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Are Cersei and Jamie Bastard Children of the Mad King?


The Third Eye

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I'm so sorry, if this theory has already been discussed. It's been quite a while since I read the books and I wouldn't consider myself an expert. I also have to confess that I don't read many online discussions and theories because so many of the theories are theories based on a theory based on a theory that has been based on a theory... if you know what I'm saying. Not that I disregard those theories. Many of them may be good. I really don't have the time to catch up with all of them. So here is a theory from someone who read the books 2 years ago amd re-read some important chapters one year ago but that's it. So please don't laugh at me.

My theory:

While Tyrion is the only legitimate son of Tywin Lannister, his older siblings are bastards of Aerys (the Mad King) and Tywin's wife (forgot her name)

Why I think this?

- Joffry is often described as a secon Aerys. Maybe because he is his grandson

- One of Tywin's reasons to join Robert's rebellion was Aerys' affection for Tywins wife (I recall that being mentioned but not exactly where, I hope this is not from the TV show. If yes, I apologize)

- There is that one scene in the River Lands (Book 4 or 5) where Jamie talks to that old Lannister Lady and she tells him that he wasn't Tywin's son but Tyrion on the other hand was. Now when I read this, I thought it was just metaphorically speaking. Like if she wanted to say that Tyrion is the one who inherited Tywin's strategic way of thinking. But what if she meant it litteraly?

- Jamie's and Cersei's incestuos relationship and desires could be something they inherited from "their father"

- This would give a strange symmetry to the story. Jamie would not only be a Kingslayer but also a Kin slayer - like his half brother Tyrion.

What I think speaks against my theory:

- Aerys didn't want Cersei to become queen - but that could also express his guilty conscience because of cheating on his wife.

What the whole of this could mean:
- First of all this reading(not sure if this is the right word, I'm German and I intend to say "Lesart") of the events has to be something GRRM has to be aware of. If not, then it will surely have no effects on the events to come.
- Secondly, it is important whether or not GRRM decides to leave this reading (again, "Lesart") implicit or being revealed to the characters by somebody, let's say that old Lannister lady. (My personal opion is that this book series will leave a lot of things open for interpretation and that there will be more thatn one truth once all of the story is told)
- In any case, this would make Cersei and Jamie half brother and half sister to both, Daenerys and Tyrion.

- In Daenerys point of view, they both wouldn't have a claim to the throne since they'd be bastards
- If - and the 5th book strongly points in that direction - Connington, Young griff/Aegon and Varys take over in Westeros this would make Jamie and Cersei natural allies of Daenerys - provided she still wanted to win the throne - most probably based on the grounds that they claim that Young Griff was not Aegon - be it true or not. Crucial for this developement, however, would be if the three are going to know about the fact that they are siblings or not.
- Prophecywise the three could be Aegon the conquerer and his two sisters reborn, while the three dragons are obviously, well their three dragons reborn.

- Let's say - I know this is getting far fetched - Dany did form an aliance, with her half-siblings, it would continue daenerys inner struggle beween having been told that lineage and blood would make her a good queen - and her own concept of enlightened absolutism which would be represented by Varys and Young Griff.
- Another possibility could be that Dany formed an aliance with Tyrion and Jamie - again as a reborn version of Aegon and his two sisters, even if she and Tyrion were not related then (And I do have no doubt at all that Tyrion is Tywin's son)



Be it as it may...:
- I do think that the question if Dany should fight a "false Targaryan King" (and I do think that Aegon isn't who he was told to be, Varys just made everybody believe that in accordance to his own philosophy of enlightened absolutism and the creed "power resides whereever people believe it resides" ) or if she herself wants to follow her ideals. The question whether or not Jamie and Cersei are her bastard siblings (revealed or unrevealed) could ad some extra spice to that struggle.

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I don't like the secret Targaryen theories much (except from RLJ), but I think A+J=C+J is certainly plausible. Don't forget Cersei's enchantment with wildfire, and the way Jaime described her when she watched the Tower of the Hand burn.



I was re-reading ACOK lately, and I came across a very interesting passage, but my books are not in English, so the translation could be misleading.


Catelyn is invited to the feast in Renly's camp, and she notes that men are getting drunk, laughing.. the usual merry making. A fool is telling some jokes, and he calls Jaime "Kinslayer", and Renly corrects saying "it''s Kingslayer, you idiot fool"


Or is it?


Again, I'm not sure if the Kinslayer/kingslayer thing is in the original version, so if someone wants to check and provide the quote :P

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Whilst I agree that Cersei and Jaime could well be the Mad King's children (I am coming around to the theory that Aerys forced himself on Tywin's wife on Tywin and Joanna's wedding night), I do not believe that Dany would ally with the Lannisters.



1) Dany knows the Lannisters killed Aerys and Rhaegar's wife and children.



2) Cersei is a paranoid, power-hungry woman who almost always react on her first emotions, in this case of a dragon wielding Targaryen coming to take the throne from her (and Tommen). Her first and only response to this is to have Dany and her dragons killed by any means necessary.



The old Lannister woman was Genna (Lannister) Frey, Tywin's sister. Her comment that Tyrion was Tywin's son, not Jaime, was her way of saying that Tyrion was a proper Lannister and maybe a double barb on her suspicions of Jaime's true bloodline. That Tywin refused to speak to her for a half-year afterwards suggests that he suspects Jaime (and Cersei) are indeed the Mad King's children.



I used to believe that it was Tyrion who was a Targaryen, because of Tyrion's fascination with dragons and other tid-bits, but this dream in Jaime's last chapter in A Feast For Crows changed my mind:



That night he dreamt that he was back in the Great Sept of Baelor, still standing vigil over his father's corpse. The sept was still and dark, until a woman emerged from the shadows and walked slowly to the bier. "Sister!" he said.


But it was not Cersei. She was all in grey, a silent sister. A hood and veil concealed her features, but he could see the candles burning in the green pools of her eyes. "Sister," he said, "what would you have of me?" His last word echoed up and down the sept. Mememememememememememe.


"I am not your sister, Jaime." She raised a pale soft hand and pushed her hood back. "Have you forgotten me?"


Can I forget someone I never knew? The words caught in his throat. He did know her, but it had been so long...


"Will you forget your own lord father too? I wonder if you ever knew him, truly." Her eyes were green, her hair spun gold. He could not tell how old she was. Fifteen, he thought, or fifty. She climbed the steps to stand above the bier. "He could never abide being laughed at. That was the thing he hated most."


"Who are you?" He had to hear her say it.


"The question is, who are you?"


"This is a dream."


"Is it?" She smiled sadly. "Count your hands, child."


One. One hand clasped tightly around the sword hilt. Only one. "In my dreams I always have two hands." He raised his right hand and stared uncomprehending at the ugliness of the stump.


"We all dream of things we cannot have. Tywin dreamed his son was a great knight, that his daughter would be a queen. He dreamed they would be so strong and brave and beautiful that no one would ever laugh at them."


"I am a knight," he told her. "and Cersei is a queen."


A tear rolled down her cheek. The woman raised her hood again and turned her back on him. Jaime called after her, but she was already moving away, her skirt whispering lullabies as it brushed across the floor. Don't leave me, he wanted to call, but of course she'd left them long ago.



I wonder if you ever knew him, truly. Another way to say, do you truly know who your father was?



The question is, who are you? A Lannister or a Targaryen? An alternative could be, that now he had lost his hand, he could never be a knight again and what is his new role? but then, surely, the question would be; what are you?



We all dream of things we cannot have. Tywin dreamed that his son would be a great knight, that his daughter would be a queen. The first part, Jaime dreams he has two hands. So if Tywin dreamed of things he could not have, that means Jaime and Cersei cannot be his children. Jaime protests he is a knight, Cersei is a queen, but the woman only cried. A negative reaction to Jaime's statement.



That is main reason why I think Jaime and Cersei are the Mad King's children.


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For starters, "Lesart" = way / manner of reading ; reading fashion ; reading style ; reading method etc.


Or you just use "approach" or "interpretation" instead :)




Well, I'll quickly summarize a few points about the A+J=J&C theory, to give you a general overview:



1.) Sorry to disappoint you, but the theory has already been discussed ad nauseam ("bis zum Erbrechen" :P ) in numerous threads on this board.



2.) Based on my observation, the theory isn't exactly highly regarded or favoured amoung the majority of forum members. Many fans are of the opinion that it would ruin the story and expose a serious flaw in the overall cliché-free and gritty narrative.



3.) While the theory seems very interesting at first, one could also construe many other counterarguments, such as (1) the lack of purple eyes (they have green eyes, AFAIK), (2) the typical traits of "classic Lannister beauty" looks, (3) lacking Targaryen looks, (4) too much (secret) Targs already in the story (Dany, Jon, fAegon, Bloodraven...) ... And these are only from the top of my head. There are many more (and more legit) rebuttals. Jon has of course no obvious Targaryen traits either, but then again we have the very telling ToJ scene.



4.) If you critically look at the current state of evidence ("Beweislage"), the theory isn't especially well supported in the text, except for a few potential foreshadowings that you mentioned. And if you look closely, many of these clues doesn't have much going for them and mostly doesn't hold water, or so it seems. It just doesn't feel right to me, you know what I mean? :) It's completely different from R+L=J or Gravedigger or the Frey pie etc.



Personally, I think it's a red herring ("falsche Fährte"). But ultimately, we have to wait and see.



Cheers!



Edit: typo, tweaked, elaborated (I'm obsessive, I know... :))


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I'm not a believer, but I recognize that this is a solid theory. In contrast to Tyrion being a bastard son of Aerys, I'm at least open towards this one.



I was going to point out Jaime's dream in AFfC, but I see that Ser Arthyr Dracenstein has already done a better job at this. :)


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that's what it says in my book (although German, I've read them in English):



"The height of folly was reached when a plump fool came capering out in gold-painted tin with a cloth lion’s head, and chased a dwarf around the tables, whacking him over the head with a bladder. Finally King Renly demanded to know why he was beating his brother. “Why, Your Grace, I’m the Kinslayer,” the fool said. “It’s Kingslayer, fool of a fool,” Renly said, and the hall rang with laughter. Lord Rowan beside her did not join the merriment. “They are all so young,” he said. It was true. The Knight of Flowers could not have reached his second name day when Robert slew Prince Rhaegar on the Trident. Few of the others were very much older. They had been babes during the Sack of King’s Landing, and no more than boys when Balon Greyjoy raised the Iron Islands in rebellion."




This could indeed point in the same direction. My personal opinion is that GRRM did scatter these hints throughout the novel but that we will never know if this is true or not... after all, we don't have an omniscient narrator.


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This could indeed point in the same direction. My personal opinion is that GRRM did scatter these hints throughout the novel but that we will never know if this is true or not... after all, we don't have an omniscient narrative.

:agree: And this may be true for many other theories as well.

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I don't know if Cersei and Jaimie are Aery's sons, but I believe the dream of Jaimie during the siege of Riverrun is very important.


If we believe it (as I tend to do) to be a "greendream" , it means that Tywin could not have children ("we all dream of things we cannot have"). In that case , neither Cersei , nor Jaimie, nor Tyrion, are Tywin's sons....which one / ones of them are offsprings of Targaryen blood...that's a more complicate riddle!



Another dream I have not seen quoted in any of the several discussions about if Tyrion will join Danaeris as kin and dragonrider is the dream that Tyrion had about himself fighting side to side with Danaeris and Bittersteel, killing his brother. I take it to mean that Tyrion will be indeed one of the three heads of the dragon, Danaeris another one....and Daario the third one: a sellsword with blue-purple eyes and unknown hair color...why not a son of Bittersteel?

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@creative name.

1. Thanks for all the translations but I would have needed none. This is an English board so let's keep things in English ;-) I used the word "reading" for Lesart because I know it from academic literature but wasn't sure if it can be used in everyday language too.

2. about the theory having been discussed and discarded: Sorry ....I really didn't find it. So should this thread be closed then?

3. You forgot Maester Aemon on that list ;-) ... but what if everybody being somehow related without knowing eventually turns out to be the commmon thread of the series?

4. Why does this destroy the "cliché-free and gritty narrative" imho, it actually adds a lot to it....
Is it because I'm expecting a totally different endgame than others?

Just to be clear:

I know that many people expect an endgame in which the forces of mankind will battle the forces of the others and that it is therefore important who's blood makes them a legitimate Targaryen succesor to the throne who is thereby entitled to fly the dragons into battle and that after that - or even before, a omniscent creature will tell us whom the "Prince that was promissed" theory was about.

In my point of view, this sounds way too much like a second Lord of the Rings. It would make the feature of being Targaryen equal to being of Isildur's descent and it would make John Dany or whomever equal to Aragorn, the Others equal to Orcs and the Great Other equal to Sauron.

I on the other hand tend to see things like this:

There is absolutely nothing special about being Targaryen. I don't think that the common cliché that a bloodline idealistically entitles you to anything will proove true in A Song of Ice and Fire. And therefore, I don't think that being secretly a Targaryan is anything that's so special at all.

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@creative name.

1. Thanks for all the translations but I would have needed none. This is an English board so let's keep things in English ;-) I used the word "reading" for Lesart because I know it from academic literature but wasn't sure if it can be used in everyday language too.

Sorry then, I suspected you might need help :)

2. about the theory having been discussed and discarded: Sorry ....I really didn't find it. So should this thread be closed then?

Nah, everything is in perfect order. Every two days we get another thread about who is the most hated character etc.

Edit: It hasn't been discarded. It's more solid than a lot of other theories.

3. You forgot Maester Aemon in that list ;-) ... but what if everybody being somehow related without knowing eventually turns out to be the commmon thread of the series?

Of course.

4. Why does this destroy the "cliché-free and gritty narrative" imho, it actually adds a lot to it....

Is it because I'm expecting a totally different endgame than others?

That's actually not my personal opinion. I just tried to tell you what other people on here might think.

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For starters, "Lesart" = way / manner of reading ; reading fashion ; reading style ; reading method etc.

Or you just use "approach" or "interpretation" instead :)

Well, I'll quickly summarize a few points about the A+J=J&C theory, to give you a general overview:

1.) Sorry to disappoint you, but the theory has already been discussed ad nauseam ("bis zum Erbrechen" :P ) in numerous threads on this board.

2.) Based on my observation, the theory isn't exactly highly regarded or favoured amoung the majority of forum members. Many fans are of the opinion that it would ruin the story and expose a serious flaw in the overall cliché-free and gritty narrative.

3.) While the theory seems very interesting at first, one could also construe many other counterarguments, such as (1) the lack of purple eyes (they have green eyes, AFAIK), (2) the typical traits of "classic Lannister beauty" looks, (3) lacking Targaryen looks, (4) too much (secret) Targs already in the story (Dany, Jon, fAegon, Bloodraven...) ... And these are only from the top of my head. There are many more (and more legit) rebuttals. Jon has of course no obvious Targaryen traits either, but then again we have the very telling ToJ scene.

4.) If you critically look at the current state of evidence ("Beweislage"), the theory also isn't especially well supported in the text, except for a few potential foreshadowings that you mentioned. And if you look closely, mayn of these clues doesn't have much going for them and mostly doesn't hold water, or so it seems. It just doesn't feel right to me, you know what I mean? :) It's completely different from R+L=J or Gravedigger or the Frey pie etc.

Personally, I think it's a red herring ("falsche Fährte"). But ultimately, we have to wait and see.

Cheers!

Edit: typo, tweaked, elaborated (I'm obsessive, I know... :))

Why do the names of logical fallacies sound so much more cooler in German?

Hell, everything sounds cooler in German.

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Hell, everything sounds cooler in German.

Sorry for that :) I suspected the OP might need help.

Actually, as a German myself, I'll admit that German as a language can be quite tiresome. Lots of complicated sentence structures. The important verbs often appear not until the very end of the sentence... English is much more lucid, IMO.

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I wrote an exam in grad school (I was in Linguistics) that was just one question on German verb structure. We had five hours to do it. So Yeah.



Anyway, on topic. This is much more plausible than the idea of Tyrion being a Targ, and the textual evidence is there if you're determined to find it. But I'm far from convinced myself.


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Don't get me wrong. It wasn't my intention to demand this be true (I love the English subjunctive) I just wanted to say that this is a possible interpretation.... (and most likely stay one, even after the series is finished as most possible interpretations will)


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A lot of people say J+C being secret Targ descendants would be too many, but I don't think this is a fair point to make to disregard the theory. If BR, fAegon, Varys, Illyrio, Serra, Jon, and even maybe Quaithe or Mel could all potentially be secret Targs, I see no real reason not to add 2 more to the list. GRRM for all we know could be setting up the whole thing to kill the WW in book 6 and just have a big Targ war in book 7, which means there have to be a bunch of potential DRAGON RIDERS around. Until Euron or Victarion or Tyrion or someone successfully binds their bloodline to dragons, Targs are the only riders.



That said, I think J+C being Targs is only plausible, and I am firmly against Tyrion being anyone but Tywin's son.


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[...] which means there have to be a bunch of potential DRAGON RIDERS around. Until Euron or Victarion or Tyrion or someone successfully binds their bloodline to dragons, Targs are the only riders.

I don't think it's safe to assume that only the oh-so-special Targs are able to easily control dragons, through magical bloodlines or whatever.

TPATQ pretty much debunked this notion, IIRC.

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