figure of a small child, overcome by grief, is representative of the tears Arya can't shed herself, and her throwing off of the little girl before the battle is symbolic for her in disregarding that part of her that cannot cope and just wants to be safe. Even though Arya's mindset isn't one of someone who flees from danger, she's surrounded by events that are way beyond her ability to fight, and her mind does turn to fleeing and crying when she has time to think following her escape from King's Landing.
On a practical level, this girl is why Westeros is fucked. Arya refuses to help the girl, she kicks her away and she's left alone in a battle. As a parent, this is a wrench for me, because that wouldn't be my instinct at all. Yet Arya takes the time to run back into the battle to save... Jaqen H'Gar, Rorge and Biter. Yeah, she puts more effort and attention into saving Biter than she does that little girl, and this is everything of why Westeros is fucked up and won't get better. Until a crying toddler gets more care and attention than a cannibal murderer I don't see a way for Westeros to know any kind of peace.
I'm not spoilering anything I'm about to say. The topic itself says SPOILERS and I'm assuming since it's about book 6, people have read the first 5.
So....
Oh dude, Westeros, even the entire world this takes place in, is totally fucked and completely irredeemable. That's pretty much the whole theme of the series. No one and nowhere is safe. The average life expectancy is probably 12, and that might be a little high. The people can starve and die in the streets and if they go to complain, the king shoots them with a crossbow and tells them to eat their newly dead friend. The Mountain can go and kill and rape and plunder and burn as much as he pleases, since there's usually no one to stop him.
The Biter goes and freaking bites womens' tits off, for crying out loud. There's an army of slaves who were castrated as babies. There's a disease that wipes people out with bloody diarrhea and no one does anything to stop it; the idea of a 'quarantine' never even comes up. So called 'knights' go around killing women and children on a regular basis, sometimes on orders, sometimes because they can and they feel like it.
Even the people of the Iron freaking Islands have made a way of life of violent raiding, slavery, and rape. That's pretty much their "code"; if you don't do those things, you don't follow their way of life. Why they haven't all been scourged ages ago is beyond me. Beyond that, though, slavery and human trafficking is a big deal in a lot of places in the world. Even little boys can be prostitutes in big cities and that's somehow okay.
Braavos is probably the only semi-decent area left in the whole known world, which means it's probably about to get burned down or shit on by pirates in some fashion like Old Town was/is.
What bothers me is how naive some of the characters can be. Cat and Sansa, especially. They see a lot of the real horror of what's around them and they still refuse to change the way they see the world. The Hound even breaks it down for Sansa and she refuses to believe him, even after all she's seen, even after almost being raped by a violent mob and saved by the Hound, being repeatedly beaten up by knights at Joffrey's behest, even after seeing her father's head chopped off - she still wants to believe that there are "true knights" and other such fairy tales. Catelyn has her head filled with the same nonsense and she messes up everything she touches. She literally fucks the whole Stark family over on many occasions, especially with that spur of the moment decision to capture Tyrion. Way to start a war and get your husband killed and your other children endangered, when you don't have all the facts, there. You'd think she'd learn from her mistakes but she doesn't; she keeps blundering on through. She lets Jaime go, for crying out loud. She sets up everything that causes the Red Wedding to happen.
She's also too out of the loop to understand things that are right in front of her. When her father is dying and feeling guilty about forcing Lysa to have an abortion to kill Littlefinger's baby, decades ago, Cat doesn't understand and thinks this "Tansy" is a person, and not a plant they use in the storyline to make a tea that kills unborn babies. Everyone and their mother knows what "Moon Tea" is in the story except Cat, somehow, probably because she's too goody-goody to ever consider that something like that could exist. She misses out on an important part of her own family's history and struggle because she's off in a make believe world of true knights and courtly ladies.
What makes the whole world so fucked is that the people who try to be good and just are usually ill-equipped mentally or physically to deal with the horrors of the way the world really is. Evil is rampant and pretty much goes unchecked. Whole family lines get wiped out like it's going out of style, and when that happens, there's no justice for them that died - someone just makes up a catchy song about it and everyone else goes on thinking "well, glad it's not me."
We're talking about a world where people think it's
funny to sick lions on unsuspecting little people, like that's just part of the afternoon's entertainment.
There's no redemption coming. Everyone's been stuck in the same cycle for many thousands of years. There's not going to be anything like a Magna Carta or democracy any time soon, and no one is going to invent Calculus and kick off the Industrial Age. If they're lucky, the doom of Valryia will spread and take everything else out and put the whole horrid world out of its misery.