Well…she’s heading south, so…probably not so much.
Well, as we know most women have a terrible sense of direction and so she probably went the wrong way.
Maybe she’s one of Mance Rayder’s spies…and the whole “south” thing is just a feint?
Maybe they wanted to give us some full frontal of a hot babe?
-Joe
Well that’s a given! And there definitely is too much set-up for a character we won’t see again. I just am not sure how she’ll work in.
ETA: Oooh, I know! The theory about her being at the keep and Theon turns on her? Maybe she doesn’t make it south after all, is attacked and captured and brought to the keep. Maybe Hoat or whoever; I am fuzzy on the timelines. THEN he can be all masterly and bad-ass and fuck-all.
Anybody know where I can see the preview for episode 8? I can’t find it anywhere.
OK there are plenty of other things said about Cersei, but I will go back and quote the first one, becasue I am clrearly on Snarky’s side.
Her motivations have come out quite clear in the most recent book, FFC. Pick up any history book about women in the middle ages and try not to loose your lunch over the way they are treated…Rape and slavery are par for the course…in the name of “marriage duty” and “arrainged marriage” Yes, I called it rape. If at any time Cersei said NO to sex with Robert it was just that, only her SAYING no, he would still do what he wanted and she would have no recourse…NONE…Just like any other women of that time. And Robert was a leacherous, abusive drunk at the early days in there marriage, and he resented what his marriage to her represented, an accord with Tywin Lannister! Throughout the war Tywin support the mad king until the very end, he switched sides, then to keep the peace he insited Robert marry his daughter…Robert , who had started the war in grief over his true love (remember he was 16 at the time).
Cersei has also made clear her veiws on the rights of women. In the last book she mentions a few times, that she is the rightful heir of Casterly rock, save for a little bit of flesh between her legs! 1/4 pound of flesh seperates her from being one of the most powerful people in her world and being a piece of property to be sold and used without any of her consent.
So, yeah maybe she is crazy and misguided, even evil…but maybe there is a good reason behind it, and maybe just maybe a little sympathy might be in store for her.
I think your opinion is valid, but I’m not sure you are right about some of the facts. I read the books so long ago that I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, so I’m willing to be shown where I’m wrong.
First, incest better than killing people? Strangely, I agree with you, but the vast majority of people, even today, don’t. For example, anybody running for President would be helped if he were a war hero, even though the people he killed were just, say, Vietnamese or Iraqis defending their home country from what they perceived as invaders. But verified incest in his past, let alone present, would not be easily overcome.
Obviously, in a place where men lived by their swords, being a killer would have even less of a stigma. I do understand the distinction between combat and poisoning, but as Rummy said, you fight with the weapons you have.
She didn’t want Bran pushed? I’d have to read where she explicitly thinks, as opposed to says, that. She was clearly wanting Jaime to do something after Bran saw them, and unless he was a master hypnotist, murder seemed about the only option.
Robert cheated first? Hard to believe that after growing up together, Jaime and Cersei consummated their love after Cersei was married. In the passage about Maggy’s prophecy, it sort of implies that she and Jaime were already at it, years before she married Robert.
She had to kill to protect her children’s lives? Protect their succession to the throne, certainly. But with the Lannister wealth, she could have taken them and fled across the Narrow Sea to protect their lives. Robert had finally repented of his order to kill Dany’s children; I don’t see him issuing one to kill Cersei’s.
The Hound’s a worse person than Cersei? He seems to be the only one in the Lannister camp who treats Sansa decently.
Having sex before you’re married is not cheating.
That’s only because he was dying.
The Hound has personally murdered dozens of people, somehow I don’t think that having an innocence fetish makes up for that. He’s fucking cool though, so he gets a pass.
OK, but do we know how long she went without Jaime after her marriage?
As for the Hound, it’s not just Sansa he’s decent to. He saved that other knight from the Mountain at the Hand’s tourney. And it wasn’t because he hated his brother, because he didn’t try to hurt him.
But I agree that the butcher’s boy might not think he’s so decent.
No, and I don’t really thing Cersei is a good person. I was just trying to point out that the hate is disproportionate to her actual actions, and if viewed in a certain light she’d look much much different.
As has often been noted, few if any characters in ASOIF are either all good or all bad. IMHO someone who commits incest is not as morally objectionable as a murderer. I don’t think the comparison to a presidential candidate who is a war hero is apt - killing your country’s enemies in wartime is not, by definition, murder. But if a candidate had been in the military and had, say, slain prisoners out of hand, a la My Lai, all bets are off.
Ah, Cersei pitched a companion of hers into a well when she was what, 13?, in hope of circumventing a fortune teller’s prophecy. She had at least a few of her husbands bastards murdered for no reason beyond their existence offended her.
Once she got real power, things got worse. She ordered peoples eyes torn out for seeing a puppet show with an ending she didn’t like.* She knew her orders for hunting down Tyrion were having innocent dwarves (and occasional children) killed, and did nothing to change them. She gave live prisoners to the fallen maester to vivisect to build FrankenGregor, including at least one who was the wife of an ally who’d fucked up, not an enemy.
Once we finally get into her head in book four, we found it mostly consists of a towering fear of inferiority and massive insecurity, covered up by swagger. She’s (show) Vicerys with a better rack and some cleverness thrown in.
That said, she WAS fairly sympathetic when first introduced. It would have been a reasonable, even an expected, plot development to have her turn out to be someone who’d done terrible things, but only for the sake of her family and country. That didn’t turn out to be the case, however.
She’s the inverse of Jamie. He was introduced as a hissible villain and turned out to be a pretty complex, sympathetic character, despite the fact he actually did do everything we’d thought he did. Cersei was introduced as a sympathetic, complex character, and turned out to be, well, pretty much a hissible villain, though one that’s more pathetic than terrible.
Speaking of Jamie, I’ll give her a pass on the incest. She clearly did love him. Just not quite enough to stop her from manipulating him into joining the Kingsguard, to bump herself up a notch on the Casterly Rock succession-chart. As a reflection of the self she wanted to be, which was probably as close to love as she was capable of.
As for Sandor, he liked killing, no doubt, but I don’t think it was ever implied he’d killed anyone outside the bounds of his job. The butcher’s boy was clearly excessive force, but he’d been ordered to bring in the filthy peasant who’d attacked his lord with a club. Likely, he liked being Joffery’s sworn shield because that gave him the opportunity to hurt people, without it being his ‘fault.’ But the ‘dozens of people’ was something he yelled at Arya when he was trying to get her to kill him, and it lacked both the details and the remorse of the ‘going to rape Sansa, and would have gone through with it if she’d reacted differently’ part.
Course, Tyrion did arm the hillclans of the Vale, with the express aim of turning it into a smoking wasteland, because they had the misfortune of being ruled by Lisa Aryn. Which you’d think would be punishment enough. Nobody calls him on that, because he’s awesome.
If you want disproportionate fan-hatred, I think Theon’s probably the winner. Started out as self-centered jerk with a reasonable Freudian Excuse. He ended up a child-killer, (by proxy) through a series of (pretty well written) bad decisions, each of which was kinda reasonable given his current situation, and only a little worse than what he’d already done. But people talk about him like he set off to commit theft, murder and rape as a hobby.
Oddly enough, his fan-favorite sister DID set off to commit theft, murder (and presumably rape-by-proxy) as a hobby. That’s probably why he’s so pissed off all the time.
- Note how similar Varyes’ first on-screen reports are to Tyrion and Cersei? ‘By the way, (something wierd and maybe mythical) is happening far away, and (something that could be interpreted as treason, if you’re paranoid). What should we DO about them?’ Think maybe he structures them that way to see how whoever’s in charge this week will react?
I don’t remember Cersei killing her childhood companion to circumvent the prophecy. It was predicted that the girl would die young, which baffled Cersei because the girl was healthy and strong. Then the girl fell down a well soon after their visit to Maggy. That’s what scared Cersei - that the prophecy had come true.
And tearing the eyes out of the people who watched the puppet show? I don’t remember that at all either. I’m pretty sure she let Qyburn take the females for his experiments. I thought she just asked Qyburn to take notes of who attended and didn’t state any explicit punishment.
Hmm. I really need to reread Affc. I’ve read the first 3 ~4 times, but only read Feast once right when it came out. It’s possible I just don’t remember those things. The Cersei hate by far precedes any of those reveals though.
Theon betrays his childhood friend. Asha goes to war against a lifelong enemy. Completely different.
Call me nobody then. Tyrion is a colourful, highly entertaining character, but he is indeed his father’s son when it comes to well-considered and goal-oriented ruthlessness in times of war. Tywin let Gregor loose against the Riverlands to split Robb’s army and entangle the local lords in fruitless but dangerous pursuits. Tyrion, among other things, armed the clans to keep the Vale’s forces occupied and reluctant to leave their homes unprotected to fight elsewhere.
Both accepted that their strategy would hit the hardest the civilians, not the armies; they opted for the most brutal cruelty against the people to bind the opposing forces.
But we can argue in favour of Tyrion insofar as his decisions were made in war; his murder of Shae and his father, however, can’t be justified that way.
Those acts are irredeemable, imo, and Tyrion’s self-criticism will either come to the conclusion that his own personal weakness, his weak self-esteem that is overcompensated by a manic desire to prove himself, has let him down the wrong path and he will be marred by it but might grow through the realisation or he will approve of this actions as justified and continue to go down.
I think her actions in AFfC show that it’s not pink flesh that she is missing but the grey kind found upstairs; Cersei was for quite a while in a position where she could have laid the foundation for a reconstitution of order and cooperation but she did the reverse. She didn’t even need Littlefinger and Varys to make matters worse, she did this all by herself. Her abilities aren’t anywhere near her entitlement.
Was this ever confirmed during her own pov-chapters?
I think some people believe it was implied that Cersei killed the girl for lusting after Jaime, but if she truly feared the prophecy that would be the stupidest thing to do, because she’d just be proving the maegi right.
Unless she just panicked and thought that if no one else knew about the prophecy somehow it wouldn’t come to pass.
I don’t Cersei was at all sympathetic a character in the earlier books. Her POV chapters might invite a little empathy - in the end, she is as much a pawn as anyone else - but they also reveal that she is selfish, delusional, possessive, and can’t see past her own nose.
I would say the same for Theon. Like Cersei, you sort of feel sorry for his circumstances, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s stupid and childish. He may not be a sadist, but he definitely lacks in empathy.
Ura-Maru: I disagree that Theon’s decision to take Winterfell was reasonable. As, I think Asha, pointed out, had he swooped in and kidnapped Brandon and his brother, it would have been a major blow. However, there is no way the krakens could keep a castle like that supplied, especially over hundreds of miles of territory. Maester Luwin was right: Theon was too full of himself.
Not sure if it was mentioned in the series so I’ll add here that another motivation for Ned Stark to avoid killing is what Tywin Lannister had the Mountain do with the Elia Dorne and her children the last time when Robert won the crown.
I seriously doubt he wanted to repeat something like that.
Black skulls would have been hard to see in a dark dungeon…
Hell, I couldn’t see crap anyway. I don’t have a tiny tv, and we have HD <though I can never tell the difference anyway> but it was so dark I just gave up squinting. Glad I’d read the series though or I’d have had no fricking idea where she was or what was there.
I agree those scenes were too dark to see what was what if you didn’t already know what you were looking at.