The poetry you see in life does not diminish the profanity I see in mine. You look toward heavens; I see only the abyss. I cannot contain my tragedy. I cannot swallow it. It would be raw and tearing, like barbed wire at my throat.
Do I ask you to swallow your joy? No. I smile for you, even though that smile stretches the darkness, lengthening the shadowed corridor I must walk.
jon’s name not being jon is actually very important to me. not in a weird targaryen way. a very central part in jon’s story is the struggle with identity, and the parentage reveal will obviously create a new struggle over it. jon being told the identity he has been told his entire life is a complete lie while it’s simultaneously him and all his life experience will be extremely difficult for him. i think him originally being named something different than jon is very important in his struggle if jon snow was truly real or not and i don’t think it works as good without it
see the thing about like “the baratheons will be wiped out” or “the targaryens will be wiped out” is that those people are down to like 2 members max, it’s a genuine possibility that they ARE wiped out. but sometimes people are like “THE LANNISTERS WILL ALL DIE” brother do you know how many fucking lannisters there are.
when the freys threw catelyn’s corpse in the river it mirrored a traditional tully funeral and when the brotherhood then dragged her from the water and revived her it was a type of baptism too but the whole thing also functioned as both a bedding and a wedding ceremony as well with catelyn being stripped naked and mocked by the freys before they discarded her body and beric then kissing her to give her life and all this happened while thoros a priest looked on as a witness
Do you think Jaime views the Lannisters as the “good guys” in the War of Five Kings like Tywin, Cersei, and Kevan do?
I don't think Tywin or Cersei think of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in that sense, honestly. They believe they're justified for sure, but:
Lord Tywin stared at him as if he had lost his wits. "You deserve that motley, then. We had come late to Robert's cause. It was necessary to demonstrate our loyalty. When I laid those bodies before the throne, no man could doubt that we had forsaken House Targaryen forever. And Robert's relief was palpable. As stupid as he was, even he knew that Rhaegar's children had to die if his throne was ever to be secure. Yet he saw himself as a hero, and heroes do not kill children."
Tyrion VI, ASoS
Let's cut for length.
We get the feminine version with Cersei:
"Everyone wants to be loved."
"I see flowering hasn't made you any brighter," said Cersei. "Sansa, permit me to share a bit of womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same."
Sansa IV, ACoK
and:
"You cannot eat love, nor buy a horse with it, nor warm your halls on a cold night," she heard him tell Jaime once, when her brother had been no older than Tommen.
Cersei II, AFFC
Cersei sneers at romantic narratives as Tywin sneers at heroic narratives, and don't underestimate the similarity. Romantic narratives are some of the few in Westeros where a woman can be a hero, a model of virtue and strength (albeit in a very gendered way intended to uphold patriarchal narratives, but that's not what Cersei's having a go at here).
The contempt Tywin and Cersei show for heroic and romantic narratives tell me they don't think of their real-world conflicts as containing those narratives. There aren't heroes, there's only winning. I doubt Kevan's worldview diverges substantially from Tywin's in this respect.
Jaime thinks somewhat differently. Jaime once believed in the stories.
The world was simpler in those days, Jaime thought, and men as well as swords were made of finer steel. Or was it only that he had been fifteen? They were all in their graves now, the Sword of the Morning and the Smiling Knight, the White Bull and Prince Lewyn, Ser Oswell Whent with his black humor, earnest Jon Darry, Simon Toyne and his Kingswood Brotherhood, bluff old Sumner Crakehall. And me, that boy I was... when did he die, I wonder? When I donned the white cloak? When I opened Aerys's throat? That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.
Jaime VIII, ASoS
This quote also shows us some of what Jaime wants - he wants to believe again. With the experience of age he knows that he can't completely rewrite his own story - I will be the Kingslayer until the day I die - but his character development in ASoS and AFFC takes him to the realisation he doesn't want to be the Smiling Knight, he can't be Tywin Jr, he shouldn't be the man who threw a kid off a tower for Cersei's love.
What he hasn't connected here is that he can't keep moving in that direction and also work for the Lannisters. He's thinking of himself, an individual, in terms of hero-and-villain (read: as doing right or wrong) but he still retains the cyncism taught to him by his father and his other harsh experiences and doesn't think of systems and institutions as capable of morally good or bad outcomes. He can acknowledge that his dad the individual did something shitty with the Red Wedding, without quite getting that showing up in the Riverlands to finish the job makes him part of that shitty thing. Believing in individual morality is progress for Jaime, but it's not the be-all end-all either.
Tywin and Cersei both ended up in a nihilistic, cynical dead end in terms of moral philosophies. Jaime's reversing out of that road, but I think he's still got a way to go.
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
