#gendrya meta
So this is something one of my besties on Twitter, Mina, found. And since it’s ASOIAF, this may or may not be foreshadowing for a future Gendrya wedding.
Older here meant ten or twelve. Gendry was the closest thing to a man grown, but it was Willow shouting all the orders, as if she were a queen in her castle and the other children were no more than servants.
If she were highborn, command would come naturally to her, and deference to them. Brienne wondered whether Willow might be more than she appeared. The girl was too young and too plain to be Sansa Stark, but she was of the right age to be the younger sister, and even Lady Catelyn had said that Arya lacked her sister’s beauty. Brown hair, brown eyes, skinny … could it be? Arya Stark’s hair was brown, she recalled, but Brienne was not sure of the color of her eyes. Brown and brown, was that it? Could it be that she did not die at Saltpans after all?
In these paragraphs, Brienne compares Willow to Arya. Even though Brienne hasn’t met Arya and has no definite idea of who or how she may act in certain situations, the readers can tell that Willow and Arya are very similar, by age, personality, and physically. So there’s that…
And now this.
Inside, the fire crackled, and the common room was filled by the sounds of chewing, and Willow smacking children with her spoon. “One day that little girl will make some man a frightful wife,” Ser Hyle observed. “That poor ’prentice boy, most like.”
Ser Hyle basically theorizes that Willow will marry Gendry. Now, we aren’t aware of how close Gendry and Willow are but between the two of them, Gendry definitely has bigger shoes to fill in the future, seeing as he is still around and is still very much wanted for being one of the last legitimate king’s bastards. He and Arya will most definitely reunite in the future, and I doubt Willow would be relevant enough to be with Gendry by that time [I have faith in a gendrya book reunion because of @misseffie’smeta which is frankly a personal favorite].
As for my own two cents (bear with me as I have not gotten this far in the books just yet but I couldn’t care less about spoilers esp with gendrya, as I’ve already been spoiled of them therefore I’m basing these on very little and vague knowledge) I’d like to think that Willow and Arya’s striking similarities is what’s keeping Gendry from ditching her and the orphans. There’s no doubt he sees his long lost friend in Willow, and knows if there’s anything Arya would have done in a house full of orphans, it would be to take care of them and protect them, much like how she had stubbornly held onto Weasel despite Gendry’s opinions.
In other words, he could go so far with the BWB, killing Lannisters and Freys to avenge Arya. But he had already let her go, and doing that with Willow and the orphans would be leaving Arya all over again. He’d be making the same mistake, and he’s probably thinking if he had gone to find Arya instead that the girl would geld him for being stupid and leaving children on their own. His best course of action was to honor his friend in a way that she’d be proud of, and to make up for his mistake.
Lastly, the fact that he is literally surrounded by people who do nothing but remind him of Arya is probably also a factor to his drastic change in character. Give my son a goddamn break, George.
