justthetippihedren:
mademoiselleviola:
justthetippihedren:
“Even though the author has stated that he is writing an arc for Jaime that explores redemption, since we know that his final act will be the ragey jealous murder of his sister, the author is incorrect.”
Valonqar disease strikes again. This circular fucking logic. “Being the valonqar means Jaime’s role in this unfinished story is already known, so literally every shred of actual text evidence must be evaluated from this assumption.”
What this means is that Jaime can never be seen as someone who might be healing, might be on some interesting path and might do something unexpected, might someday do exactly what the increasingly believable season seven spoilers say he’s going to do. Valonqar disease means we must justify anything he is currently doing or might do in the future by asking, “Will this make up for the fact that he’s going to murder his sister in a jealous rage?” And of course, the answer is always going to be no. Thus, Jaime is entirely shut down, undiscussable.
You know what’s particularly frustrating? I began reading this series a few months prior to the publication of ASOS in 2000. I was in grad school at FSU, so November 2000 means three things to me: being unable to navigate the media horde around the Capitol building in Tallahassee, the epic one-two punch of Fool for Love and Darla airing back to back, and the Red Wedding sinking my hoped-for Jaime/Catelyn flirtation.
After ASOS was published I watched real time as discussions about Jaime became more interesting. It was great, people actually discussed the weirwood dream at length. You can’t get anyone to even glance at that episode these days. Even now that we have confirmation that Jaime killing Aerys has appeared in Bran’s visions, you know? That was an old theory, that Bran had sent that dream, and other dreams experienced close to weirwood, like when Theon is sleeping in Ned’s bed. You’d think The Door would’ve caused some re-examination there, but nope. Why would Bran need to see Jaime taking that action? I mean, Jaime is the valonqar, so it must not mean anything at all. They just needed to pad out the vision so they wrote and shot a whole thing with Aerys and burn them all, it’s random, shh, don’t talk about it.
And then I watched them slowly shut down after AFFC - which is my fave book by far - until sometime over the past five years, fandom decided Jaime was not discussable at all, because we know he’s the valonqar. People were still able to talk about the character before the show began, but for whatever reason, even the show leaving it out entirely just made folks double down. The absence of valonqar somehow makes it even MORE undeniable, you see! It is baffling.
Take it from me: discourse was not improved by the decision that Jaime cannot be discussed as anything other than the valonqar.
i’m an oldie in the fandom as well, although from affc times so i never had the pleasure of reading any discussion prior to that. it’s interesting to know what sort of things were being talked about at the time.
here’s the thing; i’m also very much convinced jaime is the valonqar, albeit i really doubt it will be out of jealous raging. it will be aerys 2.0, and it is absolutely blatant grrm is setting it up as such. it’s baffling the way this new wave of fandom (to specify, i’m talking about the post-show fandom which basically took over from book readers) seems incapable of looking at events and characters as anything other than black/white. both the books and the show are ridiculously grey, so it makes zero sense to view jaime as all bad because of something he will probably do whenever we have no idea of the context in which he will do it.
as someone who’s been in the fandom way before the show, i have literally no interest whatsoever in what the tumblr bnf who joined the fandom after the show have to say. i find them very biased (jaime is horrible but poor woobie cersei is JUST OPPRESSED BY PATRIARCHY DON”T YOU KNOW?? i mean i blame the show for this one and i speak as someone who loves book!cersei, she’s one of my favourites), with poor reading comprehension when it comes to subtlety, up their own arses because since they have lots of followers they know better. i blocked nearly all of them, and my asoiaf/got tumblr experience has considerably improved. if you want actual book talk, head to w.org. it’s full of assholes, but at least the long time fans have read the books properly.
Yeah but if we give up on Tumblr we give up on the only part of fandom that is mainly girls and women.
So, book Cersei prior to AFFC is a fun case. The fandom took it as a matter of course that she’d been molested. It was only a question of, who did it. I mean, a lot of discussion went on about this and the most common speculation was Tywin. Because fanon was (and weirdly still tends to be) that the twins were somehow unusually sexually precocious, instead of just two isolated little kids who were curious and whose behavior, while disturbing to their mother, was not outside the parameters of what we would consider normal behavior, for their age and circumstances. And after ASOS, I’d say there was also the assumption that Cersei, should she get POV, would be something like Jaime. We’d see something surprising. I assumed, as most did, that we’d be getting…well, Carol Baratheon, actually. A sort of stock, trite evil queen power fantasy, but that you’d find out there was logic and purpose to her all along. That she’d been limited by her gender, not her ability.
If I was the Ds, I too would’ve scrapped Cersei and replaced her with Carol. They needed an adult female lead stationed in Westeros from the start who wasn’t going to die in season three. So, they elevated Cersei. But it would be pretty difficult to elevate book Cersei and keep her there for the show’s run.
We were teaching my daughter to play chess a few months ago and we let one of her pawns make it to king’s row, and explained she could choose what piece she wanted her pawn to become, but she hadn’t lost her queen yet. So, we taught her to turn her captured rook upside down and call it her second queen, right? And I thought about Littlefinger’s line, that Cersei is a pawn who thinks she’s a player.
And that is the great tragedy of book Cersei. She made it to king’s row, she is a queen with no king dominating her and no father now either - she became the most powerful piece - but she continues to make pawn moves *by choice*. She can only see one step ahead in one direction. She captures on the diagonal. She only selects enemies and targets from the small and the weak. And this is why she is a flop. She fails the Varys and Tyrion test. She doesn’t recognize who she is, who she is perceived to be, the part in which she has been cast. Her role and thus her best moves have changed, but she never updates her strategy. She moves her queen piece like it’s a pawn.
She still thinks she has to treat sixteen year old girls like powerful rivals, like equals, with no comprehension that she is now free to - and in fact, that it would be a great move to - instead treat powerful people like equals. Look, I used to be a college intern, but now I’m a lower level exec. If I have to choose an office archenemy, is it going to be a college intern? Fuck no, that is beneath me. Or, at least, it should be. If it isn’t, that’s a commentary on what I think my own level really is.
She still thinks she has to have sex with men she doesn’t even desire in order to persuade them to sneak about executing plots against said sixteen year old girls. I’m all for banging the guys you want. But Cersei doesn’t HAVE to bang these guys, and it hurts me in my soul that she doesn’t realize that. She is now in a position where what she wants - i.e. to not have to have sex with anyone for any reason other than desire, period - is her most powerful move. She’s the mother of the young king. She is the beautiful golden embodiment of motherhood. She doesn’t have to let gross hairy guys who look like Robert paw her. It would be okay if she liked it. But she doesn’t. And her lack of recognition that this is no longer her best move, not her only move, but in fact a move that weakens her position…it’s sad. But it is all about the pawn not moving like a queen.
When the horrific results of one of her inventions - i.e. the torture of the Blue Bard - is shoved in her face so she cannot deny reality, we watch her brain in real time inventing a new narrative, one in which she did not wholly conjure up the Blue Bard’s offenses, so she can cope with the horror of what she’s done. You can almost hear her brain clicking away, constructing the lie to herself, in a passage that is so similar to her thoughts about Melara. Her brain skitters away from truth to protect itself. And of course, she impulsively sends minions off on a harebrained scheme against an imagined enemy, and then when that fails, she impulsively sends Falyse to be vivisected, and then - and this is probably my fave Cersei moment ever, what defines her for me…
She asks for her vivisected minion *to come back and hang out with her some more*.
Because somehow, it truly never occurred to her that sending a woman off to be vivisected results in a vivisected woman. She just…never thought about it. This, even more than her inability to read other people, is the reason she cannot perform the job role she seeks. A total disconnect between her actions and consequences. It isn’t even really about a lack of caring about Falyse’s suffering. She just never connected an action - send Falyse to be vivisected - with the inevitable product. Her mind doesn’t contain that. That’s probably very much what it was like when she killed Melara. No comprehension that drowning a friend results in a drowned friend. Genuine surprise, even sorrow, when that turns out to be the case.
So yeah, she’s vastly more interesting and unusual than Carol, but tbh, nearly unplayable. Margaery becomes Natalie Dormer instead of a nice enough teenage girl who could easily have been managed by Cersei, had she any capacity for management. Suddenly Cersei’s chosen enemy is *worthy*, instead of a humiliating commentary on how Cersei sees herself. It is weak to choose enemies and targets from the weak, to punch down. That one choice is what made Carol someone who could be sustained. Of course, choosing to leave out all the victimization of maids and bards and hapless young female minions helped enormously. At least Septa Unella is an age peer who *started it*, unlike poor little Senelle, or Falyse or the Blue Bard. Really, the only similar victim is poor poor Loras, but he’s used as a secondary target to get at the real target, so it doesn’t come off as weak as her selection of weak targets does in the books. Cruel and vile, but not weak.
Anyway, your point regarding valonqar: yes, if he is the valonqar, it will be the type of valonqar George has actually set up, not some throwaway jealous ragebeast. But the valonqar you’re describing isn’t the one that makes Jaime undiscussable. Well, actually, he does in the sense that it requires us to process Jaime as a person who will do something presumably difficult in a moment that confirms forever his break with his past, which the fandom here on Tumblr, at least, dislikes enormously.
They might have to give up their assumption that the Lannisters are going to be eradicated, even. Which is always funny to me because the very people who like to lecture others about how this isn’t a fairy tale are fixated on the idea that the Bad Guys Will Be Properly Punished. And I’m like…what if they aren’t, man? They’re still here right now. Reports of the destruction of the Lannisters have been greatly exaggerated. Maybe. But y'all…maybe not.
Maybe Tywin’s shownly lines about a dynasty that will last a thousand years was foreshadowing.
Maybe if you check back in a hundred years, Jaime will actually be remembered as Goldenhand the Just. Maybe that wasn’t random. Maybe it was foreshadowing, even though Jaime can’t imagine it would ever be possible.
Maybe not? But let me tell you something: if you traveled back to 1996 and asked someone who had just read about Jaime Lannister defenestrating the 8-yo who got the first actual POV chapter in the entire series what they thought would become of Jaime, they sure as shit wouldn’t imagine that, say, he’d end up on the throne, a popular and eventually historically beloved and praised monarch who saw Westeros through its time of greatest need.
I’m not saying it’s gonna happen. I’m just saying that the bad guy scion of the evil family winning everything is definitely not the expected outcome, and not the fairy tale ending we’re supposed to know we are not getting. As Jon notes, Jaime is what a king should look like. In a series where you win or you die based upon your own ability to perceive and play the right role for you at the right time, looking like a king is a strong, strong foundation. Especially if nearly every other noble house has suffered enormous or total losses, as well.
#this is one of the best analyses of book!cersei I’ve read in a while#a pawn who became a queen but still moves like a pawn (via @him-e)