If martin wants to show us what an awful person is tywin , why stannis says tywin had the look of a king ?
I think thatâs the very point of the scene, in fact.
As âDavos Vâ ASOS begins, we see Stannis grappling with the political situation in the aftermath of the Red Wedding. The contrast between pragmatic, pessimistic Stannis and the jubilant, supernaturally driven party of Melisandre and her supporters is deliberate and dramatic, and the author underlines the tug of war between the two. While Stannis resigns himself to pursuing pardons and conciliation toward the former partisans of Robb Stark and Balon Greyjoy, Melisandre and her party urge him to up the supernatural stakes - and the only way to do that, they assure him, is by sacrificing Edric Storm to get himself a dragon. Through Davosâ eyes, we can watch Stannis push back and back against the suggestion - refusing to believe in the power of Melisandreâs visions, refusing to consider sacrificing the innocent Edric. Eventually, however, he comes to this anecdote:
Melisandre put her hand on the kingâs arm. âThe Lord of Light cherishes the innocent. There is no sacrifice more precious. From his kingâs blood and his untainted fire, a dragon shall be born.â
Stannis did not pull away from Melisandreâs touch as he had from his queenâs. The red woman was all Selyse was not; young, full-bodied, and strangely beautiful, with her heart-shaped face, coppery hair, and unearthly red eyes. âIt would be a wondrous thing to see stone come to life,â he admitted, grudging. âAnd to mount a dragon ⊠I remember the first time my father took me to court, Robert had to hold my hand. I could not have been older than four, which would have made him five or six. We agreed afterward that the king had been as noble as the dragons were fearsome.â Stannis snorted. âYears later, our father told us that Aerys had cut himself on the throne that morning, so his Hand had taken his place. It was Tywin Lannister whoâd so impressed us.â His fingers touched the surface of the table, tracing a path lightly across the varnished hills. âRobert took the skulls down when he donned the crown, but he could not bear to have them destroyed. Dragon wings over Westeros ⊠there would be such a âŠâ
Stannis is being guided, nudged, indeed outright pushed toward the abyss by Melisandre, Selyse, Axell Florent, and the rest of their cronies. For the power of a dragon - that ultimate superweapon of the Targaryen kings, the trump card that could well give Stannis the upper hand against any remaining usurpers or foes - all Stannis has to do is kill one child. Tywin wouldnât even blink at that situation: for a man who dispatched his pet monsters to brutally murder the children of Prince Rhaegar (and Princess Elia in the bargain), for a man who casually accepted the massacre and incredible social crime of the Red Wedding by claiming that it was better to kill âa dozenâ men at dinner than 12,000 on a battlefield, the sacrifice of a bastard boy of no great dynastic importance in exchange for a dragon would probably seem a ludicrously easy choice. In this moment where heâs coming dangerously close to allowing his nephew, his daughterâs friend, a 12-year-old boy to be burned alive for the supposed magic contained in his royal blood, Stannis reaches to Tywin, a man who has built his political career in no small part on his willingness to use ruthless methods, even towards innocents, to achieve his political ends. Itâs a potent and tempting point of comparison.
Yet as the anecdote underlines, itâs a falsehood. The dragons might have seemed fearsome to the little Baratheon boys, but they were skulls, the last of them no less than a century dead; stripped of flesh and life, the dragon skulls represented only a past glory, and could pose no threat to Robert or his younger brother. Robert and Stannis automatically assumed that the golden young man on the Iron Throne must have been the king, and that because he appeared so impressive, he must have been a noble person. What neither Robert nor Stannis could have known at that moment, though, was who Tywin really was - the same man who had drowned dozens upon dozens of Reyne noncombatants and wounded to end a rebellion, who a decade and a half later would release his troops in an orgy of bloodshed in the capital of the very king he was then serving. Tywin was and is indeed as noble as the dragons were fearsome - which is to say, not at all.
What this anecdote does, then, is bring Stannis right to the brink, before Davos intervenes to pull him back (at least a little, for now). The choice for Stannis in this moment is not simply the life of Edric Storm against the would-be stone dragon, but the turn toward a more Tywin-like approach to the war, his reign, and his very person or the determination to be the man Tywin would and will not be. Davos alone in this scene emphasizes that the Red Wedding was a grievous crime, an unnatural act which will haunt its perpetrators; he alone tries to show Stannis the falsehood of this approach. Tywin might have looked like a king to the toddler Stannis, but his power was and is based on crossing any line and authorizing any crime he can to further his own power and the glory of House Lannister. Stannis can look like the man he thought as a child was a king - or he can be the king Westeros deserves.
