THE CLOAK SOILED HIM: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAIME LANNISTER

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Our first sight of Jaime Lannister is of the very picture of privileged arrogance. The twin brother to the queen, the elder son of the richest and most powerful lord in Westeros, a nearly unparalleled swordsman, a strikingly handsome man “with a smile that cut like a knife.” The narrative wastes no time in giving us ample reason to think of Jaime as one of the bad guys. He’s a knight of the Kingsguard best known for having killed the previous king, and while few are brave enough to call him “Kingslayer” to his face, most characters do not hesitate to whisper behind his back. His lover of choice is his sister, and he soon deals a permanently disabling, nearly fatal injury to an innocent little boy to cover up their affair. At the very beginning, he is already seen as a villain, and he does not hesitate to act the part.

Jaime is known as the youngest Kingsguard knight in the order’s history, having taken the white cloak at age fifteen. This act of record-setting is significant to his development, but even more striking about Jaime’s taking Kingsguard vows is that he is the first heir to a great House to do so. The Kingsguard is a lifelong commitment to service and celibacy. In close to three-hundred years of knights guarding kings, there is no precedent for a knight to be relieved of his white cloak until midway through A Game of Thrones, by which point Jaime has already been a royal bodyguard for all of his adult life, and there is still no precedent for a KG knight to have the option of giving up his cloak on his own terms. Once the white cloak has been fastened to a man’s shoulders, the only way out is to join the Night’s Watch, and the only way out of the Night’s Watch is death. Desertion is a gambit that precious few men survive for long. Under these conditions, the Kingsguard is seen as a prestigious and honorable career for younger sons, especially from minor Houses. It is most certainly not seen as a suitable option for a boy who would otherwise inherit the lordship of Casterly Rock.

The first question, then, is: what moved that very young boy, who could have been a Lord Paramount, to take those vows at such a young age?

The simple answer is that he had a twin sister.

When Jaime and Cersei were children at Casterly Rock, they were close companions, they spent a lot of time together, and when they were little, they sometimes played together in ways that raised eyebrows. They’d see dogs or horses mating, and they’d imitate what they saw. Their mother witnessed their child’s play and we might say she overreacted. She moved Jaime to another bedchamber well away from Cersei’s, and she placed a guard at Cersei’s door every night. She warned the twins never to engage in such actions again, or she would have to tell their father. We can surmise that the twins were seven years old at the time; as Jaime reports, not long after this event, Joanna died at Tyrion’s birth. Jaime doesn’t remember exactly what they were doing, only their mother’s reaction, and it’s worth noting that whatever they were doing at such a young age was probably no cause for alarm. We’re talking about a pair of seven-year-old twins playing together, and the problem was probably not that they had any idea of what they were doing, or had any intention of carrying on a sexual relationship, so much as that their parents were overwhelmingly focused on the image of the Lannisters. No matter that many other noble Houses probably had young children playing with their siblings in cringeworthy but ultimately harmless ways; Lord Tywin would have rained fire on his children’s heads to keep them from being seen as playing at incest.

The psychological effect of this separation on the twins is not explored directly in the text, but the general picture is of a pair of siblings who were playing as children often do, and their mother treated them as though their play were some forbidden, secret relationship that had to be hidden from adult eyes. It would not be outside the range of normal for those children to respond to that separation by doubling down on the behavior in question, but also taking extra care to keep their playtime a secret. Their mother soon died, their father never found out about the inappropriate play, and the twins engaged in increasingly scandal-worthy behavior. Jaime doesn’t remember when they started kissing, but “it was always innocent…until it wasn’t.” After their mother died, it seems no one was really paying attention to the twins. Their brother, Tyrion, became aware of the incest at some point, but as he was still a very young child at the time Jaime joined the Kingsguard, it’s not clear whether he knew what his brother and sister were doing until their affair was too far entrenched and the consequences already apparent.

Throughout the twins’ childhoods, their father was Hand of the King under Aerys II. While Lord Tywin was a terrible person in most ways that counted, it must be noted that he was a very capable King’s Hand. Towards the end, King Aerys was so resentful of Tywin they were barely working together, but Ser Ilyn Payne was not wrong to note that Tywin was the one who actually ruled the Seven Kingdoms. (King Aerys had Ser Ilyn’s tongue torn out for making this observation.) This is not only relevant to the amount of time he spent hundreds of miles away from his family, it is crucial to the context in which Jaime became a Kingsguard knight. Lord Tywin intended to make his daughter a queen, so he took 12-year-old Cersei to court with him and kept her at King’s Landing to prepare for a chance to wed her to Prince Rhaegar or perhaps take a chance on Viserys.

Meanwhile, Jaime went off to squire for Lord Sumner Crakehall, where he was surrounded by other boys and separated from his family. Make no mistake; Tywin was also working on a good marriage arrangement for his son. His idea was for Jaime to wed Lysa Tully, which would have made a nice alliance with the Tullys of Riverrun, but when Jaime stayed with the Tullys, he was much more interested in hearing war stories from Uncle Brynden, Lysa was a shy girl, and she didn’t make much impression on him.

Maybe Lysa would have turned out better if she’d been married to a handsome, brave boy her own age, rather than Jon Arryn? Maybe the future Lord of Casterly Rock would have been a sufficient distraction from Littlefinger? Realistically, though, Lysa wasn’t into handsome, brave boys, and looking at the adult she became, it’s probably for the best that Jaime didn’t marry her. He possibly owes his life to having dodged that bullet.

While Jaime left the Tullys disappointed, he did extraordinarily well in his training at Crakehall. He won a tourney melee at age thirteen; winning a tourney melee at any age is impressive, but Jaime was fighting against dozens of bigger, stronger men with far more combat experience, and he was the last one standing. His idol was Ser Arthur Dayne, a Kingsguard knight whom most Westerosi agree was the standard against which all other knights are judged. Jaime took part in the battle against the Kingswood Brotherhood outlaws at age fifteen, and for his defense of Lord Crakehall, he was knighted by Ser Arthur Dayne himself. Jaime was doing extremely well for himself and had a brilliant life ahead of him.

Then he paid a visit to King’s Landing on the way home.

He wanted to see his sister, and he did. They met in a seedy inn on Eel Alley, where she showed up dressed as a serving girl. When they were alone together, Cersei gave him the news that there was an opening in the Kingsguard, and if Jaime took that opening, then they would be together in King’s Landing and he wouldn’t be married to Lysa Tully. Jaime, at first, was hesitant to get on board with her plan, because he knew he was supposed to inherit the lordship of Casterly Rock. However, he was also a hormonal teenager who’d developed an inappropriate relationship with his twin, and after Cersei spent all night fucking his brains out, Jaime decided the Rock wasn’t so important after all. No, he didn’t need a wife, least of all that boring, giggly Lysa Tully, he didn’t need children who’d call him Father, he didn’t need a castle and lands to manage; he needed proximity to his sister, and at the time, they both assumed she’d be staying in the capital long-term. Under those conditions, a white cloak seemed like the answer to all of Jaime’s questions.

Remember how his father was Hand of the King? The plan for Jaime to join the Kingsguard was effective, in that he did receive that white cloak and the vows of celibacy and non-inheritance that came with it. King Aerys II attended the tourney at Harrenhal, where he fixed the white cloak to his Hand’s 15-year-old son’s shoulders, and then promptly sent the boy back to King’s Landing before he could compete in the tourney. Lord Tywin took Jaime’s investiture as the final straw in his increasingly hostile relationship with the king, because it really was a great insult to put a white cloak on a high lord’s heir, and he promptly resigned as Hand.

The result was that Jaime was now stuck with the Mad King, and his father took Cersei back home to Casterly Rock.

What just happened? A mostly-healthy, mostly-normal 15-year-old boy who had everything going for him, gave it all up because he wanted to keep on fucking his twin sister.

We may ask, who else was involved in the decision to put this very young, very valuable boy under an oath that effectively took away the rest of his life? Certainly not Lord Tywin, who was still convinced, eighteen years later, that Jaime should be his heir. There was Cersei, who may have had other incentives to get her brother put in the Kingsguard; even if her father’s plans of marrying her to the next king didn’t work out, Jaime was out of the line of succession to Casterly Rock, which theoretically might have made her Tywin’s new heir, opposed as he was to letting Tyrion inherit the castle. That said, Cersei was just another 15-year-old, there were plenty of people in King’s Landing who may have wanted to find a way to remove Tywin as King’s Hand, and so she didn’t necessarily get the idea all by herself. There’s a good argument to be made that Varys served as the intermediary between her and King Aerys, and was in fact the one who really convinced Aerys to make Jaime his new Kingsguard knight. The plan appealed to Aerys as a way to piss off Tywin, who annoyed him on account of being too good at his job. It may have appealed to Varys as a way to destabilize the realm for his own nefarious purposes, as Tywin was indeed too good at his job, and putting a white cloak on his son was a sure way to rob King’s Landing of the influence of the man who made the metaphorical trains run on time. Even if Cersei made all those arrangements by her juvenile self, we are still left with King Aerys somehow thinking it was a good idea to rob Tywin of his heir. I realize they called him the Mad King for much more serious reasons than this one, but still: was there no one in that court willing to tell the king maybe he shouldn’t put a fifteen-year-old boy in the Kingsguard? Surely there were other knights and lordlings, more mature and of lower status, who also expressed interest in that opening? As an adult in that situation, King Aerys would not have been out of line to say, “No, Jaime, you do NOT get a white cloak. Go home and play with your ugly little brother.”

No, of course that’s a stupid question: aside from Tywin, there was no one in that court willing to tell the king he was wrong. I realize that Westerosi culture does not make the same distinction between adolescence and adulthood that we do here in the 21st century, and that the Night’s Watch has taken in younger boys and put them to good use, but still, Jaime was the youngest knight ever to join the Kingsguard, and that record is no accident. He made a lifelong decision based on faulty planning and faultier premises, and he effectively threw his life away because his mother was dead, his father was clueless, the king was a madman, and Jaime just wanted to fuck his sister for a while longer. He was the one who suffered the most from that decision.

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Having believed he was choosing between “a rock” and his affair with his twin, young Jaime was instead completely cut off from his family and stuck in a dead-end job guarding a dangerously volatile king without his father’s stabilizing influence.

After he sacrificed his claim to Casterly Rock, triggered his father’s resignation as Hand, and lost what little access to Cersei he’d previously had, it may be difficult to imagine how his plans could have backfired in more serious ways, but the next two years of his life showed Jaime what serving in the Kingsguard really meant. He was expected to do whatever was required to keep the monarch and his close family members and advisors alive, including to sacrifice his own life, and that much was straightforward. Another way to describe a KG knight’s duty is to make sure no one kills the king while he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing. The moral value of that job depends on the actions of the king, and we’re talking about a king who had already removed the tongue of a knight who announced that Tywin Lannister was too good at his job.

Under these conditions, Jaime’s duties included guarding Queen Rhaella, who was the king’s abuse victim as much as his consort. He had to stand at the door and pretend not to hear as the king battered and violated his sister/wife, because his duty to guard the queen did not include guarding the queen from the king. He was told this was his duty as a knight of the Kingsguard, and he should not complain about doing his job.

He was also responsible for the safety of Prince Rhaegar, who appeared to have had a decent rapport with Jaime, but Prince Rhaegar’s actions also set in motion the sequence of events that led to Robert’s Rebellion, and once the rebellion was in motion, guarding the king became increasingly difficult to justify. At the very same tourney at which Jaime was entered into the Kingsguard but not allowed to compete, Prince Rhaegar caused a scandal by naming Lyanna Stark his Queen of Love and Beauty, over his wife Princess Elia Martell.

Not much later, Prince Rhaegar abducted Lyanna and King Aerys refused to move against his son. The abduction led to King Aerys executing Lyanna’s father, Lord Rickard, her oldest brother, Brandon Stark, and all of their companions except for young Ethan Glover, without a real trial. In place of a trial, Lord Rickard was strung up over a fire and slowly roasted alive, while his son Brandon was strangled to death while trying to rescue his father. This was King Aerys’s response to the Starks demanding the return of Lyanna, and it took place in front of a crowd of silent onlookers, including his youngest Kingsguard knight Jaime Lannister. In this event, Jaime’s job was to keep anyone from killing the king while he carried out his atrocities, and afterwards, his sworn brother Ser Gerold Hightower counseled Jaime that his duty was to guard the king, not to judge him.

Years later, Jaime still regards Ser Gerold as a much better man than he himself. This was the lesson he received from such better men in those two years of serving Aerys: just do your job and don’t complain. They were effectively asking him to consider himself privileged to enable the king’s atrocities.

The Starks’ deaths by pyromancy were neither the last nor the worst acts of violence King Aerys enacted with Jaime protecting him. As the rebellion wore on and the royalists were increasingly on the losing side, Aerys became more paranoid and more destructive, and he started working on a little pet project called the Wildfire Plot. After announcing to the court that the champion of House Targaryen was fire, he tasked his pyromancers with the job of saturating King’s Landing with fire in liquid form. They worked at brewing as much wildfire as possible, and Aerys spent many meetings telling them where under the city to set up the containers, and he did all this with Jaime standing his silent watch.

During the rebellion, Aerys apparently decided Jaime had to be watched and wanted to keep him close as much as possible, and he did so for the same dreadfully ill-advised reason as he put the white cloak on Jaime in the first place: because he was Tywin Lannister’s son. While Lord Tywin kept his own House and the Westerlands out of the war, Aerys thought it would be a good idea to make Jaime his pet guard and keep him close to ensure Tywin’s neutrality. There was Jaime, employed as a bodyguard while simultaneously held hostage against his father, while Aerys prepared for the nuclear option against the rebels. Just as there had been no one to advise King Aerys against putting his Hand’s 15-year-old son in the Kingsguard, there was no one with the backbone to tell him that combining the roles of bodyguard and hostage was the worst idea ever in the history of kings having bad ideas.

The practical upshot was that Jaime spent day after day pretending not to overhear the king making plans to burn the capital city to ash. “The traitors want my city, but I’ll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over cooked bones and charred meat,” he said to his pyromancers, while Jaime made sure no one interrupted their plans for mass destruction. Remember, his duty was to guard the king, not to judge him.

The noble Prince Rhaegar’s grand plans did not work out the way he thought they would, and he died on the Trident. By that point, the rebels’ victory was a fait accompli, and Jaime knew it. He knew that if the Lannister forces showed up at the city gates, it wouldn’t be to defend the royal family from the rebels. When the Lannisters arrived ahead of Ned Stark’s forces, Grand Maester Pycelle convinced King Aerys that the Lannisters were there to do precisely the opposite of what they were about to do, and the gates were opened to the army that promptly sacked the city. For his part, Jaime’s first decision was not to kill the king; he wanted to meet his father’s army and arrange a peaceful surrender. Aerys felt differently. “Bring me your father’s head, if you are no traitor,” was his response.

Meanwhile, the king was in the immediate company of his current Hand, Rossart the pyromancer, which meant he was about to burn them all.

With no chance at a peaceful surrender, Jaime first killed Rossart as he tried to sneak out the back door, and then he dragged Aerys down off the throne and slit his throat. In the following days, Jaime would track down and kill the other pyromancers who’d been involved in the plot.

Wearing his gold armor under his white cloak, and carrying his gold sword with the king’s blood running down the blade, Jaime hopped up on the Iron Throne and waited to see who would arrive. The Lannister knights and bannermen arrived at the Red Keep, having already set the lion banner flying above the city ramparts. A group of Lannister troops took over the throne room ahead of Ned Stark’s company. There was the image Ned Stark found in the throne room: the Mad King dead on the floor, a bunch of Westermen hanging around, and 17-year-old Jaime Lannister’s gold-armored backside perched up on the throne, with his lion’s-head helm on his pretty blond head. Not that anyone tried to stop Lord Eddard from establishing a presence in the room; the Lannisters drew back and let the Starks ride in. Moreover, when Jaime saw Ned ride into the room, he didn’t occupy the throne for any longer. When he saw the way Ned was looking at him, he hopped right back up and said: “Have no fear, Stark, I was only keeping it warm for our friend Robert. It’s not a very comfortable seat, I’m afraid.” Based on the optics of the Lannisters’ sack of the city, and Jaime’s flippant response, Ned assumed Jaime was in a perfectly cheery mood after having slashed the king’s throat, and he concluded that Jaime’s killing the king was part of the package of the Lannisters and their bannermen taking the city by treachery.

I’m aware that Westeros is a culture that’s not terribly interested in psychology and the range of responses to trauma, so it’s no surprise that Ned Stark never considered perhaps Jaime was a great example of a high-ranking nobleman who’d been taught from the cradle to project an image of invincibility, that the Lannister ethos was especially hostile to any expression of vulnerability, that Jaime couldn’t afford to appear less than composed in front of the Lannister knights, and there may have been a more complicated story than Jaime having turned on his king to help his father. A more complicated story never occurred to him, and once his decision was made, all the other nobles, knights and advisors in the rebellion followed Ned’s lead. Everyone was so sure they knew everything they needed to know about Jaime’s killing the Mad King, and they called him Kingslayer, and they treated him like an amoral, untrustworthy murderer for killing the king whose death was as necessary as it was inevitable. In the process of setting up Robert’s new regime and deciding who would live or die and stay or leave, no one showed the slightest curiosity in Jaime’s side of the story.

At Robert’s coronation, Jaime was required to kneel at the royal feet along with Grand Maester Pycelle, who had convinced Aerys to open the city gates to the Lannisters, and Lord Varys, who had constantly filled the king’s already-paranoid had with more rumors of traitors, and King Robert made a show of forgiving him for having served the Mad King. It was decided that Jaime would be kept in the Kingsguard following his act of regicide, but King Robert never took his new queen’s twin aside to ask him about his decision to kill Aerys. Lord Commander Barristan Selmy, who’d spent years watching Aerys become increasingly dangerous to the realm, never tried sitting down with his youngest Sworn Brother and asking for an explanation of his decision. Everyone was so sure they had Jaime all figured out, nobody ever considered they might get something interesting for the history books by asking him for his version of events. The new King’s Hand Jon Arryn never asked him. King Robert’s famously stern, just brother Stannis never asked him. No one on the Small Council ever tried asking him to explain in his own words why the king had to die on his blade. No one in his family ever asked him; not Cersei, not Uncle Kevan, not Aunt Genna, and certainly not Lord Tywin, who made not the slightest effort to stay in his son’s life once he removed himself from the line of succession.

I repeat: nobody ever asked Jaime to tell them why he killed the king. Everyone treated him like the Worst Person Ever for killing the king before the rebels could, and no one was even slightly interested in hearing from him about why he did it. Ned Stark and Barristan Selmy both advised Robert to send Jaime to join the Night’s Watch, but Jon Arryn convinced Robert to pardon Jaime. His sentence was commuted, but his conviction was never overturned, and he never had a chance to testify on his own behalf.

In that environment, Jaime had a solid incentive to show Robert he’d killed Aerys with good reason, as he surely didn’t want to spend the rest of his life freezing his balls off at the Wall. That he didn’t tell anyone about the Wildfire Plot suggests he didn’t have a chance to tell anyone, that he had every reason to believe the court would refuse to believe him if he volunteered the information, and therefore he had no better options but to leave the story untold and the tons of wildfire out of sight and out of mind.

The fallout of Jaime’s service to the Mad King would have made a vicious cynic of even the most optimistic kid, and I reiterate that Jaime was, at that time, still just a kid. He spent two years being forced to enable atrocities, right up to the moment where he couldn’t protect the king even from himself, and there is no telling how many lives he saved by breaking his vows when he did. The common estimate of “half a million” is insufficient; by killing the Mad King, Jaime saved King’s Landing from certain obliteration, and by saving King’s Landing, he kept the Seven Kingdoms intact. Had the Mad King succeeded in setting off the wildfire, there’s no telling how many more wars would have broken out as the surviving lords of Westeros fought over which region should be the site of the new capital, or whether the Seven Kingdoms should go back to autonomous and mutually antagonistic provinces, and who should be in charge of what. There’s no telling how many more years the Seven Kingdoms would have been in turmoil, and how many more people would have died, if King’s Landing had not survived the rebellion. Jaime not only saved the lives of everyone in the city who weren’t killed by his father’s forces during the Sack; he prevented incalculable death and suffering outside the capital by making sure the rebels still had a city to take over.

The nobility of Westeros looked at this traumatized, isolated teenager who made a decision and saved countless lives, and they called him: Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Man without honor.

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The new king Robert Baratheon likely saw it as an act of generosity to keep Jaime in the Kingsguard. There was no precedent at that point to release a Kingsguard knight from his vows and let him go home to his family. Some men, such as Ned Stark and Barristan Selmy, may have thought Jaime should have given up his place in the Kingsguard and joined the Night’s Watch as a consequence of having broken his vows. For reasons of their own, Robert Baratheon and Jon Arryn felt differently, and Jaime kept his white cloak. In a further bid to keep the Lannisters invested in the new regime, King Robert chose Cersei Lannister as his queen, which placed her back in King’s Landing and made her part of the royal family which Jaime was sworn to protect.

Before we get to the implications of Cersei becoming queen, I would first ask what effect the previous two years had on Jaime’s worldview. He knew what the Mad King tried to do, and he knew his act of regicide was necessary. He knew what sort of horrible things the Mad King had done in the last two years of his reign, and he knew of the role the Kingsguard knights were expected to play in those abuses. Jaime also knew that, as a consequence of preventing the most devastating act of destruction the Seven Kingdoms would have ever seen, he was treated like a terrible person, with everyone whispering “Kingslayer” behind his back as though any of the rebel lords wouldn’t have gladly slain Aerys given the chance and with far less reason. We should ask: what did this process do to Jaime’s sense of right and wrong?

We don’t have that stage of Jaime’s psychology in as many words, but if we extrapolate between what happened back then and the way Jaime behaves in adulthood, there are some connections that emerge. One way for a 17-year-old to respond to those experiences would be to decide there’s no use in distinguishing between “good” and “bad” actions; not to think, per se, that there’s no such thing as doing good or doing bad, but more to understand that he is living in a world in which good actions are not rewarded, and thus there is no sense in trying to do good. Rather than trying to measure the absolute moral value of actions, Jaime may have decided there are people he can trust, and those he can’t.

In order to maintain a sense of self in the environment of hypocrisy that surrounded him following the rebellion, Jaime invested himself in relationships in which he felt valued and accepted, and he distanced himself from people who treated him like the Worst Kingsguard Knight Ever. In his case, the people he could trust were his family, and not even very many of them. He had his siblings, his father, maybe a very few close relatives like Uncle Kevan and Aunt Genna, and perhaps a few close childhood friends like Addam Marbrand, and that was about it for him. He was actively contemptuous of King Robert, he never appears to have made friends with any of the other Kingsguard knights, and he resented Ned Stark for years after the Sack of King’s Landing. He doesn’t seem to have forged many worthwhile relationships outside of his family.

That brings us back to Cersei, who was Jaime’s reason for joining the Kingsguard in the first place, and soon became Robert’s queen.

Cersei’s marriage to the king meant she was safely in the Red Keep, in close proximity to Jaime for the first time since he donned the white cloak, which meant they could resume their affair. Years later, Cersei recalls that she fucked Jaime on the morning of her wedding. In the context of Jaime’s having gone through those two awful years with Aerys, and the way he was treated following his act of regicide, what did the affair with his sister mean to him?

Again, we don’t have his exact words on the matter, but given his recent experiences, it would make sense for Jaime to reinvest himself in the twincest as a way to derive meaning from the trauma he’d endured following his investiture. With that in mind, the next logical step would be to define their relationship as the most important love affair in all the Seven Kingdoms, and the most important thing in either of their lives. Jaime’s thinking may have been, first off, his and Cersei’s relationship must be the Greatest Love Story of All Time, or else why would he have sacrificed so much and endured so much horror and disillusionment to be with her? Second, his having sacrificed his adulthood and reputation to avoid a marriage to Lysa Tully was worth the trouble in the end because he and Cersei were reunited after all.

That said, it should be noted now that the conditions of him and Cersei continuing their affair were not the terms of the relationship he wanted. Over time, he came to see Robert Baratheon as a rival, an intruder on Jaime’s time with his true love. For the time being, Jaime accepted the conditions of their relationship being a secret from the realm, but he would not always be content to be Cersei’s secret lover.

From that mindset, it must have stood to reason that their secret affair was more important than King Robert’s line of succession, and it didn’t take long for Cersei to decide she would rather have Jaime’s babies than Robert’s. Early in their marriage, Cersei became pregnant by Robert, but it didn’t last long; Jaime connected her with a midwife to help her terminate the pregnancy before anyone else found out. Because Robert liked to whore around with every girl who didn’t run away fast enough, went Cersei’s reasoning, it was perfectly okay for her, whose position was built around birthing heirs to the king, to have her children with her brother and pass them off as the king’s issue.

While she was whole-heartedly determined that Jaime would sire her children, Cersei was adamant that he keep his distance from them as much as possible. Jaime attended Joffrey’s birth, but Cersei wouldn’t let him hold the baby. With Myrcella and Tommen years later, it was the same: he could only be Uncle Jaime, and a distant uncle at that. He knew he was their natural father, but he never had a chance to be a parent.

At some point in these early years, Jaime paid a visit to Casterly Rock and spent time with Tyrion. We haven’t seen specifics in the text except that Tyrion was thirteen the time, which means the twins were twenty. Until further notice, I will assume the visit was shortly after Joffrey was born, and Cersei was making a visit to introduce the baby to her family and their bannermen, with Jaime attending as her Kingsguard escort. Regardless of the circumstances of the visit, Jaime was riding along with Tyrion one night and they encountered a girl running away from some men trying to rape her. Tyrion took care of the girl while Jaime rode off to deal with the assailants. The girl’s name was Tysha, and she soon became Tyrion’s first wife. She was an orphaned daughter of a crofter, so he couldn’t bring her home to Casterly Rock, but they lived joyously together in a cottage in a nearby village for a short time.

At some point, Lord Tywin found out about his younger son’s marriage to a lowborn girl, and he would not allow that to stand. He instructed Jaime to lie to Tyrion about the circumstances of their meeting Tysha. Thus, while Tywin’s goons must have been taking Tysha into custody, Jaime was telling Tyrion his sweet young wife was really a whore, that Jaime had set up the scenario on the road so Tyrion could get some sexual experience, and their marriage was a sham.

Unbeknownst to Jaime, Tywin put on a show of Lannister superiority for Tyrion’s edification by making him watch while a bunch of guards took their turns raping Tysha and placing silver coins in her hands. To cap off the ritualized gang rape, Tywin ordered Tyrion to penetrate the girl and give her a cold coin as payment, and he did so. The lesson, from Tywin’s point of view, was that Lannisters are worth more than others, and a poor orphan girl could never be a worthy spouse for a lion of the Rock.

The lesson from our point of view is that if you’re a family member of Tywin Lannister, and he tells you to do something, no matter how repulsive, destructive, sadistic or futile, you’ll probably do it. Jaime didn’t know his brother’s little wife was to be subjected to a gang rape, but he knew he was lying about her, and he did it because his father told him to. Tyrion participated in a gang rape because his father told him to.

The lesson from Tyrion’s point of view was that no woman would ever want him unless he paid her to pretend, and the two weeks of happiness he had with Tysha were a gift from Jaime. For his part, Jaime knew Tyrion was grateful to him for a lie, and it was a deception that would weigh on him for years afterwards.

The years went on, and Jaime kept on guarding a king he held in contempt, kept on fucking his sister whenever she gave him a chance, and kept on being absent from their children’s lives.

The status quo shifted when Hand of the King Jon Arryn died, and the royal family made a journey to Winterfell. Jaime’s relationship to the Starks was complicated at best, but he made the trip as a dutiful Kingsguard.

Unbeknownst to the royal family, Jon Arryn’s widow Lysa Arryn (incidentally the same woman who was chosen to marry Jaime) sent a raven to her sister Catelyn Stark and told her the Lannisters had murdered Jon Arryn. This would have been news to any of the Lannisters, but Catelyn trusted her sister, and Ned Stark began his post as Hand of the King under an additional layer of suspicion and enmity to the queen’s family. Lady Arryn didn’t need any help in making the Starks hostile to the Lannisters, yet the twins inadvertently played into her hands by having a tryst in the Broken Tower.

As Bran Stark approached the window where he found the twins, the topic of their conversation was the riskiness of their affair. Cersei was afraid Robert was getting suspicious of them, and suggested he might set her aside for another Lyanna. Cersei was especially apprehensive about Ned Stark becoming the new Hand; she was eager for the moment when Robert died and the throne passed to Joffrey, and she was afraid Ned Stark would be less than loyal to Joffrey. (As it turns out, she was right about that.) Jaime wanted to stop talking about Robert and go on with their rutting without a care in the world, but Cersei was talking about the risk of their relationship being discovered, and so that concern was in the air when Bran appeared at the window. If their relationship had been discovered, it would have been much worse than Cersei merely being “set aside” for another queen. If Bran had told his parents about seeing the twins naked together, it would have been a straight line from there to Robert ordering the execution of both the twins, all three of Cersei’s children, and probably Tyrion and Tywin just to drive the point home.

However, when they first saw Bran struggling to keep his grip on the window ledge, Jaime’s first impulse wasn’t to make sure he fell to his likely death. The twins went to the window, and over his sister’s protests, Jaime pulled Bran up onto the ledge. For a moment there, Jaime was saving Bran’s life, whereas Cersei would have let him lose his grip and fall. The point is not that Jaime is off the hook for pushing Bran, it’s that he made that decision in the context of his family being in mortal danger, and Cersei making sure he knew it. Either way, that moment of saving Bran’s life didn’t last long: Jaime soon decided he would sacrifice Ned Stark’s seven-year-old son to keep his sister and her children alive, assuming the boy would die quickly and his death would look like an accident. Out the window went little Bran. He survived, but he would never walk again. While he didn’t remember the context surrounding his fall, his injury led to further complications between the Starks and Lannisters.

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-4-in-which-jaime-doubles-down/

His attempt to give Bran a quick death was successful in one way, at least temporarily: Bran didn’t remember his fall, nor did he remember seeing the queen and her twin wrestling naked together, so he didn’t expose the incest to the king. In that limited sense, Jaime was successful.

In the meantime Cersei started giving Jaime endless grief about having pushed Bran out the window. She suggested he could have handled the situation better, as if she hadn’t been there, shouting about Bran seeing them and reacting against Jaime’s pulling the boy up to the window. Basically, Cersei acted like a tremendous hypocrite and completely erased her own culpability in the incident. Due to these interactions with Cersei, Jaime came to regret having tossed Bran out the window, but the situation surrounding the incident—-namely, that his family’s lives were on the line—-remained the same. Cersei would not allow him the comfort of thinking he’d done it to protect her and the children, but he couldn’t think of himself as someone who’d toss an innocent little boy out of a window for no good reason, so he came to think of it as Bran’s fault; the wretched boy was spying on them.

Moreover, as Bran neither died nor made a full recovery, his condition opened up a new loose end which turned into more loose ends. While Bran lingered in a coma, someone (we’re fairly sure it was Joffrey) in the king’s entourage hired some local thug to take a Valyrian steel dagger into Bran’s sick room and put him out of his misery. In a further complication, Catelyn Stark was there to fight for her son, and Bran’s direwolf showed up to put an end to the fight. When it was over, Bran had suffered no further injury, and Catelyn had the dagger in her possession.

The royal family, now in the company of Ned Stark and his daughters, went through some more misadventures on their way to King’s Landing, such as the children’s fight. While Arya was outside forcing her direwolf Nymeria to run off to the wilderness, Robert passed out drunk and the twins had another fuck in the same room. Cersei began shouting “I want” as Jaime did the Sexy Siblings Dance with her (if you need to leave the room for a moment and puke, I understand), and at first he thought she meant him, but soon it became apparent that she wanted the head of Arya Stark served to her on a silver platter. It is heavily implied, years later, that Jaime did take it upon himself to try to find Arya that night, but her father’s associates found her first and brought her safely back to the inn where Cersei ordered the slaughter of Sansa’s direwolf. If Jaime had found Arya first, it is heavily implied that he would have killed the girl to please his sister.

The Baratheon-Lannister-Stark party did eventually make it to the Red Keep without any more human deaths. Shortly thereafter, Catelyn Stark made a secret trip to King’s Landing, where she conferred with Littlefinger about the murder attempt on Bran. The result of this conversation was that she believed Tyrion Lannister had hired the hitman to kill Bran. Thus, on her way back up north, when her party happened to cross paths with Tyrion on his way south, she had him arrested and dragged up to the Eyrie to stand trial with Catelyn’s sister Lysa Arryn as the judge.

Neither the Starks nor the Lannisters knew at the time that Lysa Arryn was the one who poisoned Jon Arryn, and she’d done so at Littlefinger’s instruction. To describe her handling of Tyrion’s trial as “acting in bad faith” doesn’t quite do justice to the level of deception and sabotage at work in Lysa and Littlefinger’s actions. Fortunately for Tyrion, even Lady Arryn was willing to honor the outcome of a trial by combat, and he ultimately walked out of the Eyrie in one piece.

Jaime did not know his brother was able to secure an effective champion in a trial by combat, however. What Jaime knew was that Catelyn Stark had arrested Tyrion on charges that were almost certainly unsubstantiated, and dragged him up to her sister’s castle for an exercise of “justice” in which Tyrion had no known allies. If Jaime had been invited to fight as Tyrion’s champion, he surely would have fought and almost certainly won, but no such invitation was extended. Tywin learned of the arrest and contacted Jaime, who arranged an ambush on Ned Stark.

We did not have Jaime’s POV at the time, but he had already pushed Bran Stark out of a high window and it would not be a huge leap of logic for him to suspect the Starks may have thought Tyrion was involved in the attack on their son. If he was willing to kill one small and powerless Stark to protect his family, then it was not a stretch to threaten another, much more powerful Stark to defend his brother. For all his faults, Jaime was a loving big brother to Tyrion, and was operating under an additional layer of guilt from that time when he helped his father bring Tyrion’s first marriage to an undignified end. It would not be a great leap on our part to suspect Jaime felt like his own actions were responsible for Tyrion’s arrest, and thus it was on him to come to his brother’s aid.

Jaime and his company of Lannister guards, who numbered around twenty, came across Ned Stark, his guards Jory and Wyl, and Littlefinger as they rode back from a visit to Chataya’s brothel to meet King Robert’s newest bastard offspring.

There’s another noteworthy detail: Ned and his men just happened to be riding with Littlefinger when they ran into Jaime and his goons. Littlefinger at the time appeared to be helping Ned investigate Jon Arryn’s death, but Ned found out too late that Littlefinger was not on his side. I am not suggesting for a second that Jaime conspired with Littlefinger in planning the ambush, but I think it is entirely possible that Littlefinger had heard about Jaime’s plans and made sure Ned and his men got to the right place at the right time. He rode away, promising to come back with the City Watch. Jaime communicated his and Tywin’s opposition to Catelyn’s arrest of Tyrion, and he ordered his goons to kill Ned’s associates. Littlefinger did eventually come back with the City Watch, after Jory and Wyl were killed and Ned was seriously injured, by which time Jaime was long gone.

We don’t know what exactly was in Tywin’s letter to Jaime, but we do know that Tywin was in the process of waging war on the Riverlands to show the Tullys what happens when you mess with the Lannisters. We know Jaime rode out west and fought with his father’s army. Thus began the War of Five Kings, which soon made a devastation of the Riverlands and allowed the Freys and the Boltons to grab power through treachery. Basically, the War of Five Kings led to everything getting fucked up for everyone, but for the time being, it was the Lannister army, including Jaime and Tyrion, waging war on the Tullys, which soon drew the Starks into the field.

Now we may ask: what was Jaime’s role in waging war on the Riverlands? To what extent does he share responsibility with his father for attacking the Tullys?

When a big decision such as “starting a war” is put into action, the questions we ask should be: 1. Who benefits? 2. Who pays the consequences? 3. What are the consequences of opting out?

As far as Jaime’s level of agency in starting the war, there was no concrete way in which he benefited from attacking the Starks and Tullys or terrorizing the people of the Riverlands. The ostensible purpose of the war was the public image of House Lannister, and Jaime had sacrificed his stake in his House’s hegemony years before. At the same time, I have no doubt he saw nothing wrong with attacking the Starks and Tullys, as they were behaving antagonistically toward his family at the time and he felt like he didn’t owe them any restraint or diplomacy. Ultimately, however, the salient point is that Tywin started a war and told his sons to join the fight, and they answered the call as all noble sons are expected to do. This is the same father who successfully ordered his older son to lie about the circumstances of his younger brother’s marriage, and forced his younger son to participate in a gang rape. This is also the man to whom the crown was in debt by three million gold dragons. If he wants his sons to back him up in his latest round of cock-measuring, they’ll answer the call. The only way Jaime could have not fought in the war was if he’d been killed on the way to the Westerlands, but if he’d been killed, the war still would have happened without him. The people who suffered the worst consequences in the War of Five Kings were undoubtedly the smallfolk of the Riverlands, but there were also casualties amongst the nobility on both sides. Because Jaime answered the call when his father started a war, he was captured by the Starks at Whispering Wood and imprisoned at Riverrun. Once he was taken captive, his family couldn’t reach him and Robb Stark would not be persuaded to arrange his release.

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-5-in-which-a-new-kingslayer-enters-the-picture/

The next year or so of Jaime’s life was captivity at Riverrun, during which time he didn’t do much of interest. There was an escape attempt involving some chicanery on Tyrion’s part, but the net result for Jaime was that he was transferred from a relatively comfortable tower cell to a dank, filthy dungeon cell.

More interesting things were happening in relation to him, but not with his involvement. His captors disagreed on what to do with him. Catelyn Stark wanted to trade him back to the Lannisters in exchange for her daughters, but King Robb thought he could make the Lannisters agree to peace terms that included their keeping Jaime hostage in the long term. Part of the problem was that Robb’s bannermen would lose respect for him if he cared too much about his sisters, but either way, Lady Catelyn and her son the King in the North were in disagreement, but not a productive debate, on whether to keep Jaime as their prisoner.

While Jaime rotted in that disgusting dungeon cell with no company except his overflowing shitbucket, Lady Catelyn went off on a trip to meet with one of the Five Kings contenders, Renly Baratheon. The mission ended abruptly with Renly’s death, but the journey was not entirely unproductive, as Catelyn returned with one of Renly’s guards, an idealistic young noblewoman named Brienne of Tarth.

At first blush, Catelyn’s new sworn sword was as different from Jaime as two people in the Westerosi nobility could possibly be. Brienne was as honorable and selfless as Jaime was supposedly treacherous and arrogant. And yet, they both had a history of making some highly unorthodox life choices. Brienne was also the heir to her house and had apparently sacrificed her title and lands for a life of service in guarding a king who had no business on the throne. Like Jaime, she was very young and her reasons for joining the Rainbow Guard were not entirely healthy. She was a bit more mature than Jaime at the time of his investiture (closer to 18 rather than 15), and she was in love with Renly himself rather than someone she expected to stay in Renly’s court, but still, she was the last one who would’ve benefited from her Rainbow Guard service. She had no social connection to the other guards, Renly was courteous to her face but mocked her behind her back, and while he probably would not have made his guards stand by while he burned people alive, the inescapable fact was that he had no business making a bid for the throne and his success would have set a terrible precedent for the governance of Westeros. Getting a place in his guard seems like the best thing that could ever happen in life when you’re 18 and used to being surrounded by nasty little shits, but then it isn’t so great when you’re 30 and you realize your king is a walking dumpster fire and you’ve wasted your adulthood on enabling that empty-headed narcissist’s reign of self-aggrandizement. When Melisandre’s shadow-baby killed Renly out from under Brienne, it saved her from a wasted life of looking after that sorry jackass before she became as jaded and cynical as Jaime was after dealing with Aerys. Unfortunately, since Brienne happened to be the guard looking after Renly when the shadow-baby slit his throat, and since Stannis made no move to take responsibility for the assassination, Brienne got a fresh reputation as a Kingslayer and had to flee for her life and get a new job.

Thus, she was standing just outside the door when Catelyn brought a flagon of wine to Jaime’s cell and demanded answers.

Catelyn was, by then, more interested in regaining custody of her daughters than in playing politics with the Lannisters or respecting her son’s decisions, and Jaime seemed like the best chance she had of her daughters being returned to her alive. Which meant she had to get him to cooperate with her. Jaime, at first, appeared to be in no mood to play nice with Ned Stark’s widow, and didn’t entirely trust her not to be trying to kill him, but his need for conversation won out over his antagonism to the Starks, and they had an exchange of questions and answers.

In the course of that exchange, he was offensive but never dishonest. He answered truthfully that he had fathered the queen’s children, and that he’d thrown Bran from the window. He made his infamous “so many vows” monologue, in which he pointed out the many, internally contradictory expectations placed on knights, the implication being that if he’s an oathbreaker, so are all other knights with more than a few years of experience. There was, of course, a flagon of wine involved in the interaction, and Jaime got himself quite drunk and volunteered a good deal more information than Catelyn wanted, such as the Mad King’s idea of a “trial” for Rickard and Brandon Stark. From Catelyn’s point of view, he was over-explaining the depravities of the Mad King to justify his act of regicide, but outside of Catelyn’s point of view, Jaime was not only telling her just what kind of king he’d slain, he was finally opening up to someone about the horrors he’d endured as the Mad King’s bodyguard. The story was not only that King Aerys had cooked Lord Rickard in his armor while Brandon was forced to strangle himself, but that Jaime had to stand there and watch him do it.

That is where the “there are no men like me” claim comes from. It seems like an expression of arrogance, but that conversation was the first time he began to show some cracks in the armor of invincible arrogance he’d built around himself. Catelyn was not inclined to recognize his vulnerabilities for what they were, but nevertheless there was weariness in his complaining of too many vows, there was sincerity in his concern for his family, and there was a pitiable sort of desperation in his recounting the lurid details of Rickard and Brandon Stark’s execution. After months spent chained to a wall, he was lonely enough, and just drunk enough, to think he might begin sharing his trauma with the woman whose seven-year-old son he’d flung from a tower, after sixteen years of telling no one of the horrors he’d seen. “There are no men like me” was an expression of isolation. It was his inner shell-shocked seventeen-year-old screaming, “No one understaaaaands me!” It wasn’t that he was more special and more exceptional than any other man. It was that he was alone in the world.

Despite his taunting her about Ned’s infidelity, and otherwise acting like a disgusting drunken pig, Catelyn did not open his throat. She made him promise to return her daughters to her, and never to take arms against Stark or Tully again, and she stuffed him into a skiff along with his cousin Cleos Frey and her faithful servant Brienne of Tarth, headed for King’s Landing.

The next time we saw Jaime on page, it was in A Storm of Swords, and the change was significant because this time, Jaime was the POV character. His narrative voice confirmed that of course he was the snarkiest asshole, he was so freaking juvenile, it was almost like part of his psyche got stuck at age 15 and never recovered, and he was a rather unreliable narrator in a series full of not-entirely-reliable narrators. One of the first, essential revelations from his transition from unrepentant antagonist to POV character was that his thoughts often contradict his actions.

For example, Brienne told him he was a monster for flinging innocent Bran Stark to his expected death, and Jaime’s thoughts were, basically: “the boy wasn’t innocent, he was spying on us, and all I wanted was a little time to shtup my sister, and is that so much to ask?” Looking back to Bran’s account of witnessing the twins fooling around, it was more serious than mere annoyance at the kid for interrupting their sexytimes. Remember: the twins were talking about the possibility of their affair being discovered, and when they saw Bran clinging to the window ledge, Jaime first pulled him up to save him, while Cersei squawked about having been seen, and only then, “with loathing” at the things he did for love, did Jaime shove Bran out the window. From Bran’s POV, Jaime appeared to have been motivated by protection of his family rather than petty annoyance. Meanwhile, GRRM has also clarified, in as many words, that Jaime’s motivation in tossing Bran from that tower was deadly serious:

At the same time, what Jaime did is interesting. I don’t have any kids myself, but I’ve talked with other people who have. Remember, Jaime isn’t just trying to kill Bran because he’s an annoying little kid. Bran has seen something that is basically a death sentence for Jaime, for Cersei, and their children – their three actual children. So I’ve asked people who do have children, “Well, what would you do in Jaime’s situation?” They say, “Well, I’m not a bad guy – I wouldn’t kill.” Are you sure? Never? If Bran tells King Robert he’s going to kill you and your sister-lover, and your three children. . . .
Then many of them hesitate. Probably more people than not would say, “Yeah, I would kill someone else’s child to save my own child, even if that other child was innocent.” These are the difficult decisions people make, and they’re worth examining.

The series has plenty of unreliable narrators, but Jaime is possibly the only one who has appeared more sympathetic from the eyes of someone he harmed than from his own recollection. How did he come to think of himself that way? Possibly because Cersei had already gaslighted him into thinking she hadn’t been right there, actively encouraging him to let Bran fall from the tower, but I suspect the disconnect was deeper than that. Perhaps it was too terrifying to contemplate that his affair with his sister was putting their lives at risk. Possibly, he wasn’t ready to consider that he had to lie about his relationship to the children because they should never have been conceived in the first place.
It’s no coincidence that as soon as Jaime became a POV character, he was already in Brienne’s custody. Out of the dungeon at last, he sailed down the river with his tedious cousin Ser Cleos and this big ugly wench who never smiled, who called him Kingslayer to his face, and insisted on keeping him in chains. The arrangement was not Jaime’s idea, and she was his captor, so he had no incentive to be friendly to her, and yet he was torn between wanting to antagonize her and trying to get to know her.

At several points he entertained thoughts of killing his captor, but he did not follow up those thoughts with actions. For instance, he briefly considered using an oar to smash her head as she climbed back into their skiff…and then he reached out and helped her into the boat. He never missed an opportunity to insult her, and yet he was oddly curious about her, always trying to get her to respond to him. He was the one who saw the parallel between their reputations, and he named it in as many words: they were both kingslayers, if the rumors were true.

It was in that place of facing off against Brienne’s contempt for him that he made the pronouncement of, “It was the white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.” Jaime’s narrative voice at that stage was full of empty boasting, immature insults and self-oblivious aggression, but in that moment, he hit the nail on the head. He made a good-faith effort to do his duty as a proper Kingsguard knight, and that service screwed him up in ways that nothing else could have done.

Following that conversation, he would rather have dreamed of Cersei, but instead he relived the event of killing Aerys, up to the point of Ned Stark riding into the throne room. His thoughts on the matter included that he shouldn’t have worn his white cloak that day and that Stark had no right to judge him. One of the subtle ironies of Jaime’s early traveling with Brienne is that he spent much of that time trying to provoke her, but instead, she unintentionally provoked him in ways he didn’t fully understand.

Meanwhile, at Riverrun, Catelyn Stark’s brother Edmure Tully sent a raven to Lord Roose Bolton with news of Jaime’s escape from captivity, with no mention of Lady Stark’s prisoner exchange assignment. Unbeknownst to Jaime, the sellsword company the Brave Companions were no longer working for the Lannisters and had turned their cloaks to the Boltons, and Lord Bolton assigned them to find and recapture Jaime. Unbeknownst to Lord Bolton, their captain Vargo Hoat had certain plans in mind involving certain of Jaime’s body parts.

The situation in the Riverlands, following the Lannisters’ invasion, was best summarized as a “steaming hot mess,” and the little traveling trio knew it, but not every hazard could be successfully anticipated. Some time after trading their skiff for three horses in various levels of competence, they ran into some outlaw archers hiding in the trees. Brienne charged the outlaws and took a few arrows which she barely noticed. Ser Cleos lost control of his horse and was dragged upside down, resulting in his death by head trauma.

The outlaws retreated without further incident, and once it was established that Cleos Frey was dead, Brienne still would not let Jaime carry his sword, and that was the final straw. He decided the best way to show the big ugly humorless wench how wrong she was to keep Jaime unarmed was to pick up his cousin’s longsword and attack her.

Up to that point, Jaime had never seen Brienne fight. He knew she could climb rocks, lift and throw extremely heavy objects, swim, handle a boat, and ride a horse, but her combat skills were still an unknown quantity. Whether sitting in a comfortable tower cell or chained to a dungeon wall, Jaime did not have any chances to train during his captivity. He had basically no access to any exercise at all, and he wasn’t fed very well, so he was malnourished, atrophied and unpracticed as well as manacled, filthy and ungroomed.

Meanwhile, Brienne was around 15 years younger than Jaime, taller and broader than he’d ever been, she was in perfect health, and had recently won a tourney melee of 116 knights. How he thought he would get the chains off his wrists and himself to a safe place all by his lonesome rather than under her protection, I’m not entirely sure. Judging from the way he behaved during their duel, I get the impression he didn’t truly expect to kill her, so much as force her to treat him better. Either way, he never once considered that a girl could ever beat him in a fight, so he went at her with a sword.

It ended up being the last good fight he would ever have, and she beat him.

While Jaime and Brienne were dueling in the woods, the Brave Companions found them, surrounded them, and caught them unawares. They were overpowered, disarmed, stripped of armor, and dragged out to the campground to meet with Vargo Hoat. In the course of that ride, Jaime learned they had switched loyalties to House Bolton (“and they say I have shit for honor?”) and for some reason began thinking about Brienne’s safety. He told one of the Companions that his big wench was from the Sapphire Isle, and he let them think that meant her father would ransom her for a huge load of gemstones, which ensured they might beat and threaten her, but they wouldn’t rape her or inflict any permanent injuries.

Of course he’d been trying to kill her earlier that day, and he didn’t owe her anything for taking the prisoner exchange assignment, but once they were captives together, he started thinking about how to protect her from rape.

We’ll get back to that later.

Vargo Hoat’s plans concerning Jaime are difficult to explain, but I’ll do my best: having switched over to the Boltons, who at the time were sworn to the Starks, Hoat was having some buyer’s remorse following the Lannisters’ victory in the Battle of Blackwater Bay. He needed a plan to protect himself from the fallout of Robb Stark’s inevitable defeat. Whether the plan was at all coherent or well-executed is open for debate, but the point was, Hoat had this plan in mind using Jaime as a negotiating/bargaining/ransom piece between himself, Roose Bolton, Tywin Lannister, and Rickard Karstark. He had this plan in mind before his sellsword company captured Jaime and Brienne, long before Jaime told them anything about the Sapphire Isle, long before he tried to bribe his way out of captivity. The decision was made long before his new captives were dropped in front of him. Jaime thought he could protect himself by appealing to Hoat’s greed, but he didn’t know Hoat already had his own ideas about how to get his hands on Tywin Lannister’s gold.

There was the stump, there was Shagwell the fool jumping on Jaime’s back, there was Zollo the fat Dothraki with the arak, Hoat gave the order, and Jaime screamed at the loss of his right hand.

The company was headed for Harrenhal, uninterested in making any stops along the way, and the ride took several days. Their idea of medical care was to burn Jaime’s stump with a torch and wrap it in bandages, the idea being to stop the bleeding and prevent infection. He still lost a good deal of blood and the stump still got infected, it was incredibly painful, the Companions made him wear his severed hand around his neck, and they saw no problem with beating their now-maimed captive just because they could. That was several days Jaime spent with no real medical care to deal with his wound, blood loss and fever.

To say he was miserable would be a Harrenhal-sized understatement, but the salient point was that it was the most vulnerable time in his adult life. That torturous ride to Harrenhal was a sort of return to infancy for Jaime, with Brienne as his caregiver. He was too weak to stay on his horse, so the Companions tied him up to her and then mocked him for being forced into an intimate position with a big ugly girl. He cried, the Companions mocked him, so he made himself stop. They fed him horse piss, he vomited, Brienne cleaned him up. He soiled his breeches in the saddle, Brienne cleaned him up. He was able to sleep while tied up to Brienne on horseback, but not on the ground at night.

During that horrifically painful, vulnerable time, Jaime was faced with the fact that the core of his identity had been taken away from him, and there began the introspection. No matter how much of his life he had already given up, Jaime had always been a nearly peerless swordsman. No matter how frequently and deeply he was vilified for killing the king, he could always take comfort in being feared for his fighting skill. Knowing all the gold in Casterly Rock and all the might of the Red Keep couldn’t grow him a new hand, he had to start asking himself questions, such as: “Is that all I was? Just a sword hand? Who am I now?” He wanted to die, and if he’d been allowed to refuse food for much longer, he might have succumbed to his fever, but Brienne knew how to goad him into staying alive, and she did so. No matter how many insults he’d absorbed in his adult life, no one had ever called him craven before, so he realized he wasn’t ready for death after all. There was a part of his identity he wouldn’t let his maiming take away: he may be crippled, but he would still be brave.

Meanwhile, Brienne was also under threat from the Companions, and Jaime had already demonstrated that he could use his wits, rather than his sword, to protect her. Even when he was too sick to take care of himself, he still kept on telling their captors about that mythical load of sapphires, and thus protected Brienne from the fallout of having to defend herself against a gang rape. He later told her he did it because “a Lannister always pays his debts,” but that explanation falls short of the circumstances; he never asked her to smuggle him out of Riverrun. At that point, he didn’t owe her anything. He did it because he was developing a connection to his fellow Kingslayer.

Finally they made it to Harrenhal, where Lord Bolton put the kibosh on Vargo Hoat’s plans for world domination involving Jaime’s severed hand. Jaime was introduced to ex-Maester Qyburn, who competently sewed up his stump, and then it was time for a much-needed bath.

When Jaime arrived at the bath house to find Brienne already in the tub, he was caught in the tension between several conflicting needs. First, he was still sick, weak and vulnerable, so he needed her care, physically. Since he had come to associate her presence with safety and comfort, and because she was a fellow Kingslayer, he was struggling with emotions he didn’t yet understand, and he still needed her to respond to him.

Unfortunately, he was not exactly comfortable in his vulnerability and was still trying to control the conversation by acting like his usual snarky asshole self, which did not do him any favors in bonding with his big wench.

Into the tub he went, and immediately went about trying to get under Brienne’s skin. There was some unfortunate remark about Renly which caused her to jump out of the tub, which was the opposite of Jaime’s desired reaction, and he realized he’d gone too far and didn’t want to fight with her anymore.

Having already allowed Brienne to see him helpless, miserable, and naked, what followed was the next level of Jaime sharing parts of himself kept under lock and key for over half his life. For no reason except to gain her trust, he told her the story of how he became the Kingslayer. While she stood wrapped in a towel at the edge of the tub, Jaime told her about the process of the Mad King preparing to destroy his city before the rebels could take it. He once asked himself, “Why am I telling this absurd ugly child?”, but he did tell her everything he’d kept to himself for all those years of being despised for his finest act, and when he got to the end of the story, he still needed her response. Brienne asked how no one else knew about this, and Jaime’s reaction revealed more about him than all the insults and taunts he’d dealt her in their days of travel along the river. He launched into a mini-tirade about Ned Stark judging him guilty and not wanting to hear his feeble explanations: “By what right does the wolf judge the lion?” That level of visceral anger suggests that Jaime’s many years of silence were a response to a hostile environment: he never told anyone because he never had a chance, which in turn means his sharing the story with Brienne was an act of courage as well as intimacy. In the throes of raging against Ned Stark’s self-righteous ghost, he ill-advisedly tried to climb out of the tub, rose too fast, and fainted. After several misguided attempts to provoke a more satisfying reaction from her, that was the moment when Brienne reached out for him: she caught him as he fell, pulled him gently from the tub, and took care of him, which must have made a memorable reward for pouring his heart out to her.

There was dinner with Lord Bolton, who explained Vargo Hoat’s reasons for cutting off Jaime’s hand; he enjoys cutting body parts off people, but in this case he had his reasons. He also divulged the news of Sansa Stark’s marriage to Tyrion, which created a complication for Brienne’s prisoner exchange assignment, to say the least. That turned out to be the least of Brienne’s problems, as Bolton also revealed that while Jaime would be returned to his family in the Red Keep, Brienne was guilty of abetting treason and Bolton had no such mercy to offer her. She would be kept at Harrenhal as the Brave Companions’ captive while Jaime was sent home with a hand-picked escort of Bolton’s soldiers.

In the legal/ethical sense, Jaime still didn’t owe Brienne anything at that point. As he had left Riverrun as her captive and had never volunteered for any arrangement for her to accompany him, he was within his rights to leave her to her fate. In the logistical sense, he didn’t need her anymore. He had Steelshanks and his two-hundred capable men to escort him back to the Red Keep, and Qyburn to look after his health. He could have traveled back to the Red Keep just fine without Brienne, and no one would have judged him for abandoning his captor.

For the first day of travel, Jaime was prepared to leave Brienne to her own devices, assuming she would be ransomed back to her father on Tarth. Instead, Qyburn notified him that Hoat was unsatisfied with Lord Selwyn’s ransom offer of 300 gold dragons, convinced as he was that Tarth was full of sapphires.

(Okay, that part was Jaime’s fault, just a little.)

As Hoat believed Lord Selwyn was cheating him, they were keeping Brienne at Harrenhal, and Hoat had instructed Qyburn to examine her for venereal disease, for some reason. Jaime was torn between convincing himself it wasn’t his problem if she got raped, and hoping she broke Hoat’s neck if he forced himself on her. That night, he fell asleep on a weirwood stump and had a dream.

There’s room for tons of analysis of the symbolism in his dream, but for the purposes of this essay, the salient points are: he’s naked in a wet cave beneath Casterly Rock, his family appear and then walk away, Brienne shows up and they both have glowing swords, the five Kingsguard knights who died in Robert’s Rebellion, plus Prince Rhaegar, show up and tell Jaime what a piece of shit he was for killing the king and not protecting Elia Martell and her children, and then Jaime woke up with a shout.

He did a carrot/stick routine with Steelshanks, an example of solving a problem without his sword hand: he used the notoriety of his family’s money and Tywin’s ruthlessness, and his own reputation as a lying lion who lies, to bribe/threaten Steelshanks into turning the escort back to Harrenhal. His big wench was in danger, and he wouldn’t go back to King’s Landing without her.

The company made haste and arrived back at Harrenhal in good time, where Jaime soon learned what the Brave Companions were doing with Brienne: since Hoat couldn’t get close enough to rape her without getting his ear bitten off, they handed her a tourney sword and pitted her against a bear.

Steelshanks tried one last time to convince Jaime to leave Brienne to her fate, and Hoat threatened to give him another stump. Jaime tried one more time to use the promise of Lannister gold to get the job done, but Hoat’s idea of ransom was to tell Jaime to “go get her.”

He had no armor, no shield, no weapon and no dominant hand to use against a bear, but he had his position as a prisoner of value, and he had his escort of 200 armed and sober men on his side, so he still had ways to address the problem. Into the bear pit he jumped, and insisted on putting himself between Brienne and “Gregor Clegane with a pelt.” Here’s how the problem-solving worked: Steelshanks and his guys were under no obligation to protect Brienne, but they were under orders to get Jaime back to his family in one piece, so by putting himself between her and the bear, he effectively forced his escort to shoot the bear full of arrows before it could do any more injury to Brienne. Finally, the bear died, the two Kingslayers climbed out of the pit, Hoat was successfully intimidated into letting them go without further incident, and that was how Jaime saved his captor’s life.

The protection assignment was already a non-starter in light of Sansa’s marriage to Tyrion Lannister and Arya having disappeared from the castle following her father’s execution, but their party heard the most devastating news on the way back to the capital: King Robb and Catelyn Stark had been murdered at the Red Wedding. Such a development presented no obstacle to Jaime’s returning to his family, but it made Brienne very sad and put her in need of a new job. Shortly thereafter, King Joffrey was married to Margaery Tyrell and choked to death at their wedding feast, Tyrion was arrested for his murder, and Sansa disappeared from the city.

To most of the Seven Kingdoms, the news was of the death of a king. To Jaime, it was the death of his son, but he didn’t feel as though he’d lost a child. He knew his reaction wasn’t normal, but as he’d never had a chance to bond with his children, Joffrey’s death meant more to him as Cersei’s loss than his own. For Cersei, the loss of Joffrey presented a fresh opportunity to scapegoat her brother Tyrion and put a price on Sansa’s head. For Jaime, it was a chance for him to think about how deficient had been his relationship to his children. He knew he should have been more upset at the death of his first child, but there was the problem: he’d never been a parent to the children. He started thinking about what he wanted to change about his family situation. He was open to having another child with Cersei, and this time, he was determined to hold the baby. It didn’t occur to him that a normal family life with Cersei was impossible, not just because she was a toxic narcissist and their relationship was profoundly dysfunctional, but because there was no way they could acknowledge the children as his without getting them all killed.

When they finally returned to the Red Keep, they found Loras Tyrell as one of the new Kingsguard knights, and he was still convinced that Brienne had murdered Renly. Jaime ordered Loras to stand down, and had Brienne locked in a tower cell for the short term to protect her from any more accusers.

For the coming weeks, Jaime was occupied with Tyrion’s trial and family drama which I will explore in the next stage of this essay. In the meantime, Lord Tywin gave Jaime a newly forged Valyrian steel sword made from a little more than half of the late Ned Stark’s greatsword Ice. It was a beautiful, magnificent, inestimably valuable sword, and since Jaime no longer had a dominant hand, the gift struck him as mockery. There was no reason why it had to stay in his possession, though.

Eventually, Jaime convinced Loras to go to Brienne’s tower cell and let her explain Renly’s death from her side. He had long since accepted that she was innocent of the murder, but she didn’t need him to make her case. Instead, he gave her a chance to testify on her own behalf, as he had never been allowed to do for killing Aerys. Loras admitted that the evidence surrounding Renly’s death was suspicious, and later brought Brienne from her cell to the Lord Commander’s chamber in the White Sword Tower.

Jaime had a gift for Brienne, and a job. Cersei had put a bounty on Sansa Stark’s head, and Jaime wanted Sansa to be kept safely out of Cersei’s grasp. Not that Jaime thought Sansa was innocent; he believed she had murdered Joffrey, and Tyrion was about to lose his head for protecting her. However, he was also aware that Joffrey had given Sansa every reason to kill him, and anyway, Jaime had never been able to be a father to him. Meanwhile, Jaime had made certain promises to Catelyn Stark and he intended to honor those promises. Catelyn would never again take care of her daughters, but Jaime could still take an interest in the welfare of at least one of them.

Thus, the man who once tried to kill Ned Stark’s son to protect Cersei’s children gave his new friend his beautiful new Valyrian steel sword made of Ned Stark’s steel to protect Ned Stark’s daughter whom he believed responsible for killing Cersei’s first child. He provisioned Brienne for a quest and told her to go find Sansa and keep her safe from Cersei.

Such an effort does not absolve Jaime of guilt for trying to kill Bran, but it does mark a tremendous shift in his priorities. He genuinely believed Sansa was Joffrey’s killer, and he still took an interest in her safety, in direct opposition to Cersei’s plans. As his surviving son was the new king, and Jaime intended to be present in his life, he couldn’t tell anyone besides Brienne about this protection assignment. Therefore, he could never claim credit for helping to protect Sansa, which meant his incentive to provision Brienne for the quest was strictly the satisfaction of knowing he was doing the right thing. That, and the final explanation he gave to Brienne: “Kingslayers should band together.”

When Brienne promised to escort Jaime back to King’s Landing, she thought she was simply doing a job for her lady, and her effect on her captive was beside the point. Regardless of her initial intent, her entry into his life gave him choices. Her behavior around him showed him that it is possible to be dedicated to protecting the weak and innocent without being the type of person who would have allowed the king to burn down the city. Thus, she taught Jaime that the knight’s vows don’t need to be abolished, but approached with some care and critical thinking. Vows need to be prioritized, and interpreted, and occasionally disregarded, but the ideal of knighthood itself is still a worthy one. Her friendship showed him there are people he could trust outside of his family, that he could act outside of the prime directive of defending his family by attacking anyone who presented a conflict, and that he could be judged appropriately by his actions. She inspired him to be more of the sort of man Catelyn would respect, and Brienne would appreciate, and less of the sort of man Cersei needed on her side. The emotional connection they’ve developed has given him an alternative to the affair with his twin, so that if he began to question the viability of the twincest, he would have a healthy point of comparison and a safe place to escape from Cersei’s presence. There’s something about Brienne that’s given Jaime the idea that he can, and should, act in accordance with the promises he made to Catelyn Stark with a sword at his throat, and that while others may still think he has shit for honor, he knows himself differently and he can behave accordingly. There’s still room on his page in the White Book, and he can decide what is written under his name.

For further reference, I have also written about Jaime’s maiming: Who cut off Jaime’s hand, and why?

I did a similar book/show comparison of the bath scene: Bathtime at Harrenhal

And when you have some hours to spare, I also have a much more in-depth analysis of Jaime and Brienne’s developing relationship: The Joy of Unintended Consequences

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-6-in-which-jaime-stays-in-the-kingsguard/

 

 

There’s some chronological overlap between the previous stage and this one, so we’ll go back to Jaime’s arrival in King’s Landing.

Soon after getting Loras Tyrell under control and Brienne stored in a tower cell, Jaime went to see Cersei paying her respects to Joffrey in the Sept of Baelor. She was happy to see him and immediately started asking him to kill Tyrion. Jaime was ambivalent at best about Tyrion’s guilt in Joffrey’s death, and he didn’t want to talk about the murder nearly as much as he wanted to get inside his sister, and he did so in a way that he should not be proud of. Much ink has been spilled on whether Jaime’s behavior on Cersei was rape, and I tend to think Cersei’s attitude in that encounter was not consent so much as risk management, but for the purposes of this essay, the social responsibility in GRRM’s writing is beside the point. Whether he intended to portray a rape in that scene, I’m not sure. I can say Jaime’s intent was not to hurt or humiliate his sister, and his failure to hear her refusal was meant as a way to express their toxic relationship dynamics, but either way, it made Cersei not want to be alone with Jaime for some time afterwards.

The overall theme of the Sept scene was not really about how the twins approached their sex life, but about the changes in Jaime’s attitude toward the conditions of their relationship. Jaime was tired of keeping their love a secret, he wanted to marry her, he wanted to beget another child, and he didn’t care about Tommen losing the throne when they admitted he was not a Baratheon by birth. Cersei, however, was having none of that. She insisted they had to be discreet, that Tommen’s throne derived from Robert, that they were not Targaryens, and basically that Jaime had to get his head screwed on straight, and in this case, she was absolutely right. Jaime’s vision of going public with their incest and Tommen losing the throne without losing his head, was completely unrealistic.

Cersei sent him to meet with their father, who barely allowed time to say hello before he presented his new plan to Jaime: time to quit the Kingsguard. He expected Jaime to retire his white cloak, go back to Casterly Rock, and take Tommen as his ward and squire. He would also need a wife, and of course Tywin had opinions on suitable candidates, his first choice being Margaery Tyrell. Jaime was having none of that, and he threw the most hilariously juvenile tantrum at his father to express his refusal. He insisted on staying in the Kingsguard, he was not on board with Tywin’s idea of marrying Cersei to Oberyn Martell, and he was most definitely not interested in taking Joffrey’s widow as his wife. He was the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and he intended to keep that position.

Tywin made his position on the issue clear: if Jaime had to be a Kingsguard knight, then he was not Tywin’s son. The implication, to no one’s surprise, was that Tywin was not interested in showing love or loyalty to someone who could not serve the Lannisters’ political interests. The message to Jaime was that if he would not allow his father to run his life, then he was cut off from family ties.

Thus, Jaime had a clear chance to leave his dead-end job which had kept him isolated and alienated for all his adult life, and he refused. It was a bad decision made for good reasons. Tywin was correct to suggest the Kingsguard position was a waste of Jaime’s life, but perhaps his son would have been more receptive if he’d approached the discussion more as, “Look, son, you’ve just acquired a serious disability, and no one will think any less of you if you put down the white cloak,” and less of the “you will live where I tell you, and you will look after Tommen on my terms, and I will choose your wife, and we both know I’ll tell you how to raise your kids too, and you’ll do as I say because that’s your duty.” Given the choice between being answerable to his father by leading the Kingsguard and being answerable to his father by taking up his role as heir to Casterly Rock, he chose the role in which he felt like he had some agency and authority. Having been tarred as an oathbreaker since he was seventeen, he chose to err on the side of keeping his oaths.

Tyrion was on trial for his life during this time, but Jaime’s life had to go on. He attended the trial, but didn’t think Tyrion saw him there. It occurred to him that the family he’d always loved was pulling away from him: Joffrey was dead, Tywin disowned him, and Cersei wouldn’t let him be alone with her for some reason.

At his first Kingsguard meeting as Lord Commander, the sword felt awkward hanging at his right hip, and the winter raiment hung loosely on him. He looked through the White Book at the previous Lord Commanders’ entries, and his own page felt puny by comparison. “How could the Kingslayer belong in such exalted company?” He asked himself. Having been forced to reexamine his life choices following his maiming, his role as Lord Commander set him up to be much harder on himself than he deserved. He inwardly compared himself to the Smiling Knight, widely regarded as a terrifying piece of work. As his brothers filed into the chamber, he saw their inadequacy as a manifestation of his own failure:

He wondered what Ser Arthur Dayne would have to say of this lot. ‘How is it that the Kingsguard has fallen so low,’ most like. ‘It was my doing,’ I would have to answer. ‘I opened the door, and did nothing when the vermin began to crawl inside.’

It isn’t clear what he supposedly did to open the door to the vermin, or how he was supposed to have closed the door. The nearest interpretation I have is that Jaime thought he was a piece of shit, and his service set the precedent for men like Meryn Trant and Boros Blount to follow because he hadn’t become a better man in the intervening years.

Regardless, the Lord Commander position was his, and self-loathing is no substitute for sound leadership. He told his brothers how the Kingsguard would operate going forward; it would be different from before. He told Ser Meryn, for instance, that there would be no more beating little girls at the juvenile king’s command. Their job was to protect the king, from himself if need be, and temper their obedience accordingly. “If Tommen wants you to saddle his horse, obey him. If he asks you to kill his horse, come to me.”

How much differently would the rebellion have happened if the Kingsguard had been commanded with a similar ethos during the Mad King’s reign? (Aerys probably would have burned the Lord Commander alive, but he might not have had another knight protecting him when he did so.) This is how Jaime followed up his refusal of his father’s generous offer: he set about becoming the kind of LC his teenage self never had.

His tenure as Lord Commander was off to a promising start, but even as he was bringing a much-needed backbone to the royal bodyguards, signs of trouble began to appear. There was a clash with Boros Blount that only ended without a fight because the knights were under the impression that one-handed Jaime could still handle a sword. Right at the beginning, he realized the success of his command depended on hiding the extent of his disability from the knights, and that position was untenable in the long term. He began training with his old friend Ser Addam Marbrand, and soon discovered he was no fighter at all with his left hand. As a knight, it was a challenge, but as Lord Commander to a fractious group of men who knew him as the Kingslayer, it was a crisis without a good answer.

With his promotion to LC, he had a position in the Small Council, and while he tried to make the most of the meetings, he found “power felt more like tedium.” Tommen seemed to enjoy stamping his seal in the hot wax, but there was no meaningful way for Jaime to contribute to the council meetings.

Although Jaime may have been just the leader the Kingsguard needed, it was still not the place for him. The position left him confused, frustrated, unproductive, and vulnerable. He hadn’t chosen his brothers, and their respect for his leadership was inconsistent at best. He was no more able to be a parent to Tommen as Lord Commander than he’d done as a subordinate bodyguard.

Following the council meeting, he found Cersei waiting for him in the White Sword Tower, and as if he didn’t have enough marks against his Kingsguard position, she was there to talk him into taking off his white cloak. Her complaint was that Tywin wanted to marry Tommen to Margaery and separate Cersei from her son, and the one consistency in her solution was for Jaime to agree to retire from the Kingsguard. First she intended to stay in King’s Landing with Tommen, and then she was complaining about Tywin planning to marry her off to some lord or other, and then she was promising to go back to Casterly Rock with Jaime, the idea being they would still be near each other but their relationship would still have to be secret. The status quo of their relationship as a secret affair was exactly what he didn’t want to perpetuate, any more than he wanted Margaery Tyrell as his wife.

The one thing Cersei would not give him was the honest family life he desired. Lest anyone assume he never thought about what he did to Bran Stark, Jaime remarked that he wasn’t ashamed of his love for Cersei, but rather, what he’d done to hide their relationship, such as, “that boy at Winterfell.” Cersei went on acting like Jaime had been alone in the room when he pushed Bran out the window. She didn’t want to hear about what Jaime wanted out of their relationship; she needed him to sign onto her latest plan of keeping Tommen to herself.

While she had simultaneous conflicting ideas of what their arrangement would be, the single certainty in her new scheme was for Tommen not to be married to Margaery, and for that to work, she needed to get Jaime worked up to a froth enough to quit the Kingsguard and take Margaery off the market. The capstone of her attempt at manipulating him was to try giving him a blowjob to demonstrate how she loved him enough to beg him to marry someone else, and Jaime wasn’t going for it. While it seems a bit rich of him to say they were in the wrong place for a tryst after he literally forced himself on her in the sept, the point was, what worked on him as a fifteen-year-old at an inn on Eel Alley was not enough to persuade him as an adult. His twin had successfully used sex to get him out of the inheritance of Casterly Rock, but she would not uproot him from his life again on such a flimsy incentive.

With her seduction plans thwarted, Cersei switched over to mocking his cripple status, mocking his love for Tyrion, and boasting of having lied to him a thousand times. When she left, Jaime noted that his family was falling apart, and yet he was repeatedly told they’d won the war.

By this point, it should come as no surprise that Jaime did not share his father’s idea of victory.

Once Cersei stormed out of his chamber, it was time for the meeting with Brienne, in which he provisioned her for a quest of doing exactly the opposite of what Cersei wanted done with Sansa Stark. While all this was going on, Tyrion was still on trial for Joffrey’s murder, and it wasn’t going well. Following his epic speech in the courtroom, there was a trial by combat with Oberyn Martell as his champion, but the problem was Prince Oberyn was doing it for his own sense of “justice” for his family rather than to save Tyrion’s life. He made a dog’s breakfast of his fight with Gregor Clegane, got his brains splattered all over the fighting ground, and accomplished nothing for Tyrion’s fight for life and freedom. That fell to Jaime, who resorted to colluding with Varys.

In another instance of Jaime undermining his sister’s plans for “justice,” he made certain arrangements with the Master of Whispers and let Tyrion out of his cell on the eve of his scheduled execution. It was the first interaction he had with his brother since the family departed from their visit to Winterfell. Jaime remarked on Tyrion’s injuries from the Blackwater battle (“they made me fight a battle without my big brother to protect me”), and Tyrion laughed at Jaime’s stump. They were happy to see each other and the escape was going very nicely until Jaime decided to open up an old wound.

s4_jaimerescuestyrion

Remember in Stage 3, when Jaime was home at Casterly Rock when Tyrion married a lowborn girl behind their father’s back? Just as he was about to lead Tyrion out of the castle to a triumphant escape across the Narrow Sea, Jaime confessed to his brother that his first marriage had been annulled based on a lie. He said Tysha had not been a whore after all, that she was exactly as she’d seemed, and Tywin had ordered Jaime to lie about her because a lowborn girl who would marry Tyrion was only doing it for the gold, so she was basically a whore anyway.

Back when Jaime was getting drunk in a dungeon cell at Riverrun and negotiating with Catelyn Stark, he remarked that Tyrion liked to say people claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up. Somehow, he thought he was doing Tyrion a favor by telling him his first wife had genuinely loved him and wanted to spend her life with him. From Tyrion’s point of view, the fact of the years-old deception far outweighed the current effort at saving his life, and he became suddenly hostile and spiteful to Jaime. He shared the story of Tysha being subjected to a gang rape, and refused to believe Jaime had been unaware of their father’s plans. He shared the news of Cersei fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack (that was true), claimed to have killed Joffrey after all (that was not true) and threatened to fight Jaime to the death if they ever met again. Cripple vs Dwarf: the Battle Royale!

Following his false murder confession, Jaime went in one direction and Tyrion went the other. With Jaime away, Tyrion met up with Varys, and told him basically to wait right there while Tyrion ran a little errand. If Jaime had kept quiet about Tysha, he’s very sure Tyrion would have quietly marched out of the castle and let Varys spirit him onto a ship without a side trip. As it happened, Varys did eventually load Tyrion onto a ship headed for the Free Cities, but not before Tyrion killed two people, including Lord Tywin.

Here’s what we need to understand about Jaime’s plan to liberate Tyrion: Varys was involved. If Varys agreed to “help” Jaime pull Tyrion out from under Cersei and Tywin when they seemed to think he was Joffrey’s murderer, he had his own reasons for doing so. If Jaime had been uninterested in saving his brother’s life, Varys would have planned Tyrion’s escape without him. Furthermore, while Varys did not tell Jaime to reveal a painful secret to his brother in the middle of their escape plan, the argument can be made that Jaime merely played into Varys’s hands by getting Tyrion angry enough to introduce their father to the business end of a crossbow. For instance, Varys was just a bit too willing to give Tyrion helpful directions to find his father without being seen. If Varys had intended to make sure Tyrion was safely liberated without following his father into the privy, he probably would have handled that conversation differently.

However, from Jaime’s point of view, what happened was he decided Tyrion should be smuggled out of the country alive, and it was his own brilliant idea to tell him the truth about Tysha, which meant Jaime had given his brother the opportunity and the final push in motivation to kill their father. While Jaime had not wanted Tywin to die, his relationship as a son to his father is nowhere near as relevant as his relationship as a Kingsguard knight to the King’s Hand. Tywin was an integral part of the power structure around Tommen, and his absence created a vacuum of power which Jaime was in no position to fill.

Because Jaime refused to quit the Kingsguard when Tywin gave him a chance, he was still in the city when Tyrion was sentenced to death. Because he was still there, he was able to work with Varys on helping Tyrion escape execution. Because he helped Tyrion escape, and because he shared the truth of his brother’s first marriage, Jaime believed he made their father’s death possible. Because of Tywin’s unexpected death, Cersei Lannister effectively became the person actually ruling Westeros, and while most would agree the realm didn’t need any more of Tywin Lannister, it’s difficult to imagine a worse alternative than his daughter taking his place. Because Jaime insisted on staying in the Kingsguard, he was stuck in King’s Landing, stuck with his white cloak, and Cersei was now his boss.

And as if the twincest hadn’t deteriorated far enough, now Jaime knew his sister was fucking other men.

Choice quote from the books:

The world was simpler in those days, Jaime thought, and men as well as swords were made of finer steel. Or was it only that he had been fifteen? They were all in their graves now, the Sword of the Morning and the Smiling Knight, the White Bull and Prince Lewyn, Ser Oswell Whent with his black humor, earnest Jon Darry, Simon Toyne and his Kingswood Brotherhood, bluff old Sumner Crakehall. And me, that boy I was…when did he die, I wonder? When I donned the white cloak? When I opened Aerys’s throat? That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-7-in-which-riverrun-changes-hands/

The death of Tywin was the last thing we saw of the Lannisters in A Storm of Swords. The twins’ discovery of their father’s murder coincides with the beginning of Cersei as a POV character in A Feast for Crows. In case we thought Cersei’s POV chapters might give us a similar revelation to Jaime in Book 3, that is not the case. Telling her story from her own eyes, Cersei is not a more competent, thoughtful, vulnerable or sympathetic character than she appears from the outside. No, Cersei is a cartoon villain, and now she’s basically running the kingdom and she has the authority to have Jaime killed if he disobeys her orders. I’m not saying she would, necessarily, have him executed for insubordination, at least not in the beginning of the book; she’s not done using him yet. She would arrange some punishment for him if he defied her orders, though, and he knows that.

In addition to the consolidation of the power differential between the twins, the beginning of the fourth book introduces a new asymmetry of information. First, Jaime now knows Cersei has been fucking other men, including their cousin and a Kingsguard knight, and Cersei doesn’t know he knows. Second, they both know Tyrion killed their father, but Cersei doesn’t know Jaime conspired with Varys to let Tyrion out of his death-row cell. (Varys has also disappeared, so he’s unlikely to complicate matters by telling Cersei any more lies.)

The new idea binding this stage is for the first time, Jaime knows Cersei is not the loving partner he thought. This would not be possible without Brienne showing him he has options. Otherwise, he would not have been ready to hear the news from Tyrion of Cersei’s infidelity.

This time, he has matured and learned enough to get outside of his previous us-against-the-world framework of his life, and he understands that he can be a good person, and he could do better than the narrow world he’s built for himself. This maturity and awareness coincide with the death of his father, the result being that he doesn’t miss his father nearly as much as he thinks he should. He doesn’t entirely believe Tyrion’s revelation of his sister fucking other men, but he can’t unhear it, either. He begins to examine his sister’s behavior through the lens of her fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack, which means their relationship begins to look very different, which forces him to reconsider the biggest choices of his lifetime.

Unfortunately, this new consideration of the state of his life does not unfetter him from his Kingsguard vows, nor does it get his son out of the family regime’s custody.

He wants to be an involved parent with Tommen, and he’s coming to see Cersei as an obstacle in that regard. He wants to tell Tommen the truth about his parentage and Cersei is standing in the way. He wants to stay at the Red Keep and personally look after his king-nephew-son, and Cersei assigns him to take the throne’s army through the Riverlands and settle some affairs, the central of which is to hand Riverrun over to the Freys. Jaime feels like this duty conflicts with his vow to Catelyn Stark, but Cersei is not impressed with Jaime’s priorities, and Jaime is in no position to defy Cersei’s orders.

Already, the political situation is putting Jaime in an awkward position regarding his obligations to his family and the Stark-Tullys. He thinks of Cersei’s assignment as having him continue the work of Gregor Clegane and Amory Lorch. His response is not to advise Cersei on making peace in the Riverlands, but to ask her to send someone else to do the ugly jobs. We might ask: would it be better for Catelyn Stark’s family if he let some other throne-loyal jackass lead the army through tying up the Mountain’s loose ends? Of course, Cersei doesn’t care about any of that. She wants Jaime to tie up the loose ends, so she gives him no other options.

He does extract concessions from Cersei in return for doing the dirty work. He has his old friend Ser Addam Marbrand and the royal executioner Ser Ilyn Payne in his company. The inclusion of Ser Ilyn is much more significant than Cersei understands. Jaime thinks he needs Ilyn as a sparring partner, but he’ll do much more for Jaime’s mind than for his remaining hand.

The first stop is Castle Hayford. Following a conversation concerning his cousin Tyrek, in which Jaime has his own ideas about the boy’s fate and it leads him to thinking of Varys, naturally he wants to hit something. He goes outside and joins up with Ilyn Payne for a training session. The sparring doesn’t go very well. Jaime does not make a good left-handed fighter, but he always appreciates the sessions with Ser Ilyn.

Further up the road, they find a bunch of outlaws squatting in a Wode brother’s keep. One of them appears to have been a Lannister soldier, but Jaime has him hanged along with all the rest. One of his compatriots tells him one day, men just may call him Goldenhand the Just. Jaime doubts that very much. He is convinced he will never escape the Kingslayer stigma.

Next stop is Harrenhal, the place where all the fun stuff happens. He demands to see Vargo Hoat’s severed head, but when he does, somehow revenge is not so compelling anymore. Pia the serving girl, with broken teeth and broken nose, is so happy to see Jaime. Captive Northman Wylis Manderly, a significant bargaining chip for the throne, is also incredibly relieved at Jaime’s arrival. Jaime has assigned Bonifer Hasty (whom he mentally dubs “Baelor Butthole”) to run Harrenhal until Littlefinger shows up. Ser Bonifer does not want Gregor Clegane’s soldiers in his service, so Jaime offers to take them with him to Riverrun. Ser Bonifer also does not want Pia at Harrenhal, as she’s the girl who fucks everyone, and supposedly this makes her an undesirable presence, so Jaime takes her on as a washerwoman. He’s forming a habit of gathering up the rejects, the outcasts, the broken bodies, and giving them places to go and things to do. Pia isn’t safe at Harrenhal, as one of the Mountain’s soldiers tried to rape her. For merely attempting a rape on a young woman who is already known for having pleasured half the Lannister army, Jaime presents Pia with the guy’s severed head.

This is more than a show of chivalry to one mistreated serving girl. Rape of civilians by soldiers is a serious problem in wartime. There have probably been other men who forced themselves on Pia, and that same guy and his buddies have probably assaulted plenty of other powerless women. By executing that one soldier in front of the garrison, Jaime shows his forces that rape will not be tolerated as long as he’s their commander. Doesn’t matter whether the victim is a person of any political or social importance. Doesn’t matter whether she’s a virgin or the Proud Filly of the Riverlands. Doesn’t matter if it’s even a completed rape. Nobody gets away with sexual violence when Jaime’s in charge. By taking this position, he’s making the women of the Riverlands a good deal safer than they were when Tywin was in charge.

It’s time for another session with Ser Ilyn, but first he stops by the bear pit, where he runs into Ser Ronnet Connington, drunkenly gazing out at the bear’s half-decayed corpse. Their conversation reveals that Ser Ronnet was once betrothed to Brienne, but he broke their betrothal after about three seconds in her company because the only thing more offensive than a tall, flat-chested 12-year-old girl is one who clams up when she sees a handsome young knight looking at her like an atrocity. (She later introduced him to the business end of her morningstar in a tournament.) Jaime can handle Ser Ronnet’s crudeness up to the point when he refers to Brienne as “that freak,” at which Jaime interrupts him with a golden backhand across the mouth that sends him tumbling down the stairs and knocks out a tooth or two. Brienne isn’t there to hear Ser Ronnet’s insults, but Jaime will not tolerate anyone speaking of her that way. She is a highborn lady and Ser Ronnet had better call her by her name.

This is the first time we’ve seen Jaime get angry enough to hit someone absent physical threat, possibly in the entire series. It’s the first time he’s lashed out physically at anyone since he lost his hand. That’s what it takes to make him angry enough to hit someone in the face: some jackass knight speaking ill of his big wench. Granted, Jaime has also thought of Brienne as a “huge ugly freak of a woman,” but no more. Now he hears what it sounds like when someone speaks of her out loud in such terms, and he’s provoked to violence. He soon assigns Ser Ronnet to escort Ser Wylis Manderly out to Maidenpool so Jaime won’t have to see his face. He has the Mountain’s soldiers with him, he has the mute, pock-faced headsman Ilyn Payne as his tutor, he takes Pia when Baelor Butthole rejects her, but he can’t stand to be in the same room as Ronnet Connington. The argument could be made that Jaime’s hitting Ronnet was hypocritical, because Jaime repeatedly thought of Brienne as a freak and frequently told her she was ugly. On those lines, though, Jaime’s reaction to Ronnet is not hypocrisy, it’s upheaval. He recognizes his recent-past self in Ronnet’s gross language and he’s disgusted at himself for having been that guy. He won’t be that guy anymore.

Darry is a stop on the way to Riverrun, a delaying tactic. The castle wasn’t expecting the Lannister army to show up. A “darker need” has brought him here. Cousin Lancel doesn’t seem to care one way or another: he’s fasting, sleeping in the sept and hasn’t consummated his marriage to Amerei Frey.

The visit is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, he’s shown up unexpected with an army at Castle Darry because he needs to confront Lancel about fucking Cersei. He wears his red and gold to dinner because of his “darker need” and he doesn’t want to look like a Kingsguard for this conversation.

And then on the other hand, he can’t help but behave as gently and diplomatically as possible to everyone around him. He tells Peck it’s okay to sleep with Pia if she’ll have him, and he should be gentle and kind with her, like he’d treat his bride. Lancel isn’t at dinner, so Jaime is left with Amerei and her mother Mariya, who want to talk about Amerei’s late father Merrett Frey getting killed by outlaws. Someone suggests the outlaws were “Beric’s band,” or perhaps a group led by some torn-faced, hooded woman called Stoneheart. Jaime knew Merrett when they were kids and didn’t like him one bit, but for Ami’s benefit, raises a toast to him and acts like he was an okay guy. That’s not even getting to how Jaime acts when he finally gets a chance to see Lancel. There’s also talk of a recent, especially brutal attack on the nearby town of Saltpans; word on the road is the Hound was in charge of the butchery. He counsels Ami and Mariya to be generous with their smallfolk, like Arthur Dayne did with the Kingswood people to get them on the crown’s side. He’s interested in gentleness and generosity rather than violence and intimidation.

At some point Jaime knocks over his wine cup (accidentally) and excuses himself from dinner to go find Lancel in the sept. His young cousin is sleeping beneath a different altar every night and the Seven are sending him visions. Jaime is inclined to think the visions are coming from Lancel’s empty stomach. As much as he’s been obsessing over the idea of Cersei having cheated on him with Lancel (and Osmund Kettleblack and possibly Moon Boy), when Jaime sees his cousin, he responds with nothing but concern. The kid is starving himself and completely retreating from everything of substance in his life. Jaime’s first priority in this encounter is to try to persuade Lancel to have a good meal and fuck his bride before she runs off with Hardstone.

Finally, the conversation over Lancel torturing himself leads to the question of what he’s done to warrant this self-inflicted punishment, and the short answer is that Jaime and Cersei have each influenced Lancel in the worst possible ways. Lancel had an affair with Cersei and played a vital role in killing King Robert.

He killed a king and fucked the queen, like Jaime did.

He plans to depart from Darry the next morning, renounce his marriage and lordship, and return to King’s Landing to join the Warrior’s Sons. On the one hand, the Warrior’s Sons were banned centuries ago, but Cersei has just brought them back, so there’s her hand in ruining Lancel’s life yet again. On the other hand, his throwing away his castle, his wife, his lands, his people, for some vow, is no different from what Jaime did to himself in joining the Kingsguard. Why did he do it?

Jaime admits to himself that honor and glory played their parts, but mostly it was for Cersei, and why was that? It goes back to that grandiose mythology that Jaime created for them long ago, but now he recognizes that as a delusion: “I thought that I was the Warrior and Cersei was the Maid, but all the time she was the Stranger, hiding her true face from my gaze.”

Following the visit with Lancel, it’s time for another training session with Ser Ilyn Payne, but the sparring is immaterial; it’s all about the talk therapy and wine afterwards. This time, the conversation (in which Jaime talks and Ser Ilyn lets him talk) gets especially raw, because Castle Darry under previous management was the site of an ugly time in the history of the royal family.

What, you mean the royal family has ever had a time that wasn’t ugly?

This time was worse than most. It was that time mentioned in Stage 4, when the Baratheon-Lannister-Stark entourage stopped at Darry on their way south from Winterfell, and the children had a fight that culminated in Mycah the butcher’s boy being killed.

This is the first time Jaime is talking to anyone about how low he sank that night. He discloses to Ser Ilyn that not only did he step over the passed-out king to fuck the queen, he went after Arya Stark because Cersei was howling for the girl’s blood. Having already tried to kill one of Ned Stark’s children as a matter of protecting their own family from execution, he was also ready to kill or maim another Stark child not as a matter of defending his family, but of indulging his sister’s sadism.

He doesn’t blame Cersei for encouraging him to be that guy. He’s disgusted with himself for what he did that night, and he recognizes that nobody can make him do better except him. It’s not a matter of anyone else having influenced his behavior, it’s about his reasons for doing what he did, and now he realizes those reasons were all based on lies.

This is a good time to go back to the occasion of Jaime provisioning Brienne to rescue and protect Sansa Stark.

Brienne has met up with Tyrion’s erstwhile squire Podrick Payne and taken him under protection. They’ve been hard at work at trying to find Sansa, and it hasn’t been going so well. The closest they’ve come to any positive progress in the quest is that Brienne has made a short list of locations to search: Riverrun, where she may be hiding out with her great-uncle the Blackfish, the Vale, where she may have gone to stay with her aunt Lysa Arryn, or Winterfell. She’s at the Inn at the Crossroads with Podrick, Septon Meribald, and some jackass knight named Hyle Hunt who once tried to pop Brienne’s cherry on a bet and who now wants to marry her for her lands and titles.

She has already gone to the Quiet Isle and met with the Elder Brother, who explained to her that Sandor Clegane was definitely not the leader of the attack on Saltpans; it was some other asshole wearing his helmet.

Their little band of weirdos head back to the Inn at the Crossroads, now serving as a makeshift orphanage because there are a lot of children in the Riverlands who have lost their parents in the war and there aren’t a lot of families looking to take in unrelated children. The kids take Septon Meribald’s food, take Brienne’s silver, and let them in to stay for the night. Based on this transaction, Brienne assumes she and her companions will be protected under the sacred tradition of guest right.

However, this is after the Red Wedding, in which the Freys wiped their asses with guest right and were rewarded with the crown’s protection.

The attack on Saltpans was actually the work of some remnants of the Brave Companions, as in, the same outfit that took Brienne and Jaime captive and robbed Jaime of his dominant hand.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood Without Banners, also known as “Beric’s band,” is still active, though Beric himself is not. The outlaws headed by a torn-faced hooded woman are not mutually exclusive with the ones formerly led by Beric Dondarrion. This outfit is the one running the orphanage, albeit not doing a very good job of keeping the children fed.

The remainder of the Brave Companions didn’t stop at Saltpans, either. They just happen to show up at the orphanage on that particular night, and lucky for the children, Brienne just happens to be outside when they get there. It’s dark, muddy, there’s thunder and lightning and rain, and Brienne gets out her shiny Lannister-branded sword and takes on seven of those assholes at once. The first of them is the big noseless Rorge, one of the creeps who’d previously threatened to rape her, now wearing the Hound’s helmet. Brienne makes short work of Rorge, but she isn’t prepared for the attack of Biter the giant non-verbal cannibal. He smashes her head, breaks her arm, breaks some of her ribs, and chews off part of her face, until finally Gendry the handsome young blacksmith comes to her aid and puts his spear through Biter’s head. At around the same time, the Brotherhood show up and get rid of the remaining sellswords.

When the fight is done, the Brotherhood are presented with a caring old septon, a knight previously in the service of Randyll Tarly, a squire previously in the service of Tyrion Lannister, and an unconscious, gravely wounded young woman carrying a sword decorated with a gold lion encrusted with rubies. The septon is allowed to go free. The others, especially including the young lady who was nearly killed while defending the children, are taken prisoner.

The rumored hooded woman now leading the outlaws turns out to be the ill-advisedly resurrected Catelyn Stark, what’s left of her after three days decomposing in the river. One of the last things she heard before she died was Roose Bolton saying, “Jaime Lannister sends his regards” just as he plunged his sword through her son Robb’s chest. Thus, the Brotherhood’s new raison d’etre is rounding up all the Freys, Boltons, Lannisters and their associates, and putting them to death.

Hyle Hunt used to serve Randyll Tarly who is now allied with the Lannister regime, so he’s guilty by association. Podrick Payne used to serve Tyrion Lannister, so he’s guilty by association. Brienne, for her part, develops a nasty infection in her bite wound and spends a couple of days in a semi-conscious delirium in which she keeps on crying out Jaime’s name. This is in addition to her gold-lion-and-rubies sword and the parchment signed by King Tommen. It doesn’t make a good impression on her new captors.

Once again: Zombie Catelyn associates Jaime with the murder of her son, regardless of how far he was from planning the massacre.

When Brienne recovers sufficiently from her fever to wake up, she is bestowed a new nickname: The Kingslayer’s Whore. The guys bring her in front of Zombie Catelyn, who looks at the sword, the parchment, and her travel buddies, and gives her judgment that Brienne is loyal to the Lannister regime and therefore needs to die. She has already decided that Jaime is a dead man walking, and when Brienne tries to tell her what a great guy Jaime is, it doesn’t help her case.

Zombie Catelyn gives her an ultimatum: take the sword and slay the Kingslayer, or be hanged for a betrayer. They’ll hang Podrick and Ser Hyle along with her, of course. There’s one way to prove her loyalty to Zombie Catelyn, and that is to kill the man whose name she keeps calling out in her sleep. Otherwise, she and her guys will be hanged as traitors and Lannister-lovers.

There was a day in Jaime’s life, many years back, when he was serving a master who wanted him to kill his own father as a test of loyalty. “Bring me your father’s head, if you are no traitor,” said Mad King Aerys to young Ser Jaime. It was a conflict of vows: no matter what he did, he’d be breaking his sacred promises to someone.

Now Brienne has Lady Stoneheart and the Brotherhood telling her basically to bring them her beloved knight’s head, if she is no traitor.

As she did at one point technically swear her service to Catelyn Stark, the argument could be made that she should carry out Zombie Catelyn’s orders. However, the living Lady Catelyn also swore not to ask any service of Brienne that might bring her dishonor. This is where knight’s vows get tricky; who gets to decide what might bring dishonor? Either way, this is Brienne’s turn for her vows to present a conflict. She thinks knighthood is about doing good in the world, but there would be no honor in giving Zombie Catelyn what she wants.

Unfortunately, she and her guys are captive and stripped of their arms and armor. She’s weak and wounded, so she can’t fight back. There’s no way for her not to choose between the sword and the noose; the Brotherhood chooses for her. As they’re led out to the trees with the ropes, Brienne tries to bargain for Podrick’s life, but there’s no bargaining here. This is not one of those times when someone writes a pretty song about a knight who fought bravely and died to save others. She cannot protect anyone with the loss of her own life. In the end, it’s the sight of Podrick’s little flailing legs that forces her hand.

Before the Lannister army departs from Darry, they get a visit from Jaime’s cousin Daven Lannister, the new Warden of the West. They have a sit-down in Jaime’s tent and Daven tells him all about the Riverrun siege; it’s very boring and Daven wants some Freys to die.

Daven is lots of fun, but that’s not the point! The Lannisters are under different types of pressure from all sides. The Riverrun siege is at a standstill because that asshat Ryman Frey keeps acting like he’s going to hang Edmure Tully, and then keeps on not hanging Edmure Tully, so Uncle Brynden Tully the Blackfish is unimpressed. Blackfish has picked the countryside clean of food, which is not so nice for the smallfolk, but it means the Tully garrison will not be starved out any time soon. The Freys have their own food supply, but they won’t share it with the Lannisters, so Daven sends his men out to forage (from a countryside that’s already been picked clean) and half of them don’t return. Jaime’s uncle-by-marriage Emmon Frey, the new legal lord of Riverrun, wants Edmure hanged, while from the other side, Lord Gawen Westerling’s wife and three of their children (including Robb Stark’s widow Jeyne) are inside the castle and he’s afraid the Blackfish will kill them if Edmure is hanged. Gawen Westerling is a Lannister ally, so his concerns are taken into consideration. In summary, they need to end the siege, and soon. There’s no good way to do it. Daven says they need to storm the castle, while Jaime’s thinking about how to keep his promise to Catelyn Stark about not taking up arms against her family.

Other pressures are below the surface, but Jaime keeps them private. He had a dream about smashing Cersei’s teeth when he caught her fucking Moon Boy, while he tells Daven she’s radiant and golden. He thinks she’s fickle and false as fool’s gold. He likes life in the camp so much more than life at court. His men seem comfortable with him. Unfortunately, his training with Ser Ilyn confirms that his old skill is not coming back.

He doesn’t want to go back to court, feels increasingly alienated from Cersei, but at the same time, his position in the war camp depends on illusions.

Now it’s time for Riverrun, the whole point of taking the army through the Riverlands. Jaime begins his visit with sympathetic thoughts for the Tullys, the enemy family whose defeat he’s there to finalize. Having been a prisoner of war quite recently, he feels sorry for Edmure Tully being strung up on the gallows every day. There’s a conversation with Cousin Daven, in which Jaime shares his memories of being the Tullys’ guest in his youth, when Hoster Tully sat him next to Lysa at every meal but Jaime was focused on hearing from Uncle Brynden the Blackfish about the War of Ninepenny Kings. Blackfish is the knight they’re now assigned to turf out of the castle for the benefit of Jaime’s aunt and her husband.

Another pressure on the Lannisters is the River lords’ presence in the war camp. Jaime notes which of the Riverlands families have joined their side in the siege, and which families have bent the knee to Tommen but are not helping in the siege. He needs to end the siege soon to keep the nominally loyal River lords from getting ideas. However, that does not offer him any clues of HOW to resolve the siege in a timely fashion.

Soon there’s a visit to his tent by Aunt Genna (Tywin’s only sister) and her ridiculous husband Emmon Frey, the new Lord of Riverrun by decree of the king. There are the initial culture clashes, in which she offers her condolences on the loss of his father but he misses his right hand, Jaime makes up a load of polite malarkey about their son Cleos Frey, and Emmon seems to think he’s the new Lord Paramount of the Trident and gets all offended upon learning Littlefinger holds that position.

After Emmon takes his leave, they have a discussion of the political situation. Genna says he should hang Edmure to erase any ambiguity about who is the Lord of Riverrun.  She says Blackfish won’t accept terms from Jaime, due to his reputation as an oathbreaker. So, any plan for resolving the siege that involves bargaining with the Blackfish is a non-starter. She ultimately advises Jaime to do what Tywin would have done.

So what would Tywin have done? What was Genna’s relationship to her eldest brother? She appreciated that he raised an objection to her betrothal to Emmon, which is not to say she approved of the man he became later. She ultimately makes the pronouncement Jaime definitely did not see coming and does not want to hear: he’s similar to all her brothers except for his own father. Although her big brother wouldn’t speak to her for half a year after she told him so, she goes ahead and says so again: Tyrion is Tywin’s true son, not Jaime.

His next task is a meeting with the Blackfish, in which Jaime is curiously preoccupied with how his opponent sees him. He has struggled over whether to wear his Lannister armor or Kingsguard white, implying that the negotiation might have a better outcome if Jaime projects the right display of loyalty to family or to service. (He ultimately chose a leather jack and crimson cloak.) He doesn’t like that the first thing out of Blackfish’s mouth is “Kingslayer,” but ultimately keeps his cool.

Faced with the implication that he’s responsible for the Red Wedding, and that he was supposed to get the Stark girls under his protection, Jaime is tempted to tell Blackfish about his provisioning Brienne for her quest. However, Blackfish looks at him the way Ned Stark looked at him perched on the throne above the Mad King’s fresh corpse, so he doesn’t bother with that. Even now, he’s still sensitive to how he’s perceived relative to his actions.

Blackfish tells him he can go ahead and hang Edmure, as he’s a dead fish walking no matter what. Jaime offers to exchange Edmure for Lady Westerling and her children. Unfortunately, this is where Genna’s warning comes true: Jaime is already known as an oathbreaker and Blackfish has no interest in setting terms with him. Jaime offers to let Blackfish join the Night’s Watch as a term of his surrender, with the promise that Jon Snow (a Stark relative, thus an ally to the Tullys) is Lord Commander. Blackfish isn’t having that, either, as his loyalty is to his niece Catelyn, who never trusted Jon.

Meanwhile, Blackfish is content to judge Jaime as if he’s culpable for Tywin’s actions. Jaime cannot deny that the Red Wedding stinks of Tywin, but Tywin is now dead, and Jaime was neither involved nor consulted in subverting the sacred laws of hospitality. If Jaime’s reputation for his own actions isn’t enough, then the fact of his being Tywin’s son (regardless of Aunt Genna’s disclaimer) will have to suffice. Whether he’s in Lannister red or Kingsguard white, there’s no way he can come to this negotiation as a trusted party.

Jaime’s frustration starts getting the best of him as he offers to resolve the siege via single combat, as if pitting his champion against Blackfish’s champion is compliant with the oath he swore to Catelyn. For a moment there, he talks about taking up Blackfish in single combat himself, which is a terrible idea, as Jaime’s disability far outweighs Blackfish’s advanced age. It’s a moot point, as Blackfish won’t even accept that plainly foolhardy offer, nor will he accept any offer at all if it’s coming from the Kingslayer. The parley is no parley at all; Blackfish was simply bored and wanted to mock Jaime for his disability and the latest offenses tied to the Lannister name.

For now it looks like they’ll need to storm the castle, so he calls a war council. Following one of Tywin’s better examples, he lets his captains speak first. Emmon Frey says to hang Edmure Tully. Karyl Vance says that won’t be enough to move the Blackfish. Cousin Daven says to storm the walls, and Strongboar offers to lead the assault, but Uncle Emmon will not stand for them busting up his castle. Ser Addam Marbrand has ideas on how to storm the castle with minimal damage, but Walder Rivers says that’s not good enough to thwart Blackfish. Edwyn Frey says to shoot Blackfish with arrows smeared with poo, Strongboar offers to challenge Blackfish to single combat, Forley Prester says that won’t get the job done, either. Norbert Vance offers to go and talk to Blackfish as an old friend, and Lord Piper says that’s pointless. Cue the spat between Lord Piper and Edwyn Frey about what happened to Piper’s son at the Red Wedding. Jaime yells at them to break it up, Piper storms out, Jaime tells Edwyn the Freys screwed over the Starks, so they don’t have a leg to stand on against the Pipers, and that’s enough war council for the night. Seems like a thoroughly unproductive war council, no good ideas and no united front.

Next is time to visit the Tullys from a position of power, which means going to the gallows at the Frey encampment. (Note: the Frey encampment is a 4-dimensional hot mess.) In the walk through their camp, he passes a lot of men he tried to kill in the Whispering Wood. Ultimately he finds Ryman Frey, the guy supposedly in charge of this establishment, drunk as usual and frolicking with a sex worker and a singer. Jaime still has to threaten violence to get past the spearmen at the gallows, which is one more promise he can’t keep if anyone decides to force the issue. Once they reach Edmure, he assumes Jaime and Ser Ilyn are there to kill him, which he meets with relief. Ser Ryman, his son Edwyn, and the drunken whore all come running up to intercede, and Jaime makes an illustration of best practices to Ser Ryman by smacking him upside the head with his golden hand for threatening to hang Edmure when he knows they cannot afford to do so. He expels Ryman from the camp, appoints Edwyn in his place, and demands all the Red Wedding prisoners at the Twins be handed over to the crown. Just as Edmure thought he was finally done for, Ser Ilyn has cut him off the gallows rather than kill him.

Back in Jaime’s tent, he acts as the gentle captor he would have appreciated during his own captivity, giving Edmure a bath, a change of clothes and a meal. With Edmure in the bath, Jaime makes the offer that brings all his conflicting concerns together.

On the one hand, Edmure can yield Riverrun and no one dies. Smallfolk can stay or go, Blackfish and the garrison can join the Night’s Watch. Edmure can also join the Night’s Watch, or he can go to Casterly Rock as Jaime’s captive, with his wife and child joining him following the child’s birth. The child, depending on gender, will be given lands when he earns knighthood or dowered when she’s old enough to wed. Edmure may even get parole after the war. This is what he gets if he yields the castle.

If he refuses to yield the castle? Then Jaime will murder everything Edmure cares about and twist in the knife in every direction available. They’ll tear down the castle, with the Riverlands guys being the first line of attackers, they’ll kill everything inside, and if Edmure is still alive and there’s still anything left to call a castle by the time his wife gives birth, then Jaime will send the new baby into the castle via trebuchet.

Later he thinks to himself: this shows Aunt Genna he’s really Tywin’s son. He can think whatever he wants, as the next chapter gives us the test of Jaime’s capacity for mercy. Edmure yielded the castle, but he also let Blackfish escape, which is not what Jaime had in mind. Emmon Frey is demanding to have Edmure’s head. Jaime threatens to shove the former Lord Tully into a torture chamber, so Edmure admits his uncle swam away under the castle gate. He seems to have thought he could get away with playing fast-and-loose with Jaime’s terms of surrender and still get that sweet deal of Casterly Rock’s hospitality. However, he’s not entirely wrong. Jaime is not nearly as confident of finding Blackfish as he lets on, but he doesn’t take out his frustration on Edmure. The worst he does to his new captive is to say, “I’ve been despised by better men than you, Edmure.” As a knight who’s spent his entire adult life being treated like a crime waiting to happen, telling him he’s a bad guy is no way to force his hand.

Finally, there’s the meeting with Lady Westerling and her daughter Jeyne, who is clearly devastated at losing Robb Stark. Jaime is unimpressed with Lady Westerling’s machinations and says to her face that her daughter is worth ten of her. Keep in mind that Lady Westerling is a vital ally to the Lannisters, and her correspondence with Tywin helped to set the foundation for the Red Wedding. Jeyne was absolutely not interested in her husband being killed. Jaime is much more sympathetic to Jeyne’s grief than to her mother’s politics. He wonders if Cersei would mourn him the way Jeyne mourns Robb. The most he does to manage the risks of prisoner rebellion is to increase the escort for Edmure and the Westerlings at the last minute: from 100 to 400. He’s willing to devote considerable man-power to making sure his prisoners are delivered to their destination, preferably alive and healthy.

There’s a training session with Ser Ilyn, in which Jaime describes his progress as, “If I keep this up for another year, I may be as good as Peck.” Meaning his young squire, a nice kid, not known for his swordsmanship. As they drink wine together afterwards, Jaime talks about kissing: “Do you think my sister kisses Kettleblack?” Ser Ilyn non-verbally recommends killing Cersei, but Jaime declines, as that would hurt Tommen.

No matter how angry he is at Cersei, he’s more invested in being a parent to her remaining children, long after she made him keep away. What he’s aiming at is not to repair his relationship with Cersei, but to overcome it. She would not want him to be involved in Tommen’s life, and he doesn’t intend to seek her approval.

Next morning is the departure of the River lords. Karyl Vance advises Jaime to go to Raventree and treat with Tytos Blackwood, who will never yield to Jonos Bracken (as the Blackwoods and Brackens have been feuding for centuries and their conflicts have literally compromised the political integrity of the Riverlands) but he’ll yield to Jaime.

The garrison of Riverrun have nothing to say about Blackfish. Aunt Genna suggests interrogating a few of them, but as Jaime had promised Edmure not to hurt any of the garrison, he refuses. He feels content, regardless of Blackfish’s disappearance. The war is winding down, the Lannisters are winning, and he did his part at Riverrun without taking up arms against the Starks or Tullys. He looks forward to returning to Tommen, though not to Cersei; she’s in the way. He thinks about telling Tommen the truth of his parentage: “Would you sooner have a father or a chair, lad?”

As the garrison depart for the Wall, Jaime makes them take a vow not to take up arms against Lord Emmon. Aunt Genna says one man in ten might keep that vow, but Jaime lets them go regardless. While nobody believes he’s capable of keeping a promise, he treats his opponents with the best of faith.

Before he leaves Riverrun, Jaime has a dream of standing in the Sept of Baelor. A woman shows up whom he first thinks is Cersei, but she’s really his late mother Joanna. Referring to his lost sword hand, she tells Jaime they all dream of things they cannot have. His father had dreamed that his son would be a great knight and his daughter would be a queen, and they would be so strong and brave and beautiful no one would ever laugh at them. The dream ends on a disappointed note, the implication being that Jaime and Cersei had failed to live up to their father’s expectations. He wakes up that morning to find it’s snowing inside, which means winter has come to the Riverlands. Jaime’s first thought is wondering how the realm will eat. The maester shows up with a raven from Cersei.

Without digressing too far from the narrative at hand, Cersei has been playing puppetmaster and her machinations have backfired on her in the ugliest way. The content of her letter is begging Jaime to come and save her. “I love you, I love you, I love you. Come at once.” Never mind that Jaime has no sword hand and has no real power to protect Cersei from anyone, regardless of the veracity of the charges against her. (In this case, she is absolutely guilty.) What she’s asking Jaime to do here is essentially a suicide mission, and he knows she knows it.

Looking at this letter as a matter of what Cersei expects from her brother, it’s indefensible. She wants him to come and die for her, not because it would help her, but because she cannot abide him getting on with his life without her. Looking at this as a question of Jaime’s connection to Cersei, he could send a response. He could write back and say there’s no way he can fight for her and she needs to choose a champion who has some chance of winning. He could write back and tell her to go take a long walk off a short pier. He could give her any response at all.

The maester is waiting for Jaime’s reply to the letter. He crumples up the letter, hands the paper to Peck the nice young squire, and gives his final answer to his sister:

“Put this in the fire.”

In Jaime’s one chapter in ADWD, a major theme is family, particularly a man’s love for his children. Jaime spends a lot of time telling us Raventree Hall is old and weird, such as the heart tree in their godswood. He also sees his father’s hand in the devastation surrounding the castle, but even so, he’s there because he’s been told Lord Blackwood is ready to surrender to the crown.

Raventree is a quick diversion from tracking down the Blackfish, after which he expects to return to King’s Landing. He’s eager to get back to Tommen, and completely unenthused about going back to Cersei. He may even be half-hoping the High Septon puts her to death before Jaime has a chance to see her again. After all the time he’s spent talking to Ser Ilyn, he no longer cares enough to lift a left-hand finger to save his sister’s life, and he can’t get excited enough to go back and kill her himself. He simply doesn’t want to see her again, and he’s content to leave her to her fate. He’ll show up for Tommen, the son he was never allowed to parent, but Cersei gets no more of Jaime’s time.

First there’s the meeting with Lord Jonos Bracken in his tent, where he’s busy plowing a dirty-faced sex worker named Hildy. The interaction with Hildy reminds Jaime of Myrcella, and he thinks he’ll need to tell her, too, about her parentage, and that might upset the Martells. If only that were one of those conflicts he could cut apart with a sword.

Bracken bent the knee to the throne only after the Red Wedding, and it’s clear he surrendered not because he was convinced the Lannisters were the leaders Westeros needed, but because surrender was the way to keep the war from taking away any more of his family. His nephew and bastard son were killed by Lannister soldiers, the Mountain stole their harvest, put their castle to the torch and raped one of Lord Bracken’s daughters. A dozen of his relatives were killed at the Red Wedding. For those injuries, Lord Bracken expects compensation from the crown as credit for having partially subdued the Blackwoods. Jaime agrees Lord Bracken made the prudent decision by surrendering when he did, but also secretly thinks Lord Blackwood is more honorable. Bracken advises Jaime to be harsh with Lord Blackwood because they’re untrustworthy and they need to be punished. He suggests taking Blackwood’s only daughter as a hostage, because Blackwood really loves his little daughter and giving her up will hurt.

In meeting with Lord Tytos Blackwood, their conversation turns to Edmure Tully, whom Blackwood says is living a life without honor. Jaime thinks that’s unfair, as Edmure acted to save his child. Lord Blackwood, also, is motivated to protect his children. Regardless of Lord Bracken’s advice to bring the hammer down on Lord Blackwood, Jaime handles him quite gently. He is indifferent to whether Blackwood physically kneels to him as a ceremony of submission, and their negotiation of Blackwood’s surrender actually goes quite amicably. The most tension surrounds the selection of a hostage. Two of his sons have already died; his youngest died of dysentery and another was killed at the Red Wedding. Jaime promises to get the boy’s bones returned from the Twins. He offers up a whole slew of relatives as hostages to the crown; anyone but his sweet little daughter Bethany. Jaime agrees to take his second son Hoster. He declines to take supper with Lord Blackwood because Jaime will not take food from a starving castle.

There is a case to be made that Lord Blackwood planned ahead of time to install Hoster as a spy in Jaime’s camp; he’s so relieved when Jaime agrees to take him, and the boy is packed and ready to go within the hour. He’s a very friendly, bookish boy who loves to talk about history and politics (he’s like a skinny Samwell Tarly), and if he’s there to spy on Jaime, then he has nothing to report except that Jaime is a very ethical, generous captor who starts out their journey by telling Lord Bracken to send one of his daughters to court as a hostage.

He gets along very nicely with his new hostage and maybe spy, thinking of him as a hypothetical companion to Tyrion. He reminds himself to be angry at Tyrion for killing their father, but even so, Jaime doesn’t have fond memories of Tywin.

Unfortunately, he only gets a day to hang out with Hoster the Hostage before he parks the host in the village of Pennytree for the night. Having already suffered a great deal of violence at the hands of “king’s men,” the villagers have holed up in the holdfast and refuse to open the gate. The host could storm the castle, but Jaime refuses to force the issue; they can still use the village for a night’s shelter. However, Jaime also orders his soldiers—it’s that concern for the smallfolk and their empty bellies again—not to steal the villagers’ food, as they brought their own provisions. I can picture Hoster writing a letter to his father: “Tonight, ser shared a wineskin with me and Lord Peckledon’s son in a cottage in Pennytree. Ser let the villagers hide in the castle all night, and we all had to leave their food untouched. He let me tell him all about Missy’s Teats. I showed the host where to ford the river!”

That’s the night when an old friend shows up. Two of Jaime’s sentries come back to the village around midnight, with Brienne on horseback in their custody. She looks older, she has an obvious facial wound, but she’s still carrying Oathkeeper. Their conversation is quick and to the point, phrased to make sure the surrounding soldiers don’t pick up any sensitive information: she says she’s found the girl, a day’s ride away, and the Hound will kill her unless Jaime comes alone.

The story is malarkey, but for the purposes of getting Jaime to desert his army, it’s sufficient. The next (and last in the extant books) we hear about Jaime is in Cersei’s meeting with Uncle Kevan, who tells her Jaime left Raventree with a woman by Brienne’s description. Cersei tells herself her letter must not have reached him, or else he would have returned to fight for her. She thinks he would never abandon her for “such a creature” as Brienne, but that is what he’s done. He read her letter, he burned it, and he could not be bothered to send even the shortest, bluntest, most basic reply. He is content to leave her there to fend for herself and probably lose. Even if she survives her trial, Jaime is thinking seriously about getting Tommen away from her before he becomes another Joffrey. For now, though, Jaime isn’t rushing back to the capital for his son. He’s putting his life on the line to band together with his fellow Kingslayer. Cersei can tell herself whatever she wants, but Jaime has heard her question and given his answer. He has a life to live without her.

If there’s one message I hope you’ve gathered from this last stage of Jaime’s arc, it’s that he is a much bigger character than he gives himself credit for.  His Kingsguard vows truncated his potential for leadership, and his incestuous affair subverted his better impulses for nearly all his adult life. By putting on the white cloak, he yoked himself to the family regime while cutting off his chance at a family. He did this to himself because he believed his sister was the love of his life, but now he knows he could have done better, he can still do better, and he is doing better. Rather than stay under-utilized and enmeshed all his life, he has outgrown his white cloak and left his sister behind. No matter what Cersei tells herself, their relationship is in the past tense. His burning her letter and riding off in the other direction with Brienne is not selfish and immature behavior within the context of their relationship, it is the end of their relationship. Cersei is no longer a motivating factor for him.

The mythology of their incestuous affair was, per Cersei’s confession to Ned, that they were one soul in two bodies. Jaime believed the same thing, at one point telling himself “if I were a woman I’d be Cersei.” His decisions tell us otherwise. Ever since he returned from his captivity, at every opportunity to do what would please Cersei, he has chosen the opposite. She gave him no choice but to deal with Riverrun, and he dealt with it, but what did Cersei have in mind when she put him on the job? She had no interest in his promise to Catelyn Stark, and no interest in any mercy for the Tullys. Rather than hang Edmure Tully and disembowel the Blackfish, he turned his reputation as a villainous monster into a tool of mercy. He threatened to trebuchet a baby so he could make a deal in which no more fathers would have to lose their sons. The Tullys were no friends of his, and yet he did his job in a way that prioritized their survival. This is what he can do with a modest level of military resources and bargaining power at his disposal, so think of what he could do when freed from the burden of his vows. In the way he resolved the siege of Riverrun, he’s shown us the potential in the moniker of Goldenhand. If you play nicely with him, he’ll be extremely generous, but if you cross him, he will smack you like you have never been smacked before. While Cersei views leadership as a matter of elevating herself, Jaime views leadership as a responsibility to look after the people, and that’s what he’s been doing. Doesn’t matter whether they trust him, or whether they like him, or whether they’re sufficiently loyal to Jaime’s side of the war. He wants everyone to have enough to eat, he treats battle as a last resort, he looks after the safety of the most powerless people, he embraces the outcasts, the underappreciated, the unfairly judged, the neglected and unloved. Like his exiled little brother, not his embattled twin. Like his big wench Brienne, not the pretty little maiden his father wanted him to marry.

He is not the man Tywin wanted him to be; he is the man who may actually have the power to clean up the messes his father made. This is the Lion of Lannister who can restore the family name to a position that commands loyalty and admiration. Possibly the greatest tragedy of his arc thus far is that Cersei’s children were never going to be his family. He thinks he will (eventually) return to King’s Landing where he’ll be the father Tommen needs, but really, it is very unlikely that he will see Tommen or Myrcella alive again. The love of family, including his chance to be a parent to his children, is a motivating force for him, but it won’t be enough to save those two. That is not to say the pursuit of family has been a waste of Jaime’s time; far from it. He rejects the idea of “family” as held by Tywin, in which blood ties are put to the service of politics. Instead, he seeks the practice of family as demonstrated by the Starks, in which parents love their children for the messy and complex individuals they are and siblings see each other as needed allies rather than competition. He’s angry at Tyrion, but they’re both still alive and there’s still time for them to reconcile. While he has not gone so far as to say it in as many words, Brienne is the woman he loves and while she believes her life only has meaning so she can protect others, she will live for Jaime. Cersei represents lies, narcissism, obsession, destruction, and death. Brienne represents honesty, connection, courage, and life. Jaime has denied Cersei any more of his time. He will not die on her account.

If you’re wondering whether I’m weird enough to think Jaime is one of those lucky buggers who’ll actually survive this notoriously death-heavy series, the answer is yes. GRRM has put tremendous care and consideration into writing Jaime’s arc to bend toward triumph. He has chosen life.

 

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/epilogue-in-which-jaime-is-not-the-valonqar/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHCLIXzx6HM

 

1. The show left the Valonqar out of Maggie’s Prophecy.
2. My friend’s case for FrankenGregor as the Valonqar.
3. Lady Stoneheart and the Kingslayer Parallel.
4. The TV show has left no space for Jaime to kill Cersei.
5. Brienne’s arc does not bend toward death.
6. Brienne will not die in TWOW.
7. Cersei does not need to be proven right.
8. My essay on the development of the Jaime/Brienne relationship.
9. For why Jaime’s arc is more important than Cersei’s death: see everything on this site.
10. Jaime’s dream of smashing Cersei’s teeth: who cares?
11. Here is a helpful analysis of the weirwood dream.

See this Scapple board for the video transcript.

ETA, 08/22/17: I’ve done some more writing on the subject.

12. What is the null hypothesis of the Valonqar clause?

13. What does “Valonqar” really mean in Maggy’s usage?

14. It doesn’t mean “twin.”

 

@Lord Varys

[kissdbyfire]

I thought it had the makings of a great thread but then I saw the OP.

Sorry, not gonna read 73 blog posts or whatever those are. 

[aryagonnakill#2]

Post a theory or don't.

[The Fattest Leech]

1 hour ago, goldenlion said:

 

check all of it out and tell me your thoughts https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/home/part-1-in-which-adults-are-not-in-charge/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/home/part-2-in-which-he-gets-a-new-nickname/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-3-in-which-he-does-things-for-love/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-4-in-which-jaime-doubles-down/
https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-5-in-which-a-new-kingslayer-enters-the-picture/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-6-in-which-jaime-stays-in-the-kingsguard/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/part-7-in-which-riverrun-changes-hands/

https://cloaksoiledhim.wordpress.com/epilogue-in-which-jaime-is-not-the-valonqar/

This feels like a spamware pop-up window on my computer screen. 

You should try posting the theories and then giving credit/links to the source. 

[Lion of the West]

Spam links are not appreciated. We are happy to discuss Jaime but please post your thoughts in a regular text.

[Angel Eyes]

I'm surprised that Jaime isn't viewed in a slightly better light in-universe. He faced a real Morton's Fork during the Sack of King's Landing; he could have killed King Aerys (which he did) and be a Kingslayer, or kill his father and be a Kinslayer. Is it worse to be a Kingslayer or a Kinslayer?

[chrisdaw]

That's more words than should ever be needed to break down Jaime.

In the simplest terms Jaime is a classic heel-turn on the theme of selflessness/selfishness.

It is not about right or wrong. And it is not primarily about redemption.

When we meet Jaime he cares only for himself and his sister, the rest of the world be damned. Selfishness personified. By the time Jaime dies he will have proven the realm's greatest most selfless servant.

It is Jaime's lot to carry out the worst necessary actions in order to save the world. He will be (for a time) Hand, the realm's first servant, and he will prove the saying the Hand takes the shit.

Aerys is a beginning, and where to look for what Jaime is all about. A great deed in one way but also dishonourable, an action that makes him hated and reviled. Jaime is going to be doing a lot of this, weighing life against life, loyalty against loyalty, family against the realm. It will be his burden to do the bad, disgusting, dishonourable, immoral, unlawful, unforgivable, in service to humanity and the realm, and carry all the shame alone. It has to be him, because no-one else will be willing to carry on their conscious what Jaime will, and the realm is going to need doing a lot of necessary evil if they are to survive.

He is to become Tywin, but unlike Tywin who was seemingly unfeeling, Jaime will feel the horrors of his actions acutely.

[Stormking902]

This man is writing essays LOL

Jamie didn't sit back and allow the Lannisters to sack the city, Jamie and Varys both told Aerys not to open the gates. 

[Morte]

Long read. Did not finish it, simply because it isn't an analysis only, but also a much too long summary of Jaime's arc.

Just a short remark: Will Jaime survive? Yes, in my opinion the chances are good for him to at least make it till quite the end. Simply because I think that of the remaining two of the "Magnificent Seven" the last survivor will stand vigil for the other one. And one of them will actually finish the entry of the other in the White Book (and maybe, just maybe, this two entries will indeed be the last finished in the book?)

[Chancho]

Thanks for the Reading, truly good stuff, i agree witth most everything (onlly red 3parts so far)... Jaime was shaped by his late teen yearsto become self-centered and cynical, people took advantage of his naivity.... turning him in something that was despised and with the books we understand how he coped withit