As I Read A Clash Of Kings, I Realize That The Most Powerful Thing About This Book Is Gaining Access

As I read a Clash of Kings, I realize that the most powerful thing about this book is gaining access to Arya’s psychology. She starts out homeless in King’s Landing & you get a first hand account of what life is in the starving capital during war & politically unstable times.

You see her travel by road through Riverlands which were raided, destroyed & burnt, innocents caught in the crossfire of Stark-Lannister drama just because Catelyn got played by Litterfinger & kidnaps Tyrion & Tywin was too ruthless & played dirty by raiding the Riverlands to scatter their forces. It’s so easy to get caught up in the drama of these lords that it’s difficult to imagine that the lives of common people were destroyed to the limit that they started missing the Mad King! Simply because during his reign there was no war. It’s heartbreaking to watch a child’s innocent perception tainted, how she starts calling herself a sheep and agonies herself about deluding herself about being a wolf or a warrior.

Worst of all, is when she ends up in a concentration camp like situation. Her mental state when prisoners are dehumanised & picked one at a time randomly to die. The aftermath of being treated like an abused slave who gets beat up & threatened daily gets to her to the point that she starts calling herself a scared little mouse. You really get a sense of why she gives the names of the two people most abusive to her & later realizes that she could have named someone important like Tywin or Joffery to be killed when she has only one name left.

All of this is what enriched the experience for me while reading the book compared to S02 where “Who should win the game of thrones” seemed like a game where the cost of war just wasn’t real enough. Seriously at this point I’m rooting for no King, not even a little bit! Arya is hands down the MVP for this book & I’m glad this arc made this game of highborns so much more real. It’s really heartbreaking but I love how deeply I got to understand my lil gal!