given that the show has kinda shit the bed with writing Jaime, how long do you think before he realizes that all the reasons he was charging at Dany are all the reasons he should be done with Cersei? I'm trying to figure out what it is thats gonna open his eyes to the fact that Cersei was also burning people
Hard to tell. The problem with show!Jaime is that you get occasional glimpses of his book characterization and main inner conflict (as in the last episode), but they’re drops in the sea of all the time he spends being Cersei’s wingman or whatever the plot demands he to do. It’s not consistent. So take the following with a grain of salt.
I think Jaime knows that Cersei used wildfire to burn the sept. Is there any other explosive powerful enough to inflict that damage? Even if they’ve never talked about it, the ashes that lie where the great sept used to be leave little to imagination. But he wasn’t there to see it *happen* in front of his eyes. I explained before that I think Jaime needs momentum, urgency, to act on something. He needs to see an immediate threat. He’s less concerned about the moral implications than he is about preventing unacceptable horrors to unfold in front of his eyes. When he learned about the sept, people had already died and there’s nothing he could do about that. I believe Jaime is a person who tends to rationalize events and revert to a state of self indulgent quiescence if given time, and that’s why he can, to an extent, live with what Cersei did but not with what Dany was doing in front of his eyes to his soldiers. Plus, attacking Dany follows a linear logic in his internal narrative. She’s his enemy—she’s Cersei’s enemy. Of course she needs to die. The fact that she was, in that moment, Aerys 2.0 only added fuel to the fire (forgive the pun).
I also think Jaime is way more conflicted about Cersei than he lets on, you know, or at least I like to believe he is. But at this point there’s virtually nothing that Cersei can do to make him turn his back on her—she hit rock bottom and he’s still at her side. I said it before: if show!Jaime leaves Cersei, it won’t be because he is *disgusted* by her, but because he found something else worth fighting for.
And that’s what I’m looking forward to.
