There’s so many Arya = Tywin’s honorary daughter feels going around, and maybe I’ve got an unpopular opinion going on over here, but I so feel that this is a complete contradiction.
The only reason that Arya is the way she is is that she was NOT Tywin’s daughter. Everything that he enjoys about her, and finds so interesting, are parts of his kids that he squashed out, and that’s not to say that he sees this and regrets it, but rather that were Arya his daughter, he would set himself to quashing them out of her, too.
The Arya/Tywins scenes for me show not that he’s secretly a swell dude, or that he recognizes how cool Arya is, or that he wishes she were his daughter, but rather the extreme difference between the standards he sets for himself and his family and the standards that he sets for others. He appreciates Arya because he has no responsibility for her, and her actions do not reflect on him.
She is interesting, and a source of entertainment, and he certainly sees in her bits of Cersei back when she was young. But he is well aware of all the steps he took to make Cersei ‘presentable,’ and simply because he is kind of Arya does not mean that he would do things differently if he had a second go at parenthood.
#Tywin Lannister is a terrible father who could rule a kingdom but raised his children to kill him #these scenes are fantastic but let’s not forget who Tywin is #or who ARYA is #this is not meant to last #and its setting Arya even farther down her dark path
