ok we're back with ten more image slots to talk about joffrey's inherent badness because the text argues vehemently against this thing that people keep saying in my tags that joff is just uniquely bad and wrong and was destined to be a cruel, violent, spiteful despot. someone said that robert hit joff so hard he got brain damage and that's why he's Like That™️. this is no different than saying that joff is A Bad Apple because he is a bastard born of incest, abhorred by the gods. or that he is bad because his mother is a lannister and so he is of tainted, evil stock. the argument that joff is not only uniquely but inherently bad is refuted time and again by the text, and by me. let's discuss.
agot; chapter 30, eddard vii
above, robert confides in ned that he loathes his son and heir. cannot abide him. is terrified that he will one day take his throne. he claims that ned does not know him as he does (when ned has suffered far more for joffrey's actions than robert! his lady wife's hands disfigured by joff's hired catspaw, his daughter's soulbonded warg beheaded thanks to his lie that both his parents accepted) and crucially, robert blames cersei's parenting and joff's lannister blood on the fact that he is unfit for the throne.
yet joffrey is the image of his father (robert, not jaime). he acts in ways that he thinks will earn robert's approval. he acts out because of robert's disdain and abuse. robert (and many others) says he sees nothing of himself in his son, and yet this is time and again proven false.
asos; chapter 53, tyrion vi / asos; chapter 63, davos vi
cersei and stannis both recall the incident where robert was so enraged at joffrey that he hit him hard enough to knock out two baby teeth. hard enough that stannis thought he'd killed him with the blow.
and the act of animal cruelty that provoked this ire in robert was a clear mirroring of (genuinely i cannot remember if it was ser amory lorch for real or gregor clegane who did this idr which version of the story is a lie) presenting robert with the dead and mangled bodies of princess elia's children, who were viciously butchered in their beds. it would make perfect sense for joffrey to have heard that story more than once, and to have understood the pleasure robert took in seeing the dragons slaughtered. killing a pregnant cat and presenting robert with her dead unborn kittens is something a small child exposed to his father's brutality and violence would do to please and emulate him.
(much pithier post by @visenyaism about this same passage: https://www.tumblr.com/kingsmoot/724517618713837568)
and, of course, none of the three adults in the room with joff when this happened thought to teach him anything about why this was not something they wanted him to do. his father beat him while his mother (robert's property even more so than joff. understandably helpless in this situation) and his uncle (not helpless. should have opened his mouth) watched. there is always an adult in the room and they are always doing nothing.
and even after this. years after this!! after who knows how many more instances of scorn that would not have registered with the other adults present because they were not physical violence, joff still tries to emulate his father:
acok; chapter 53, tyrion vi
asos; chapter 77, tyrion xi
WELL A SON TAKES AFTER HIS FATHER :(
could it be that there is somewhere else in the text where we have seen a father disparage his cruel, violent, monstrous son on the basis of his inherent wrongness? absolving himself of his own responsibility for the boy's behavior? 🤔
asos; chapter 49, catelyn vi
adwd; chapter 32, reek iii
adwd; chapter 32, reek iii
i've made one post before comparing joff and ramsay as expressions of their mothers' rage and as characters driven by the entitlement their mothers sowed in them (https://kingsmoot.tumblr.com/post/723616029989896192/) but this time i want to focus on their fathers' culpability and denial
i do not draw the comparison between joff and ramsay to either:
absolve ramsay of his responsibility for his actions as a serial killing serial raper who tortures theon and donella until they lose every last shred of their humanity. he's like thirty. OR
compare or equate the actions of an adult man doing leatherface/otis driftwood shit to a little boy being supported in his terror and violence by the huge and powerful group of adults around him (ramsay's violence is his own. he is skinning and raping women in the woods. he is killing children. he is torturing theon and donella and raping jeyne. joffrey's violence is not his own. it is carried out by willing participants thrice his size and twice his age at least.)
i draw the comparison because roose and robert both blame the intrinsic, immutable, corrupted nature of their sons on why they are monsters, and yet both of them also acknowledge (subtly) that the fault is theirs.
robert's "jon despaired of me often enough, yet i grew into a good king! (...) ah, say that i'm a better king than aerys and be done with it!!" to ned is telling. he knows that he's a horrible king. he knows that he hasn't grown out of anything. (https://kingsmoot.tumblr.com/post/773495838881333248/) he claims to ned that there is something wrong with his son and he blames the lannister bitch for it, but somewhere deep down in the parts of his grey matter the light or the conscious can never touch... he knows what he is. and he knows whose son joffrey is. and he knows what that makes the both of them.
and roose, who blames his son's monstrosity on his bad blood, leaves us with the very obvious question of whose blood it is that's in him? roose's preoccupation with his own bloodletting takes on a very different cast after this exchange with theon. the leeches suck the bad blood away, all the rage and pain. the rage and pain ramsay is filled with would poison even the leeches... but how much rage and pain does roose need removed?
roose sent a serial killing serial rapist to raise the child of a woman he brutally raped and whose husband he murdered (https://kingsmoot.tumblr.com/post/757215882916265984/) and acts as if ramsay growing into the kind of man that he grew into is an issue of his low birth out of wedlock. robert is a huge violent wife beating drunk who delights in the gruesome slaughter of babes in their beds and acts as if joffrey's cruelty and violence is the frigid lannister bitch's fault. can you see how the text purposefully sets up two of its most vile and overtly hateable characters to have the exact same justification for their sons' actions and how by doing so it is suggesting that you, the reader, should not believe them?
overall, the asoiaf series stands in staunch opposition to the concept that your birth determines who you are (yes, even with the prophecies and the chosen ones and the many heroes' destinies). to believe that joffrey baratheon was born bad is to misunderstand the core of his character and also to forgive and absolve the many characters who have actual power of their responsibility for "his" actions, and to forgive (and praise!) robert, cersei, tyrion, and jaime for their abuse.
to believe that there was nothing anyone could do to stop joffrey baratheon's reign from driving westeros into the ground but to kill him, is to concede that the murder of children is justifiable and necessary, something that the text pointedly and repeatedly refutes (the murder of elia and rhaegar's children repeatedly defined as a fracture in ned and robert's relationship and a stain on his reign, jon snow switching gilly and mance's babies, stannis' refusal to burn shireen, davos' saving of edric storm, cersei's murder of robert's bastards, the list goes on and on and on and on)
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