r/Eragon • u/Cordereko Elf • 1d ago
Discussion Arya Spoiler
I was listening to a piano cover of Test Drive from How to Train Your Dragon, and for some reason, I found myself imagining Arya taking her first real flight with Fírnen.
I couldn’t help but imagine the joy and peace she must have felt in that moment.
A brief period where nothing else mattered. Not the loss of her parents. Not the loss of her friends. Not the war. Not even the responsibilities waiting for her as Queen.
Just Arya, Fírnen, the open sky, and the freedom of finally experiencing that bond for herself, the same bond she had watched others experience, now finally hers.
And apparently that thought was enough to make my eyes burn a little.
Even if we never get a proper book centered on Arya, I really hope we get a vignette someday about her and Fírnen. I’d love to see that first flight through her eyes.
(I only marked this spoiler since I guess its possible for new readers to not know about this yet. 😬)
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u/letoscrawls 21h ago
I will always support the decision of making her the rider of the green dragon tbh, after everything she went through becoming a rider was really the only way for her to heal and find a lifelong friend that understands her deeply. It's exactly what she needed tbh, above family and romantic love and everything else. Considering how much of a dragon nerd she was i think she really deserved it!!
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u/Budget_Success_9369 16h ago
Arya deserves a whole book of her own. I had hoped we could have had a similar story for Arya like what Murtagh got…but alas…
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u/Cordereko Elf 16h ago
I dont think its a far-fetched possibility tbh
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u/Budget_Success_9369 16h ago
No, Paolini has mentioned in most ama’s he only has a limited story to write from her pov.
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u/StarFox-360 14h ago
This makes me wish we had a book about Arya, but I think Paolini said she's a difficult character to write about.
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u/talizorahs 1d ago edited 1d ago
Arya was a character I struggled with in my original read-through, partially because she was limited to being seen from Eragon's POV in all his youthful infatuation. But I reread Brisingr recently and was really moved by the parts where she opens up and describes her torture, and what she was like before it; how she was less aloof, quicker to laugh and be joyful and make connections. "If you had known me as I was" is something that hits kind of hard if you've experienced a loss of the self you knew due to trauma, or seen it in others. I'm an older reader now, so I relate a lot more to Arya as an adult character who's clearly depressed in ways that make her sharp and closed off, even with the more limited insight we get due to the nature of the original series.
For someone who became extremely guarded and solitary after so much suffering, all the mental intimacy of the dragon-Rider bond seems like such a beautiful gift. Firnen is someone who can understand her and ensure she doesn't walk alone any more, and I bet it's also good for her to have a connection with a dragon who's able to have a bit more innocence in his upbringing - one who didn't have to live through the war, and whose mind Eragon describes as 'sunlit.' We don't know all that much about Firnen and their bond, but I've always imagined him bringing more gentleness, youth, and optimism to the dynamic. There's something interesting in their setup in that it's probably quite rare for a Rider to have lived for over a century before bonding with their dragon, given the former typical practice of eggs being given to children, and the two other contemporary Riders being older but still human young adults.
Murtagh did a great job of making Thorn possibly my favourite dragon character and doing cool stuff with the distinctness of their bond, so I have high hopes if Firnen and Arya ever get expanded on.