Game of Thrones: Why are the Lannisters "villains"?

Cafe Society
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(Open book and television series spoilers permitted here, along with speculation and completely irresponsible bullshittery - beware! BEWARE!!!)

Many of my friends consider the Lannisters to be the villains in Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire. So do many reviewers. However, I don’t see why, and I don’t believe George R.R. Martin sees them that way, either.

Yes, I’ll grant that Ned Stark was the most personally sympathetic leader from the first book in the series - but, as nearly every character pointed out to him, he wasn’t actually very good at statecraft on a national level. He was a poor judge of character (tipping his hand to Cersei), and a poor hand in a crisis. He likely could have averted the War of the Five Kings if he’d thrown his support behind Renly while Robert was dying; not the lawful heir, granted, but he had the wealth and popular/military support to keep a firm grip on power, and Renly’s plan to move on the Lannisters in King’s Landing immediately might well have worked. Stannis wouldn’t have been happy, but he’d have been facing a kingdom united against his claim, not a free-for-all power-scramble; he’d have acquiesced. And Renly pointed all this out, as did Littlefinger. Ned Stark had all the information he needed to make the best possible decisions for the Kingdoms; he simply declined to do so.

The Lannisters, on the other hand, have a very good institutional understanding of statecraft. Tywin’s time as Hand under Aerys is widely acknowledged to have been very successful - the Kingdoms were prosperous and peaceful, and this is attributed to Tywin’s leadership. He’s a cold man, and dangerous in wartime (we’d call many of his actions against civilians war crimes) - but he isn’t cruel for the sake of cruelty, and his goal seems to be a stable, peaceful realm. (And Martin makes a point of showing that partisans on all sides of the war commit terrible atrocities). The Seven Kingdoms could have done a lot worse than Tywin Lannister. Further, while Tyrion eventually was pushed beyond the breaking point, he was never anything like a monster; as acting Hand, he was humane and effective. The only absolute monsters on the Lannister side were Joffrey (now dead, in the novels), and arguably Cersei.

(Yes, Jamie and Cersei’s relationship is unsettling; it’s also unimportant to the larger issues of state. So is the attempt to murder Bran, for that matter).

Even Stannis has a lot to recommend him; for all his much-ballyhooed inflexibility, the man has shown a great deal of cleverness and resourcefulness since the Battle of Blackwater. His committment to the Wall shows a genuine concern for the Realm’s welfare, and his willingness to let the Wildlings immigrate shows him to be far from a complete monster. Yes, Melisandre is a bad and dangerous influence - but in many ways, Stannis would make a fine king. (And by Westerosi law, that’s exactly what he should be).

Honestly, of all the players who made a bid for power in Westeros proper - Stannis, the Starks, Renly, and the Lannisters - I’d say the Starks are the very least capable of governing. Ned Stark made bad choices as hand, and Rob Stark provided an explicit example of winning every battle and losing the war through terrible, terrible coalition management.

So, why do so many fans (and critics) seem to be rooting for the Starks? And why in the name of the Seven Gods should I? :slight_smile:

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Because they’ve got wolves!! Everybody loves giant savage wolves who are also friends to (certain) children.

Also, the real threat is from the north, and only the Starks appreciate that even a bit.

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I’ll grant the first point :), but the second just isn’t so. Stannis wasn’t on-board with the Other threat at first, but he’s absolutely recognized that now (in the books). His whole strategy has boiled down to “Save the Realm from the Others - and once that’s done, use this to bolster my claim to the Iron Throne.” So he isn’t entirely selfless, but he certainly Gets It.

On the flip side, Rob Stark was certainly raised to consider supporting the Wall his highest priority, but we never saw him act on that. It’s perfectly fair to say that Stannis Baratheon has done far more to defend both the Realm and the Wildlings from the Others than Rob Stark ever did.

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You mention the death of an important character that is alive in the series thus far. Perhaps a warning would be appropriate?

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I completely agree. That’s why the first sentence of my OP was: “(Open book and television series spoilers permitted here, along with speculation and completely irresponsible bullshittery - beware! BEWARE!!!)”

“Beware” in all-caps is probably a sufficient warning. :slight_smile:

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The warning in the 1st line of the OP is insufficient? :confused:

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Perhaps it should read “Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a spoilerbox round him thrice…”

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Because the Starks are the ones with honor! :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, though, I agree with a lot of that. Yes, Ned was honorable (at least as far as we know), but also monumentally stupid. I do think GRRM intended for us to find the Lannisters “evil” in the beginning, just as I think he wanted us to love the Starks, in the beginning. Having Jaime essentially murder a young Stark (yes, Bran lived, but Jaime intended to kill him) to hide the secret that he was fucking his sister…that’s certainly the action of a villain. As for why some people hold onto that, I think it’s tough for some fans to look beyond their first notion. Personally, I hated Jaime Lannister until we got some POV chapters for him and then I realized that everything I’d read about him to that point had been the ‘opinion’ of other characters.

And, while I agree with you about Tywin’s leadership, I think he’s quite despicable when it comes to his family. He can certainly make the tough decisions politically, but his judgment with his children has lead to some pretty cruel treatment, especially of Tyrion. Letting Tyrion believe his first wife was actually a whore and demanding he participate in her gang rape? That’s cold. Unfortunately we won’t get any Tywin POV chapters, so we won’t know what he was really like. I’d like to think he was more reasonable before his wife’s death and, with her gone, he was left to become a harder, more uncompromising man. One reason I believe that is the fact that I’m absolutely loving Charles Dance’s portrayal, especially his scenes with Maisie Williams.

Why on the name of the Seven should you like the Starks? I suppose you could reconcile Ned’s stupidity with the fact that he wasn’t meant to inherit Winterfell and never aspired to be anything but a simple lord. It’s a unpopular opinion, but I think if he’d taken Catelyn with him to King’s Landing, it would have ended very differently for him. She understood the implications of words & actions in a way that he didn’t and seemingly couldn’t. In the end, it was his stubbornness that got him killed.

Robb was cool, though & hey, Bran’s a tree now, so that’s interesting, right? And don’t forget Ms. Creeping Death. :stuck_out_tongue:

Riiiiiight.

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The first line of the OP is not explicit enough for you?

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If the question is Ned vs Joffrey, then the answer is motivation. Ned wants to get everybody organized and working together in order for the largest possible population to survive the Winter with the lowest possible level of suffering. In contrast, Joffrey/Cersei/Tywin want to make sure the Lannister name and fortune stay on top and that there is absolutely no suffering in their extended family.

If the question is Rob vs Joffrey it’s much the same answer, except that Rob has no plan or concept of what decisions will help make Ned’s vision come true. He can’t think further than getting control, he’ll figure the rest out later. We are left to the assumption that his upbringing and nature will lead him in the correct direction.

If it’s Rob vs Tommen, I’m not sure Tommen/Margery isn’t the better option. If Highgarden can be manipulated into the lead power position, the better for everybody, as they have the most balanced, wise and experienced adults remaining.

There are also a lot of people who want Danaerys to win out int he end, mostly because, “Hey! Dragons and boobies, it’s chock full of Win!!1!!!”

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You, sir, have won the thread. And possibly the Iron Throne, though I doubt you’ll enjoy it much; no one does.

Truth - and I’ll say that Danaerys, from a modern political perspective, is the most interesting choice. She’s the only genuine reformer in the lot (witness her crusade against slavery), and the Westerosi political system is pretty clearly in need of reform. It would be wildly implausible for her to become a democrat, but it’d be consistent with her character (if she grabbed power) to distrust her feudal lords - if Westeros were going to get something akin to the structure of a centralized, powerful State, Danaerys Targaryen would probably be the one to build it. And once you’ve got a strong state with a weak aristocracy, you have better conditions for the development of a middle class, political pluralism, and so on.

But there are a lot of solutions to the problem of an untrustworthy feudal leadership, and a lot of them are fairly unpleasant. (Example: The Soviet Union). The very best possible outcomes for Westeros would probably require Danaerys on the Iron Throne, but they’d still be long odds. I’d say Stannis is the surviving claimant who would afford the greatest chance of a reasonably good outcome.

BTW - the fans who think Dany’s hot kind of squick me out a bit - novel-Dany, anyway. She’s way too young, and too clearly a victim. IMHO, anyway.

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Tywin would have been able to keep peace in the same way that Stalin kept the peace, “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” He completely murdered two entire houses, down to the last child, for standing against him. His ruthlessness has no limits at all.

Joffrey lied and, at Cersei’s insistence, got an innocent boy (the butcher’s son?) killed, as well as his fiancee’s beloved pet. He didn’t give a shit. He beat his fiancee because she made him angry. He made a deal with Ned and then cut Ned’s head off anyway. He cut off a bard’s fingers (or tongue? One of the two anyway) for singing a song that Joffrey didn’t like. With Joffrey this list could go on and on, the kid is a monster.

Jaime, as mentioned, pushed a child out of a tower window. This is not what I would call a trifling character flaw.

Cersei arranged her husband’s murder (though to be fair, he was also terrible), and attempted to do all sorts of other horrible things. She would have been just as ruthless as her father, had her incompetence not prevented it.

Tyrion participated in the gang-rape of his wife because his dad told him to. That he thought she was a prostitute in no way mitigates how horrible this is.

Myrcella, Tommen, and Ser Pounce seem ok so far.

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Because the Starks have the moral high ground so far.
AFAIK, none of the Starks have thrown children off castle walls to protect their secrets, or reacted disproportionately to slights (e.g. Tywin sending the Mountain to rape the entire Riverlands, and the people in it, over the capture of the Imp), or nabbed random peasants to torture in Harrenhal etc. They also never used assassins (crotch-spawned or otherwise), stabbed anyone in the back (regal or not), forced anyone to slaughter an animal to save their face…

Are the Starks incompetent at what they do ? Well, yes. They’re the poster children for “the moral path is not necessarily the Greater Good”. But that’s not the point, is it ? By all accounts, Darth Vader was pretty damn good at his Jedi-hunting job (which can be painted as forceful separation of Church and State :p) ; and under the Emperor the galaxy did know peace and stability. Of a sort.
They’re still the villains, though.

I would agree that Tyrion is a moral, quite probably humanist character (so far in the series, at least). But he’s the extreme outlier of his family.

(BTW, I don’t particularly root for the Starks myself. They’re a bunch of idiots. But I don’t get how anyone would root for the Lannisters. For Tyrion, sure. For the Hound, maybe. But not The Lannisters)

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I agree with you somewhat, but think you over-state the case a bit. Stalin was a notorious paranoid; if he even thought you’d ever held an unkind opinion of him, you were sent to the Gulag or the firing squad. Whether you were an enemy of the State or not, there was no such thing as safety under Stalin’s rule.

Tywin is perfectly willing to engage in large-scale killing, but he’s not a paranoid or fanatic, and this makes a huge difference. He’s perfectly willing to make peace with former enemies, and even reward them, provided that they “bend the knee” before he’s required to wage all-out war on them. Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t (or didn’t) entirely trust them, but he was willing to bring former enemies back into positions of respect and power.

It would almost certainly be possible for anyone not actively resisting the Iron Throne to live reasonably comfortable lives under Tywin - in fact, we know that’s exactly what happened when he was Hand. The same can’t be said of Stalin.

Granted. While I don’t think most of the leading Lannisters are terrible choices for senior political leadership, Joffrey certainly is, and Cersei isn’t much better. Her decision to restore power to the Faith, in particular, was clearly unwise.

Agreed. But this wasn’t really a political/policy decision, nor is it one that Jamie would probably make again; he’s grown a lot since losing his hand. I don’t think it’s all that relevant in terms of governing the Realm.

My reading of that incident was that he believed she’d consented - that his father had hired her to do this. In reality, of course, it was a gang-rape - but Tyrion probably didn’t understand that. A savvier person might wonder if even an ordinary prostitute would normally consent to this sort of activity - but by his own admission, Tyrion wasn’t that savvy at the time.

Ser Pounce is awesome! And I hope he ends up living in the water gardens in Dorne - I think he’d like that. (Plenty of kids to scritch his ears, after all.)

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The Stark soldiers and bannermen have done all sorts of horrible things, though. Every time a POV character encounters a common citizen, it’s made very clear that “Lions” and “Wolves” are considered equally dangerous to life and property. And we have absolutely no indication that the Starks have tried to rein in these abuses, or discipline troops who engage in atrocities against civilians. About the kindest thing you can say about the Starks is that while they tolerate atrocities, they generally don’t order them.

ETA: Would it have been better for Stannis to meet Renly in open battle? How many more men would have died in that case? Frankly, the use of creepy-shadow-baby assassination probably saved lives on both sides of that conflict.

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Well, it’s a little unfair to hold them responsible for what their vassald do in their spare time, but Ned outlawed flayings, for one thing. That’s a… start, I guess. And yeah, the population they and their bannermen rule over is likely miserable - duh. It’s a feudal society. It’s crap all the way down. Or up. They wouldn’t be any less miserable under the Lannisters, so that’s a meaningless distinction or argument to make.

Absolutely agreed. Like I said, the Moral High Ground doesn’t even speak with the Greater Good any more.

But generally speaking, we idealize heroes based on their morality and character and actions, and their motivations, not the consequences of those actions or the might-have-beens. Stannis didn’t kill Renly to avoid a senseless slaughter, he killed Renly because he would have lost that senseless battle. Which seems to have been the will of his own peeps, else they wouldn’t have flocked to Renly.
So he doesn’t get hero points for that. None.

Plus when all is said and done, Renly’s and Stannis’ men in that context are committed to duke it out of their own accord. Had the Knights of Summer stuck to their goddamn oaths, they wouldn’t have been in a position to get killed in a senseless battle.

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Right, but any resistance or dissent will be crushed. That can create a kind of peace, sure, but I don’t know that I’d consider it the mark of a good ruler. I wasn’t trying to say that Stalin and Tywin are completely analogous (that is the nerdiest fucking thing that I have ever typed) but Tywin is a ruthless and violent despot who won’t hesitate to slaughter anybody in his way. Compared to the Mad King, a literal lunatic, yes, Tywin would be better for the people. Compared to Ned, had he got his shit together and maybe hopped off of his high horse for a bit, Tywin would be an overbearing tyrant.

You asked why they’re villains, well, that’s a pretty villainous act. While he does express regret for it later on, it’s pretty low level regret and not the absolute horror that a decent person might feel. I do think that after Tyrion he’d be the best ruler of the Lannisters.

The scene is presented pretty vaguely, IIRC, but I have a hard time believing that a woman being gang raped is going to give the impression that she’s involved in a consensual activity .

Sorry, Ser Pounce has only one true destiny.

It is known.

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How would Ned Stark’s response to resistance differ from Tywin’s? He certainly took the lead in crushing the Iron Islands’ uprising; sure, he didn’t put all the Greyjoys to the sword, but he also needed/wanted their naval power. Taking Theon Greyjoy as a hostage (to be tortured or killed in the event of another rebellion) was a reasonable substitute. And the damage inflicted on the Iron Islands when the rebellion was quashed wasn’t trivial - Theon could still see damage when he returned years later.

Also: Well, at least Ser Pounce seems happy.

/Yes, I know it’s all just a story - but fanwanking is fun!/

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I love Tyrion as a character and I find him very sympathetic, but he certainly has his less flattering moments when it comes to morality. For instance, he murdered Shae and the singer who tried to blackmail him. Now his motivations for doing so were understandable, but such actions are not generally done by the heroes of stories.

One of the things I like about the series is the variety of POVs. Even the villains get their side of the story fleshed out. If Kevan Lannister had more POV chapters we might have a somewhat different version of Tywin. But most of the information we receive about Tywin is from people who hate him.

The way Tyrion views Tywin is very interesting in the books. Tywin has done such horrible things to Tyrion, that Tyrion views every action his father takes against him as an insult. Tywin appoints Tyrion as Master of Coin. Which is an extremely powerful position. Tyrion views this as an insult and a demotion. But what did he expect Tywin to do, resign as hand of the king and let Tyrion have the job? Tywin refuses to give Tyrion Casterly Rock, dick move on Tywin’s behalf. But then Tywin marries Tyrion to Sansa Stark, giving Tyrion a claim to Winterfell. Tyrion resents this too, which baffles Tywin. He essentially says something like “But you wanted to be a powerful lord, and I know you like pretty girls, I thought this would make you happy?”

Jaime does the same to Tywin. Tywin gives him a Valyrian steel sword, a very expensive gift. Jaime assumes it’s an insult because he’s lost his hand, even though Tywin’s brother assures Jaime the gift was meant to be genuine.

It all ends up being an interesting lesson about behaving the way Tywin does. Pull enough dick moves, and pretty soon everybody assumes every move you make is a dick one. Note none of this means I think Tywin wasn’t a bad dude. He was a very bad dude. I just find him an interesting character. (some of this was reposted from a previous thread.)

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Best post/username combo I’ve seen in awhile.