I think there's truth to it. Korra has flaws like arrogance, impulsiveness, stubbornness and aggression, traits often celebrated in male protagonists but used against her. That doesn't mean all criticism of her is sexist, but there's definitely a double standard in how audiences respond to flawed female protagonists.
That's a crazy take because that "pause" IS the whole point.
This is Arya Stark. The girl who watched her father die, who went blind, who spent 3 seasons learning how to become no one.
For her entire arc, she was told: kill your identity, kill your desires, become death.
And the night before the Long Night, the night everyone thinks they're going to DIE, she chooses to be HUMAN for once.
She doesn't want to die a virgin who never lived as Arya. She wants one night where she's not a Faceless Man, not a Stark revenge machine. Just a girl with a boy she grew up with.
Gendry is the only person left who knew her when she was just Arry, the butcher's boy's friend. Not Lady Stark. Not assassin.
It's not supposed to have plot tension. It's supposed to have HUMAN tension. The quiet before the apocalypse. That's why she stares like that.... she's trying to memorize what it feels like to be alive before she has to go kill Death himself.
If you cut this scene, you lose the reason her killing the Night King hits so hard. She had something to live for the next morning.
It's not filler. It's the last breath before the plunge.
The most beautiful thing about this scene is that although Reiner tries to dissimulate and pretend not to know what's written, he still doesn't ask what the herrings are, which are exclusively a sea fish, so neither of them could have known if they had been from Paradise.
Reiner pretending he couldn’t read the label was just as interesting as Ymir being able to read it. He knew that one small detail could expose both their origins. Two people hiding secrets in the same room.
Bertholdt simply didn’t have a clean opportunity in that moment. Reiner’s armored hands were deliberately forming a defensive shell around the nape area, shielding both him and the captured Eren while they fled. For Bertholdt to reach through those gaps and try to gouge Mikasa’s eyes, he would’ve had to stick his own hands (or more of his body) out into the open against an Ackerman who was already right on top of them, actively trying to kill him, and still extremely dangerous even with broken blades. One mistimed move and she could have finished him before he landed the hit—exactly what happened later when Reiner briefly dropped the cover and she nearly got him. With Titans swarming, other Scouts closing in, and Ymir also in the mix, the priority was survival and extraction, not turning it into a brawl.
On the Ackerman point, they don’t have any special eyeball durability. Their eyes are as vulnerable as anyone else’s (Levi and Mikasa both take plenty of normal injuries elsewhere). What they do have is superhuman speed, reflexes, and combat instinct, which makes a precise eye-gouge against Mikasa in that exact position a high-risk, low-reward play. Bertholdt at this stage was also still the more passive and conflicted of the two—he was following Reiner’s lead, focused on not dying and securing Eren, and hadn’t fully switched into the colder, more decisive fighter he becomes later in Shiganshina. Trying to dig out her eyes would’ve been both tactically stupid and out of character for him in that moment.