I have to ask, do you like book Renly? I've seen your love for Rnely, but all of the traits you seem to like about him are show-only traits. Show Renly is kind and noble, but Book Renly is an entirely different character. He's vain, vicious, cruel, cunning, mocking, and obsessed with power, seeing the smallfolk as weapons he can charm. Do you treat him as a different character depending on medium?
One thing I’ve realised while reading these books is, unreliable narration is treacherous. Almost all the five Kings from a Clash of Kings have one or more character in their inner circle as a POV character, all except Renly. You get Renly content only from Catelyn, Ned or someone from Stannis’s camp and there are a lot of things that make no sense logically:
Ned rejects Renly’s offer to help and instead goes to Littlefinger asking him to bribe the city watch for backup. Or Ned not telling Robert that his children are illegitimate even on his death bed, writing “heir” in the will in place instead of Joffery & deciding Stannis is heir, even though despite being a royal dick, Robert would have chosen Renly just as he gave their ancestral seat Storm’s End to him instead of Stannis. Only a King can change his line of succession, so Ned hoping that he could do it without any proof was CRAZY!
Catelyn spends the entire duration of her diplomatic trip being extremely judgemental, instead of trying to form an alliance with someone with the strength of Highgarden, money, claim, love of the public & the biggest army behind them.
Stannis’s hate for him to the extent that he killed his own brother with sorcery. Call me old fashioned, but I would watch the world burn before I consider harming my little brother even if he’s standing in the way of my goals.
All of these sound weird right? Well the gay subtext might be annoyingly subtle in the books but he’s still gay and the Starks & Stannis aren’t exactly the most progressive people in the world, neither are they very bright and they often let their prejudices cloud their judgement. For example, it was extremely easy for Littlefinger to get Starks to provoke the Lannisters, because he knew how to press Catelyn’s buttons. He knew she would let her prejudices drive her, that she wouldn’t blame someone like Littlefinger even though he straight up told her that the Valyrian steel dagger was his but would very easily assign the blame to a dwarf. So try reading all of their judgemental commentary with a grain of salt, especially Catelyn, in the books she’s a very cold & judgemental woman.
What you have is a very extreme and warped read of him, a much more magnified version of these unreliable POV character’s opinions of him. He’s vain, sarcastic & charming kind of a gay dude, in fact at times I felt that George was going a bit overboard with the gay sterotypes to make up for the subtly of the gay subtext but he’s definitely not this cruel, power hungry & evil dude you think he is…if he was, why was he the most popular & loved among the common people, who loved him enough to believe his ghost saved them from battle of Blackwater instead of praising the Lannisters or rooting for Stannis? Why was he so popular among everyone on the small counsel & Robert?
He was a King’s brother, his favourite, he sat on the small counsel, governed, gained the most amount of popularity among the general public & built strong connections with Lords of both Storm Lands & Highgarden… when a person with a political career a lifetime in the making stakes his claim over a religious extremist neither the powerful lords, counsel members, former King nor the general public like, it’s not called being power hungry?? So maybe instead of asking me if I’m biased because I saw these characters on a medium not influenced by narration by POV characters, maybe you should try reading Renly content in the books with an open mind without a judgemental & prejudiced narrator rooting for his competition, convince you of how “terrible” he is even though literally everyone loving him goes against the narrator’s assessment.
I mean, no character is perfect in asoiaf but come on? Judging Renly as vicious and cruel among a set of character like these would be the over statement of the century! And Weapons he can charm? Do you mean Loras’s “sword”?
