HELLO! You write that "Туwin whom? this is the only genuine semi-parental relationship she's ever had". so my question is - do you ever see any fanfic about this? About Cersei and Qyburn relationships? It would be interesting to read. And what do you think about them? your headcanon?
Hello! I did write that and very much stand by it, haha. Unfortunately, I haven’t read too much fic for this fandom to begin with, but I think I’m going to try looking for this specifically now because it’s a fascinating relationship.
Oooh, opinions and headcanons… I’m going to talk about show!Cersei specifically, not only because she’s a completely different person from her book counterpart in many ways, but because her relationship to her father is entirely different in the two versions. Book!Cersei loves Tywin because he’s her father even if she resents him occasionally. She tries to do what he does mostly by directly mimicking his actions and, according to people watching from the sidelines, it’s not too effective; plus, she’s not the ruling monarch.
Show!Cersei, on the other hand, sees him as a role model more than anything, IMO. I don’t want to talk about Tywin Lannister; I don’t choose Tywin Lannister. He keeps the family together, he’s intimidating and therefore useful for protection, but the moment he turns on her and her children, she immediately drags him out of his self-imposed denial and threatens to take their entire house down with her if he tries anything because she’s had enough. Her main accusation to Tyrion is not that he killed their father, but that he left them open by doing so. She doesn’t mimic him, but she does learn from what she’s heard, uses it to her advantage during her reign (successfully, again according to people watching from the sidelines) and, to be honest, grows out of what he is in certain areas. She’s definitely a better parent, at least. He’s an example that she learns from and follows, but it’s obvious she thinks Tyrion counts as more of a family to her, even when she hates him, than Tywin ever did.
So yeah, I’d say Qyburn really is the closest she’s got to an actual parental figure.
Harsh as it might sound, I don’t think Tywin loved any of his children past the potential glory they could bring to the family name and Cersei was a key part of that, considering that he outright denied Tyrion what was his by right and Jaime swore his life away to the Kingsguard. She was used as the prize he could offer to anyone he wanted an alliance with, over and over again, her entire life, and that was about it. He belittled her at every turn while flaunting the fact that she wouldn’t really get a choice about her own future. The only thing he offered in return were vague promises of how she was doing her part for their House and was therefore all the more important for it and she responded by obeying until it became too much, she snapped, promptly dropped all pretenses and outright said that she didn’t care about what he had planned for her because she gets to choose who her family consists of.
On the other hand, there’s her dynamic with Qyburn, who helped her and advised her out of her more regrettable decisions and literal nightmarish situations, always made sure she was safe and did everything in his power to come to a solution that would benefit her most in any political move she made. In return her got her complete, dare I say unconditional trust and support in the experiments and work he did, both for the crown in later seasons and all the way back in s4, when to her he really was just a supposedly disgraced Maester with a lot of uncanny ideas and to him, she must have been the slightly shifty Queen Regent with a lot of questions and requests that she wouldn’t dare voice in front of anyone else (see things like the Mountain post-trial and then the wildfire). Comparing that to her relationship with her actual father… I mean, there’s barely any grounds for comparison, isn’t there?
