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Stupid decisions by Cersei (spoilers)


clydas

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I think it's been well said what Cersei's mistakes are and what they derive from: being unable to read a situation for what it is.

It's not as if the Tyrells didn't hold some element of danger. Yes, they were scheming for the throne. But how is that different from the Martells? From the Tullys? We're a bit spoiled on the Starks: most families are going to try and make the most of their advantage.

Her mistake was to take a perfectly manageable situation and DRASTICALLY overcompensate. It all ties back to her worldview: she sees the Tyrells as an immediate threat because she has to rely on them. Paranoid, all the plotting she does drives her to mental exhaustion, and, unable to relax, she needs someone to lean on without asking further mental effort in return. Thus why we see the rise of the yesmen: she spends so much effort in thinking and double-thinking what she perceives as her problem that she cannot abide the possibility that she is wrong. What's more, her father has instilled in her too much enjoyment from the concept of 'just deserts'. Everyone likes to see an enemy get their comeuppance, but for Cersei it's her only primary interest. She finds the actual duties of power boring, as well as its novelties. Art, literature, music, these things are wasted on her (she is hardly alone in this regard, however). It's not even so much that she wants to be Queen, but that she wants to win and gain adulation, again and again, and she simply wants the position from which she can get the most out of that.

But the kicker is this: its because of the wasted energies of better people that Cersei is able to get in control and do so much damage. The best and brightest of Westeros did the equivalent of nuking themselves into oblivion, and for what?

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  • 2 months later...

Definitely Cersei is in an environment beyond her competence to navigate. The Tyrells are offering all sorts of people to populate positions. Any vaguely competent ruler would see that this is pro forma: they don't expect to get everything, but they have to make the offers, and trust in their performance to make lasting gains. Cersei cannot see this: all she sees is a threat to be shut completely out. She cannot balance competing factions: she wants NO ONE to have any power or position of themselves. In short, she wants to be an autocrat in a government isn't disposed to accepting one at this time.



Dany has a vague idea of ruling as an autocrat, but she learning about the messy process of how to go about becoming one. Cersei refuses to learn. Perhaps she's just to old and set in her ways. Very instructive, what Martin is doing here, showing how autocracy really didn't flourish until the Rennasiance, and the Middle Ages were more of a multipolar era in most kingdoms.


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Cersei is without a doubt the female version of the Mad King. Proves it with her paranoia and drastic impulses. Oh, and her burning down the Tower of the Hand kinda reminds me of the tendencies of the MK as well.

This is so true! I was wondering if anyone else had noticed that Cersei was starting to get a bit cuckoo. Along with that, I don't have my book with me, but in every one of her chapters, there's a mention to how much one of her dresses/jewels/etc costs. GRRM has never done that before, so I was wondering if he was doing it to prove how distracted and delusional she really is.

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This is so true! I was wondering if anyone else had noticed that Cersei was starting to get a bit cuckoo. Along with that, I don't have my book with me, but in every one of her chapters, there's a mention to how much one of her dresses/jewels/etc costs. GRRM has never done that before, so I was wondering if he was doing it to prove how distracted and delusional she really is.

GRRM absolutely did that on purpose. Cersei spends so much thinking of herself and getting what she wants that doesn't understand what's going on around her. Most jarringly for me, her visit to Sept of Baelor. There's a pile of the corpses of religious people killed in the war brought by thousands of common people protesting, and her main concern in getting Tommen his blessing (which is more a PR thing than any genuine belief). She doesn't give them a second thought. She's so out of touch with reality that she doesn't understand how the Faith could sell their jewels to feed the poor.

Cuz, y'know jewels > human lives

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I don't know if Cersei is to blame for this, but in the small council meeting in which she announces the suspension of the payment to the IB, they also discuss white harbour and Wyman Manderly. She seems to think that everything is under control, and that asking for Davos head and marrying Arya to Ramsey will secure the northerners' loyalty... and we know the situation is a bit different, especially if you believe in the GNC. Of course, she can't read minds, but it's still funny how she seems to get everything wrong.


About the Iron Bank: it's impressive the way she treats Noho Dimittis, the IB's envoy, as if he was her vassal. The guy is braavosi, she's not his queen, but she acts as if it is his duty to accept everything she says, not as if he could hire faceless men to kill Tommen.



But yeah, I think her major flaw is to act as if the world revolves around her. For instance, she says the night's watch men lost their minds and named Jon LC. I'm not saying she shouldn't worry about it, but the way she talks shows that she doesn't realise the black brothers know Jon much better than she does, and that they must have their own reasons for their choice.



It's hilarious how in this chapter Cersei makes some of the dumbest decisions ever made in a small council meeting, and then finishes with "we did a great job today" (or something like that)


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  • 3 weeks later...

Finished AFfC (finally! Darn gainful work getting in the way!).



Now I am gorging on the boards as much as I can in between other committments, and this thread is awesome.



I found myself looking forward to each and every Cersei chapter just to see what new and exciting stupid decisions she would make - and I was never disappointed! I felt like someone who was slowing down to look at an accident, in this case an accident involving a plane crashing onto a train as it derails onto a traffic jam.



I felt a little bad about the way Cersei was left at the end of the book. It isn't that she doesn't deserve what she seems to be getting, but I will miss her special combination of crazy, stupid, and utter lack of ethics if she becomes a fatality too soon.


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In addition to what has already been mentioned, Cerseis primary mistake is making everything about Cersei and not the realm. I believe even Tywin felt in his heart of hearts that every he did was for the improvement of the realm, and he could probably even make a good argument for why. Cersei could never make that argument and when faced with having to would simply make a cutting jape or threaten death against who questioned her.

Her other mistake (kind of stemming from the above though) was her being so absolutely blind to the situation of the "small folk". You have to at least have them cowed. When they are bold enough to express their misery via military force (religious orders), it means something is going terribly wrong. A Feast for Crows is all about the "crows" picking apart the festering remains of westros- that cersei simply didn't comprehend the scale or depth of misery, the damage done to the foundation (the peasant), and that she was not the queen of a viable empire/kingdom shows how short sighted she is.

It is all about Cersei. She makes me think of the mother and wife of a large family who sees events not in terms of how they affect her family, but in terms of how they affect her as a person, mainly her pride. :(

Seriously?! Where are you getting that belief from? Not even Tywin. who can be pretty hypocritical (his "you don't think I would have ordered rape" given to Tyrion, whose wife he ordered to be gang raped) ever claimed he was doing anything for the good of the realm. He always claimed he was doing everything for the house of Lannister. And considering the way he treated his children, "for the sake of the house" basically means for himself and his own pride.

Tywin had a heart of gold... meaning, cold and metallic. ;)

A very good argument, in fact. He brought many years of peace and prosperity to Westeros. And surely he was just as harsh when it needed be.

It is known. :laugh:

Tywin brought "peace and prosperity"? What evidence is that based on? The peace was there because there were no Blackfyres to start a new civil war anymore, not because of anything he did. It's easy to be a Hand when nothing is threatening the peace and prosperity. And Tywin was the one who started the War of Five Kings.

And if by "harsh" you mean "a mass murderer and rapist" then I guess yes. But he hardly "needed" to do things like obliterate entire houses or send his monsters to rape, pillage and murder smallfolk. Some of them even turned against him (the Bloody Mummers and their leader Vargo Hoat, who ended up cutting off Tywin's son's hand).

Alright far be it for me to defend some of Cersi's poor choices at ruler....however. Much as Kevin comes around to believing she may be right in mistrusting the ambitions of the Terells....so am I. I think she acts to much from emotion and makes some really bad decisions, most of which are already beautifully illustrated in this thread. I think her end motivation may turn out to be vindicated though.

Oh, Cersei was definitely right to mistrust the Tyrells. We know that they killed Joffrey, and they were definitely "growing strong" and the Lannisters were more and more dependent on them.

As they say, "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you".

Cersei was incredibly short-sighted and paranoid and made an incredible number of stupid decisions... but that was the one thing she was right about. But then she went a completely wrong way about it.

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After reading so many of the Cersei POV chapters, I have to agree that she's pretty full of herself. She's extremely mistrustful, views everyone as either a threat, a tool or a disappointment, and believes that she can match Lord Tywin (which she has absolutely no chance of doing). She can't even comprehend kindhearted people, at least in my opinion. I'd really like to see her whole world flipped upside down, just to see her reaction.


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One of my favorite blogs is racefortheironthrone, and Steve Attewell, I think has a great take on why Cersei makes such lousy decisions.





one of Cersei’s major weaknesses: she’s not good at understanding other’s motivations or figuring out their levers. She can rather crudely manipulate Robert – she succeeds in publicly shaming him into executing the wolf, she can use reverse psychology on him to try to get him into the melee at the Hand’s Tourney, and she can wheedle him into making Lannister appointments. However, Robert clearly sides against her in favor of Eddard when it comes to the punishment of Arya, and will do the same when it comes to taking Eddard back as Hand. Likewise, she shows no understanding of Eddard’s motivations at all in this chapter, or any understanding that people might be motivated by impulses other than self-interest, and has no way of dealing with Renly at all.


Secondly, Cersei displays a strangely vindictive, scorched-earth approach without thinking deeply about how her actions are syncing with her long-term motivations. It is simply not worth it to spark a vendetta against the Starks, who Cersei already has reason to fear the enmity of (due to her role in the attempted murder of Bran), over a bitten arm and a pet wolf. In the end, she succeeds in having Lady executed, but gains nothing by it – indeed Cersei potentially undid her endgame by alienating her son’s fiancee



Finally, I’d say Cersei’s biggest problem as a politician is that, because of the fact that her political gifts and education was completely neglected by her father (who curiously seems to have never really taught any of his children his own political skills) and the way that her own gender constraints have created this curdled resentment inside, she’s really only suited to destroy rather than to build. As a usurper, Cersei is remarkably successful – she manages to thoroughly cuckold her husband, eliminate a formally more powerful enemy in the Hand of the King, and install herself as Queen Regent of Westeros. However, once she finally gets to the position she’s been working for her entire life, she has no idea what to do. She immediately loses control over her son’s actions, turning the relative cold war in the Riverlands into an immediate war with the Starks, and has no plans for dealing with either Baratheon beyond trying to command her father to abandon the war effort against the Starks and allow them to pin his army against the walls of King’s Landing.



The most instructive moment comes when the immediate threat to the Iron Throne is crushed; once Tywin actually establishes an alliance with the Tyrells and Martells (a diplomatic coup of the ages), her immediate instinct is to destroy this coalition, because she has no understanding of allies on an equal footing, again because she can’t conceive of others as either servants or enemies. This quality follows through to her choice of subordinates, where Cersei instinctively avoids competence for fear of competing agendas, and instead somewhat subconsciously appoints incompetents and traitors who she feel won’t question her decisions.




You can see the inability to understand people as anything other than servants or enemies at play with how she handles Tycho-as pointed out, it's incredibly arrogant and unbelievably stupid of her-he's not her subject but a representative of one of the most powerful institutions in the world, but it makes more sense if you see from Cersei's viewpoint, 'everybody' is supposed to be her subjects and that includes Tycho and even the Iron Bank. After all nobody is more important than the Lannisters, right? :bang:



And her notorious inability to understand other people's motivations is of course, why she completely misreads the situation in the North regarding Manderly; she assumes the Northerners will simply be ruled by fear and self-interest in preserving their own necks. She can't conceive of the North's longing for vengeance, (which also extends to the River lords,) and the idea that they are in fact genuinely loyal to the Starks, (and genuinely despise the Boltons for any number of really good reasons,) simply doesn't occur to her. And man is that gonna bite them in the ass...



To me at least the most telling moment is news of an IB invasion greater than any seen before, her thought is not-"My god! We have to get the fleet out there and deal with this," but "Oh, the Tyrrell's have the nerve to tell me what to do, here...hey if the pirates sack the Arbor, Oldtown, and Highgarden that will really hurt the Tyrell's-ha that will show them!"



It's not just petty and vindictive beyond all description-she literally has no understanding of what the IB invasion means-or that if KL let's Oldtower fall, it will literally tear the Realm to pieces, and everyone will starve for lack of the Reach's food supplies-but she doesn't see any of that. It would be remarkable if it wasn't so terrifying.


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I think that Winnief (with the assist from Steve Attewell) hits the Cersei nail on the head.



I suspect that it may have been challenging for GRRM to write such a character. Writing someone that out of touch is easy, but making someone that out of touch seem somehow plausible is not an easy task.


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Cercei makes just one big mistake, which is to believe that she knows how to read people an situations the same way as her father did.

So she mistakes her foes and allies until the point that she believes that everyone is an enemy at the same time that everyone is "eating on her hands" (as she is Queen Regent).

In the end the problem is her arrogance.

The problem is that unlike her father (or even Jaime) she never left the comfort of a Castle, never saw what we call "the real world". Her father knew how to win wars (which she doesn't, because in fact she never fought one), but more important he knew how to deal with his enemies and allies after the fight, to make them remain at his side and prevent future struggles. Tywin Lanniester was a hard man, but he was also wise enough to see that he couldn't rule a kingdom without friends.

I think a key thing said by Tywin is that when some bent the knee, you take their hand and help them up. Cersei never understood this.

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I think a key thing said by Tywin is that when some bent the knee, you take their hand and help them up. Cersei never understood this.

She really doesn't. It's where Joffrey got it from. It's not enough for her to defeat her enemies, either-she has to utterly destroy them publicly as well and humiliate them. She almost can't help herself. Hence, that notorious fiasco with Ned in front of the Sept of Baelor

And even more tellingly, in the way she went about trying to get at Margeary. It was always a bad idea, (without the Tyrrell marriage, there's no alliance and the Lannisters are finished,) but her chosen method was one that was incredibly convoluted and risky. It would have been far simpler, surer, and safer to simply arrange for Margaery to have a riding 'accident'. But I think she went with the trump adultery charges because, (subconsciously at least,) it wasn't enough for her to kill her rival, she had to publicly shame her, (and her entire family) as well and get to rub it in as much as possible.

This was an incredibly dangerous strategy given the Tyrrell's power, Margery's personal popularity, and of course that Cersei is herself the most infamous adulteress in Westeros.

But again, I think Cersei was somewhat unaware of how bad her personal reputation is right now. She's always been indignant about the "vile slander" about her and in ASOS, we learn the Tyrrell's rejected the idea of marrying Willas to Cersei because they considered her "too old and too used," but Tywin made a point of not informing her of that. She's been kept in a bubble about the way people regard her as opposed to the beloved Margery.

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One dumb decision Cersei makes in this book that doesn't get as much press, because it ultimately doesn't come to anything through factors that have nothing to do with her, is her complete indifference to the Lords Declarant. Tywin went to some lengths to install Littlefinger as a (supposedly) pro-Lannister agent to manage the Vale, a region full of powerful lords hostile to Lannister interests. When the Lords deliver their manifesto indicating their intent to depose said agent, Cersei is completely uninterested and essentially signs off on it, saying it's a matter of internal Vale politics that the regime has no dog in. This is incredibly stupid, as the Lords Declarant consist of the most ardently pro-Stark/Tully Vale lords; to regard Yohn Royce, a man who has made no bones that he hates the Lannisters, as an acceptable substitute for Littlefinger as Lord Protector shows a serious lack of thought.


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Good point Colonel Green. But its entirely possible that comes WoW, the hostility of the Lords Declarant, (especially Bronze Yohn's) WILL amount to something and that the the knights of the Vale will become major players, as the only intact military force in Westeros. Everything seems to be leading in that direction. And while I don't know how the Vale forces will come to play a part, I think it's safe to say it will not be in a direction that Cersei will like, and her ignoring them will come back to bite her in the ass.



One way in which she's already paying for her apathy to the Vale, is that Sansa, is still alive and active right under her nose-and Sansa may be gearing up to move from the category of pawn to player.



Which may be another major mistake on Cersei's part-she always considered the little 'she-wolf' to be a silly, weak, little girl...she's wrong and I think it will come back to haunt her.


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Good point Colonel Green. But its entirely possible that comes WoW, the hostility of the Lords Declarant, (especially Bronze Yohn's) WILL amount to something and that the the knights of the Vale will become major players, as the only intact military force in Westeros. Everything seems to be leading in that direction. And while I don't know how the Vale forces will come to play a part, I think it's safe to say it will not be in a direction that Cersei will like, and her ignoring them will come back to bite her in the ass.

One way in which she's already paying for her apathy to the Vale, is that Sansa, is still alive and active right under her nose-and Sansa may be gearing up to move from the category of pawn to player.

Which may be another major mistake on Cersei's part-she always considered the little 'she-wolf' to be a silly, weak, little girl...she's wrong and I think it will come back to haunt her.

Wow, good point, especially about the Vale having the only intact military. That may explain some of LF's motives as well. I had not thought about that. Thanks!

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I haven't read the books yet so I am going by the three seasons of the show; but speaking of Sansa, I always felt that Cersei made a huge mistake in leading Joffrey to marry Margaery instead. Margaery's goal is to dethrone Cersei and become THE Queen, thus undermining Cersei's position and power (which in a sense she has been doing by winning the favor of the people and having a hold over Joffrey while Cersei can't seem to sway the boy her way); she also has a very clever grandmother in the Queen of Thorns to advice her and by the looks of it Margaery is smarter and better at playing the Game of Thrones than Cersei could ever hope to be. So allowing someone like her, who is gunning for her Queenship, so close to the throne will come back to haunt her.



If she had more foresight, she would have let Sansa marry Joffrey and would have used the whole her father is a traitor thing to show how her/Joffrey's mercyful side and win the favor of the people. She would also have in Sansa a person whom she could easily subdue and who feared her. But by letting Margaery into the picture and taking Sansa out, she basically underminded her position and is now cut off from her hold over Joffrey.


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Well to be fair, to Cersei, she HAD to let the betrothal to Margaery take place because that was the only way they could get the Tyrrell alliance. (Unless they brought Myrcella home to marry Willas instead, and there are a lot of practical problems with that.) And without the Tyrrell's the Lannister's can't hope to hold the Seven Kingdoms. But I think it is striking that Cersei didn't realize from the start that replacing Sansa as Joffrey's fiancee with a girl from a family like the Tyrrell's was automatically going to shift the balance of power. To put it bluntly, there was no way in hell Cersei or Joffrey could get away with bullying Margaery the way they did Sansa and that appears to be something Cersei never really considered; Daddy said Joffrey was going to marry Margaery instead of Sansa, and that's as far as Cersei thought about it at the time.



Agree that Margaery is clearly much, MUCH better at the game than Cersei is; she understands the importance of getting the smallfolk on your side, and she has a degree of patience and self-control that Cersei lacks.


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