Fencer

Arguably a step up in both loyalty and combat effectiveness in comparison to many of his (its?) contemporaries.

I think that's the point we are supposed to see... and after Robert's death, the Kingsguard, small council, and whole of the court degrade into sycophants and brown-nosers under Cersei's leadership. But the members of that Kingsguard shouldn't be used to measure the organization.

I kind of feel sick with myself for trying to make a legitimate comment in one of these pointless threads, but... Here's the thing. REAL characters--which GRRM I think does a generally respectable job creating--rarely, if ever, think of themselves as evil. Even the greatest "evil" individuals in human history thought they were engaging in legitimate or even "good" activities. Since I'm already upset at myself for replying to this thread, I'll take the next step and bring up Hitler. Even the man generally considered history's greatest monster didn't wake up every morning and think "how will be evil today?" Does history judge these people as evil? Absolutely. Does it take a degree of metal disruption and delusion to convince ones-self that horrible crimes are justified? Almost certainly. But, whenever we encounter a character who is evil for the sake of evil--Megatron, Cobra Commander, boltons are sick, all those idiot rulers from Hunger Games--the only thing it does for me is break the quality of the story being had, and likely means that the author is a few levels below par.

The value of a seasoned warrior should not be undervalued in this conversation. Experience matters, a lot. In a crisis situation, most individuals to not "rise to the occasion", but instead sink to the level of their training and experience. Those with experience often far exceed the younger/stronger with their ability to assess, decide and react to a situation; the ability to get inside an opponent's decision loop provides a distinct advantage. As that sage and eminent philosopher said: Further, I would suspect that in a larger conflict the more experienced kingsguard would be expected--and would be much more valuable--in a leadership, planning and strategy role far before they were called on to physically defend the king.

All too true. Whenever we get into these complex theories, there is one other question to ask: would this be good writing/storytelling? To me, at least, the above theory would most certainly not represent good storytelling. Far too many assumptions and "twists" (i.e., complete deviations from the knowns) required to make it viable. Good storytelling (Martin, Jordan, King, etc.) lay the groundwork and clues for a casual reader to be suspicious, and an attentive reader to foresee the course of the story. Bad storytelling creates things out of whole cloth, in conflict with the established truths of the story.

Can we do this again with a character that at least some people are familiar with? Like, Megatron? Or Gendo Ikari? Or Ned Flanders?

I thought it was more the way Cersei went about it, i.e. publicly snubbing Mace, putting incompetent or unreliable people on the Small Council. That's the thing about Cersei. Because we get insight into her thoughts, we can see that some of her ideas are, at first blush, initially logical, but ultimately deeply flawed because she doesn't have the foresight to think through their second and third order effects. Other ideas are wholly illogical and clearly driven by her vanity (Kettleblacks, etc.), which she uses to justify her bad decisions both to others and to herself. She seems perpetually doomed to failure because (despite her opinion of herself) she doesn't actually know how to plan. Tywin did. Tyrion did. Cersei never actually learned to though. While she is the one who actually gives us the phrase about playing the Game of Thrones or dying, she herself is nowhere near the player that she thinks she is.

This is actually close to part of why I enjoy Cersei's POV. In many ways, to me Cersei parallels Melisandre, in that both are attempting to control events and bring themselves to greater power, but so terrifically misinterpret those events and their role in them that their failures reach spectacular heights. Both view themselves are great powers, but lack the introspection to recognize and remediate their mistakes, but instead dig themselves (and those around them) deeper and deeper into crisis, and in doing so, lose even more of their self-awareness.

Don't forget Cersei can also claim childhood friend murderer, and then.... there's also that whole (quite voluntary) incest thing. What really confounds me with discussions like this is that we actually have direct insight into the thinking of both of these characters. There is very little ambiguity with respect to their motivations and thinking--we get a front row seat into their minds as POV characters. Maybe you could make some sort of argument about Joffrey vs. Rob because we never see their thoughts directly, but not Catelyn and Cersei. While I suppose the abomination diffuses that some by largely putting all of the characters on the same level by removing specific POV characters, even then it doesn't take much to understand the differences that even the show was able to articulate. In violent agreement there... I think the reading comprehension and ability to understand nuance of someone willing to make this comparison would be highly questionable.

There are? I was unaware of this! Someone should post cut-and-paste topics on a weekly basis so that I can keep up with assessments of "evilness" of literary characters based on arbitrary--and hopefully vague--metrics and selectively selected evidence. I am sure this would be a good way to spend my time and engage the community.

While I appreciate your assessment, I think your argument could be further strengthened by asserting--as loudly as possible--that nothing bad happened ever prior to his investigating Cersei's infidelity. Since no one had done anything bad, including murder, infidelity, incest or revenge, there was no reason to investigate said bad behaviors. Ergo: Jon Arryn invented evil.

It should be stressed too that fully besieging the Twins means splitting forces across the river--the very value of the Twins being the only secure crossing point also greatly compounds any attempted siege. For all intents and purposes, the besiegers are stuck conducting two independent operations; the inability to effectively cross nearby means that command and control, resupply, and maneuver are split across the river. Material and personnel cannot be moved with any ease between the two, meaning that reinforcement of one side by the other is not reasonably possible. This poses as many challenges for the besieger as the besieged. Contravallination to defend against reinforcements to the Twins (Tywin or others) while possible, take a lot of time and effort, and would even further strain the already distributed force. On top of all that, exactly when or how would Robb's forces go about initiating this siege? Move half the army across through the Twins, then (I guess the next day) instead of moving the rest across, begin the operation? This would mean the force that had already crossed would be very restricted on supplies and reinforcement, having only what they crossed with, while also being the most exposed to counter attack. It all seems like a very dicey prospect, particularly for not even being the reason for raising this army in the first place, and Robb didn't have the foresight of knowing what would happen a few books later.

I'm not quite sure about his tax policy, but somehow I feel that had he lived to adulthood (or just a bit closer to it) he may have tried to implement ius primae noctis (prima nocta). I mean, it was only a matter of time till he hit that level of hedonism, right?