silverwolf22 Posted May 12, 2019 Share Posted May 12, 2019 https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/173306972125/why-jaime-even-killed-aerys-i-dont-get-the/embed a conversation ( I agree with makerkenzies thoughts Quote Well, Jaime did mention that he only killed Rossart, but there were others that he killed afterward, to ensure that it never got set off, and sadly, that also made sure that no one was around to know the full extent of the caches buried in the capital (h/t to @wendynerdwrites) But to get down to the root of why Jaime killed Aerys, you have to get into Jaime’s psychological headspace, (fortunately though it’s not the Cersei part). Jaime always wanted to be a knight, yet his tenure in the Kingsguard was full of everything but true knighthood. He was forced to stand guard and do nothing while Aerys sexually brutalized Queen Rhaella, told that he had no right to judge the king while he murdered Rickard Stark without trial and had his son strangled after watching simply to torment him further. Aerys was, in so many ways, the embodiment of all that Jaime despised in himself, the source of what turned him into the Smiling Knight instead of the Sword of the Morning. So when Jaime kills the pyromancers, he saves the city, his “finest act” as he puts it so eloquently. Yet when he returns, there Aerys is, cackling while he waits for the people to burn, asking Jaime if he slew his father. The gall of that madman, ordering so many people murdered purely in a fit of pique, as if the lives of innocent people were his to spend like coin, and then calling Jaime like a dog at the feet of the wicked master. Putting on the Lannister gold armor was the way of him shedding the years of blind service (seriously, how horrible is it when Tywin is a step up?) and taking a stand for something greater. So he comes back to that throne room, and there frail Aerys is, right there, able to be ended. Jaime has the chance to end that part of him so definitively, to be the knight he always pictured himself as. It’s a heroic act, so Jaime rationalizes. Stop Aerys from ordering anyone else to set off the blaze, some loyalist to go down with the ship and consume friend and foe alike. Get a surrender out so the sack ends as quickly as possible, with as many lives still around to be saved. That is true, but there is a second part of it. A deeper, more visceral part, lashing out at the man that had made him a monster. In cutting down the Mad King, Jaime is cutting at parts of his past that he hates, and trying to gain some small measure of personal satisfaction that he did something right. Thanks for the question, Anon. SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King guileandsubterfuge What is this fuckery? Aerys was, in so many ways, the embodiment of all that Jaime despised in himself, the source of what turned him into the Smiling Knight instead of the Sword of the Morning. Jaime is 17-years old now. Jaime doesn’t despise himself. Jaime isn’t thinking about being the Smiling Night. He’s a 17-year old kid who has spent at most two years in the Kingsguard. He literally thinks of himself this way years and years later after spending most of his life as the despised Kingslayer and man without honor. He despises himself because he was forced to break his vows. A deeper, more visceral part, lashing out at the man that had made him a monster. In cutting down the Mad King, Jaime is cutting at parts of his past that he hates, and trying to gain some small measure of personal satisfaction that he did something right. Aerys only made Jaime a “monster” in that he had to break his vows to kill him. Unless Jaime is a time-traveling fetus, I have no idea what you’re talking about. *Jaime* isn’t the character who has stood by for years and years watching Aerys grow madder. That’s literally the rest of the Kingsguard. Jaime is the kid who just got there and is still at the point of questioning all of the bullshit around him. warsofasoiaf Jaime disagrees. “It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.” -ASOS And what are the things he dwells on about his tenure in the Kingsguard? What could have caused him so much trauma that the highest honor in the land soiled him? “You swore an oath to guard your king, not to judge him.” -ACOK “We are (sworn to protect Queen Rhaella), but not from (Aerys).” -AFFC And does he hate himself for his roughly two years of Aerys’s service for soiling him? Does he think that the boy in him died when he put on the white? “ And me, that boy I was … when did he die, I wonder? When I donned the white cloak? When I opened Aerys’s throat?” -ASOS -SLAL guileandsubterfuge Nope. You’re using the thoughts of a 34-year old man who has spent 17 years in the Kingsguard and suffered from his choices and seeing the hypocritical way his act is treated, to somehow guide the actions of the boy he was. You’re trying to argue that Jaime killed Aerys out of some sense of self-loathing or as revenge for Aerys turning him into a “monster”, That’s one hell of a reach and it’s simply wrong. Jaime killed Aerys to stop him from destroying King’s Landing. It’s that simple. He chose one vow over another - which is the whole point of his later speech. warsofasoiaf If you actually read the original post and understood it, you would already know that I do not disagree with the notion that Jaime killed Aerys to stop him from destroying King’s Landing. It’s right there, explicitly mentioned: “Stop Aerys from ordering anyone else to set off the blaze, some loyalist to go down with the ship and consume friend and foe alike. Get a surrender out so the sack ends as quickly as possible, with as many lives still around to be saved. That is true.” But *gasp* Jaime is a complex character with a complex blend of emotions, and he can have multiple reasons for doing any one particular thing both conscious and unconscious. You paid no attention to what I wrote, so I’ll extend the same courtesy. Consider yourself ignored, I’m done with your flailing. -SLAL guileandsubterfuge Wow. I was trying so hard to not make it personal, but you have literally NEVER been able to objectively discuss or analyze Jaime and while the rest of your content is typically good you have a Jaime-sized blind spot when it comes to Jaime. I would love to be able to ignore you, but honestly, you are the person I most think of when I think *Someone on the internet is wrong* and I feel a deep obligation to counter your blatantly wrong ideas and meta when it comes to Jaime. Hopefully, other people can step forward to counter your continued wrong interpretations. makerkenzie Jaime had to kill Aerys, rather than allow the rebels to take him into custody, for the same reason that he killed the other pyromancers later: anyone who knew about the wildfire caches was someone who could ignite the wildfire caches, and therefore a threat. When Jaime came into the throne room with Rossart’s blood on his sword, and Aerys wanted to know if that was Tywin’s blood, it proved that there was no way Aerys could be convinced to surrender peacefully. If there was anything less than perfectly rational about Jaime’s act of regicide as a traumatized 17-year-old, it was in overestimating the amount of power Aerys might have had following a live capture. And, you know what? I think we can understand why, under the circumstances, teenage Jaime didn’t have the time or space to be perfectly rational. He’d spent the last two years having to enable Aerys in all sorts of atrocities up to and including his actually setting up a giant nuclear bomb under the city. All this while the older KG knights were telling him that yes, he should just stand there and do as he was told. It was clear that adults were not in charge and Jaime was the only one with the backbone to stop the bomb from going off. He wasn’t in a position to work out a calm and rational weighing of risks and benefits of various responses to the king’s madness. Jaime’s situation was HOLY SHIT THERE’S A NUCLEAR BOMB UNDER THE CITY and THIS FUCKER HAS HIS THUMB ON THE BUTTON and furthermore, he could not wait for some more responsible and mature nobleman to sweep into the city and show him the way. His own father, a Lord Paramount and former Hand of the King, was at that moment sacking the city he’d just promised to defend. Jaime’s father, his closest and most powerful example of an authority figure, was throwing gasoline on the dumpster fire. Under those conditions, it would have been absurd to sit there and wait for the rebels to come in and get the king under control. The rebels were already doing the opposite. Jaime’s self-loathing as a failed knight did not come into it. His idea of himself as having become the Smiling Knight instead of (his overly idealized vision of) Arthur Dayne developed later, in response to the fallout of his killing the king. It’s comforting to tell ourselves no one can make us feel inferior without our consent, but the truth is, if enough people tell you you’re a piece of shit often enough over a long enough span of time, even if you know all those people are their own brand of filthy hypocrite, you still come to substitute their projection for your own reflection. Part of the problem with Jaime’s self-loathing as a cynical 30something knight is that he so thoroughly bought into the hype about guys like Arthur Dayne in the first place. Arthur Dayne was not an angel; you could ask Lyanna Stark about that if she hadn’t died in that tower. Jaime’s right to say the cloak soiled him, but he didn’t have the time or space to think in those terms until much later. At the time of killing the king, he wasn’t lashing out against the monster who made him become the Smiling Knight. Some things really are this simple: he saw a threat and he neutralized it. The city was under siege, and he resolved the siege as parsimoniously as he could under the circumstances. Because he resolved that siege, he was judged as a filthy oathbreaker. That was what Brienne understood when she heard his confession in the Harrenhal baths; he started behaving like a villain only after he was treated like a villain. The white cloak soiled him because his killing the Mad King led to his self-loathing, not the other way around. warsofasoiaf “…but he didn’t have the time or space to think in those terms until much later.” I actually have no problem with a lot of this piece, it’s this line that I disagree with, because why not? What prevented him from thinking in those terms? Why was he unable or unwilling to reflect on himself and his position? He has plenty of time, he was a Kingsguard knight for two years and Aerys was said to have gone worse by the Defiance of Duskendale, years before Jaime was ever a Kingsguard, so it’s not like this stuff only happened later into Jaime’s tenure. Jaime knew from the get-go that standing there and doing nothing while Aerys brutalized Rhaella was wrong, he wouldn’t have brought it up to Jonothor Darry if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have needed to dissociate just to get through it if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be so traumatized by it if he didn’t. The argument in your third paragraph, that he bought into the hype of True Knight Arthur Dayne only to discover that he hid behind his oath to absolve himself of responsibility while enabling the monster that was Aerys II and this factors into his current-day torment, is something that I agree with. What I don’t agree with is that he needed distance to reflect upon it. Nor do I think that it in any way diminishes Jaime’s conscious actions and motivations, nor do I think it diminishes his current psychological demons and self-loathing borne from being “reviled by so many for my finest act.” As I mentioned, Jaime is genuine when he believes that killing Aerys will prevent him from giving the order to detonate the city to someone else, or one of Rossart’s assistants might take it upon himself to detonate the wildfire while Aerys languishes in a cell. He also wants to stop the sack as quickly as possible and save what lives he can, he’s being sincere when he tells Lord Crakehall as much. But to argue that there was no emotional reflection for Jaime in his actions over the past two years doesn’t strike me as very likely. Jaime is clearly traumatized by the actions that transpired during his tenure, and he’s going to think about it, and have opinions for all involved, himself included. -SLAL makerkenzie What prevented him from thinking in those terms, at that time, was that he was an isolated juvenile trapped in a desperately toxic situation and he was in survival mode. He was serving as both bodyguard and hostage to a king who liked to set men on fire. It can’t possibly be healthy to be filling the dual roles of bodyguard and hostage. He was trapped between his pyromaniac boss on the one hand, actually plotting to blow up the city, and the expectations associated with his Kingsguard vows on the other hand, as well as the understanding that even if he did absolutely everything right, he could be executed if his father stepped out of line. He was just a bit preoccupied with the immediate, physical dangers pressing down on his teenage shoulders. On the day of the Sack, he had Aerys ordering the pyromancer to light ‘em up, and he had his father the notorious war criminal fucking up the city, which did nothing good for Aerys’s decision-making ability. Under those pressures, this: That is true, but there is a second part of it. A deeper, more visceral part, lashing out at the man that had made him a monster. In cutting down the Mad King, Jaime is cutting at parts of his past that he hates, and trying to gain some small measure of personal satisfaction that he did something right. …is more complicated an explanation than Jaime’s actions warrant. He wasn’t lashing out at the man that had made him a monster. He wasn’t cutting at parts of his past that he hates; at that point in his life he was too busy trying to navigate the unmitigated war zone that was the Red Keep to think of himself as a monster. The predicament of his asshole father on one side of him, and that madman with his thumb on the nuclear trigger on the other side, combined with the complete absence of trustworthy adults in Jaime’s life, are easily enough to explain why the king had to die. Additionally, my position is that this: Aerys was, in so many ways, the embodiment of all that Jaime despised in himself, the source of what turned him into the Smiling Knight instead of the Sword of the Morning. …is projecting the cynicism of 30something Jaime onto the actions of 17-year-old Jaime, which is neither useful nor appropriate. He doesn’t think of himself as having become the Smiling Knight until he’s all grown up and has gone through all of Robert’s reign. He didn’t despise himself until he went through all those years of being tarred as the Kingslayer. My position, which I understand is not universally accepted, is that it wasn’t only the trauma of serving the Mad King that led Jaime to see himself as a failure of a knight; it was the confluence of that trauma and the stigma of the Kingslayer judgment he faced following his finest act. My position, which I understand is not universally accepted, is that Jaime thinks so badly of himself because he’s spent his entire adult life being treated like a filthy oathbreaker. My position, which I understand is not universally accepted, is that Brienne revises her opinion of him following the bath scene because she understands that he only began acting like a bad guy after he was treated like a bad guy, and he was treated like a bad guy for doing something heroic. My position is that GRRM wants us to see Brienne’s reaction as the correct one, because Jaime was not always the guy who seldom flings children from towers to improve their health. My position is that GRRM wants us to understand Jaime as someone who was once a good kid who got screwed up and screwed over by people who should have known better, and those people were not only Aerys and the older KG knights; they were the nobles who treated him like Worst Kingsguard Knight Ever because he turned against his king. This may not be what you intended, but in your original response to the Ask, it sounds a lot like you’re saying Jaime was always that guy who seldom flings children from towers to improve their health, and that was why he became the Kingslayer. I’m saying: no, he assuredly was NOT always that guy, His actions as a traumatized juvenile led to his attitude as a cynical adult who fucks his sister, not the other way around. Which does not mean I’m letting Jaime off the hook for the shitty things he’s done post-Rebellion. It means I’m saying that good kid is worthy of our attention and it’s worth the trouble to understand how he got screwed up and screwed over. I am sick of them mentality thatned and cat were right about jaime when fact is both were wrong. and certain people are determined to be wrong about jaime and refuse to accept that their initial opinions of jaime were wrong to the point they persist in claiming jaime is a big narcissist claiming he is as big a narcissist as cersei when I would say he is the least narcissistic lannister. or claiming that he as a teenager thought anything he did ( specifically his killing of aerys in ) would be seen as a great deed because he is a lannister and claiming his speech about ned not having the right to judge him is prroof of his narcissism when he had a point not to mention when he used that line it wasnt a line of starks and lannisters but the animals and their nature I have seen people claim jaime has to be the valonqar because they think that cersei needs to be surprised about the alonqar and think it was the person she thought would be by hersides and bs some argument that it cant be someone who isnt related to her as if there is something wrong with the valonqar applying to any little brother which would emphasize how self fullfilling her prophecy was and how paranoid etc. https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/173314611275/yes-that-does-include-ned Quote Why, yes, I am specifically thinking of Ned Stark when I talk about how Jaime Lannister was unfairly vilified for stopping the Jade Holocaust. And it’s not like this is a zero-sum game in which Jaime cannot be good unless Ned is bad. Ned was overwhelmingly a good egg and Westeros needs more noblemen like him. But he wasn’t right about everything. He judged Jaime unfairly, for instance, and he could have done better. It’s not just a trivial detail, either, that Ned was wrong about Jaime. This is one of the stories GRRM has woven into ASOIAF: Ned’s attitude about the Lannisters was wrong, and that wrongness has had consequences. And that is not to go anywhere near saying the Lannisters are blameless. There is no justification for the twins’ subverting Robert’s line of succession, or Cersei arranging for Robert’s early death, or Tywin’s fucking up the Riverlands. What I’m saying is that Ned viewed the Lannisters as a monolith of antagonism. They were never a monolith. They all have different personalities, different motivations, and different levels of access to power. Ned treated them like they were all the same, and all The Enemy™, and Catelyn picked up on that attitude. Part of that view of The Lannisters™ as The Enemy™ lay in Ned’s being so eager to see Jaime’s killing the king as a power-grab. As soon as Jaime hopped up off that throne, Ned should have and could have asked himself, “Wait, what kind of power grab is that?” If Ned and Cat had not been so happy to view the Lannisters as their unified enemy, some things in AGOT would have happened differently. For instance, it might not have even occurred to Littlefucker and Lysa to point the fingers at The Lannisters™ after they killed Jon Arryn, if they hadn’t reasonably expected Ned and Cat to believe it. If Ned had not approached his new job at HotK under this determination that The Lannisters™ fucked everything up and they were all responsible for the same offenses, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Littlefucker to screw him over. If Catelyn hadn’t been primed to believe The Lannisters™ were out to get her family, maybe she would not have been so happy to believe Tyrion sent the catspaw to finish Bran, and she would not have had Tyrion carried off to the Eyrie, and a whole heckuva lot of horrible shit would not have followed. One of the ways in which Ned got the Lannisters wrong was that he was so quick to assume the worst about Jaime’s motivation for killing the king. We finally get Jaime’s POV in ASOS, and through his memories told in his own words, we see that Ned’s passing judgment on him was as unfair as it was unproductive. Jaime is not a filthy oathbreaker who slew his king so Lord Tywin could take over; Ned was wrong, and if he’d ever troubled to ask Jaime for his own side of the story, they might have come to be best friends. The Lannisters™ did not kill Jon Arryn; that was Lysa acting under Littlefucker’s guidance, so Ned was wrong. While perhaps we can forgive Ned for never considering his own sister-in-law would murder her husband, the fact is that was a big area where Ned was wrong. Ned was right about the Lannisters trying to kill Bran, but he was mistaken about which ones did what and why. He didn’t realize the twins were responsible for Bran’s “accident,” but neither they nor Tyrion had anything to do with the catspaw who tried to finish the job. That was Joffrey acting as Robert Baratheon’s son, with completely different motivations from his mother’s family. Not serving House Lannister’s interests. Ned was a very decent dude and he understood Lord Tywin much better than Catelyn did (for example), but Ned didn’t understand the first thing about the Lannisters as a family. Which is fine! Ned doesn’t become any less of a good guy if we recognize that the Lannisters warrant a more nuanced lens than Ned was prepared to focus on them. Ned was only human. He didn’t know everything. He had limitations and he did the best he could. It’s okay for Ned to have been wrong about some things and some people. It’s okay for Catelyn to have made some bad choices. The point is, we don’t get a sufficiently well-informed view of the Lannisters, as a family or as individuals, from Ned’s POV. That especially goes for Jaime. This is why so many of us J/B enthusiasts are so viscerally invested in the narrative frame around Jaime’s becoming the Kingslayer. If there was anything cynical about Jaime’s decision to kill the king, and moreover if there was anything cynical about Jaime’s silence about the wildfire caches, that implies Ned was right about him all along. Which is, first, boring, and second, frustrating. It’s frustrating because, if the wolf was right to judge the lion, what does that say about the future of the realm? I have seen people try to act like if the KL goes boom then its jaimes fault for not telling people about the wildfire when no its not or claiming that its jaimes own fault for not telling them about aerys plot as if they would have believed him even if he did show them the wildfire (when he didnt know where the wildfire was ) Quote https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/165621493955/no-virginia-jaime-is-not-a-proud-anti-hero Today I’m going to talk about this somehow widespread idea of Jaime having kept quiet about the wildfire plot supposedly for “pride” or “spite,” like he’s committed a grave moral offense by not divulging the existence of the wildfire caches or, for short, I’ll call it the “Jaime Likes Being Called Kingslayer Theory.” Here is a list of reasons why this theory of Jaime’s motivations is FLAMING HOT GARBAGE. 1. Removing the wildfire caches would have been a logistical nightmare. The city would have been put in much more danger by trying to dispose of the caches than by leaving them alone. If the existence of the wildfire had been made public knowledge without first ensuring it was safely destroyed, it would have caused a mass panic. 2. Even if 17-year-old Jaime wasn’t aware of (and thus not motivated by) the logistical difficulties, why should he have assumed the wildfire caches wouldn’t have been just as devastating a tool of mass destruction in someone else’s hands? 2a. First, this boy was Tywin Lannister’s son. As in, the guy who drowned Castamere and slaughtered the Tarbecks. That was Jaime’s primary role model of a powerful man. 2b. And then he spent two years dealing with King Aerys II, who enjoyed setting people on fire and actually planned to blow up the city. 2c. It stands to reason, Jaime’s default expectation was that the wildfire caches would be used for blowing shit up and killing lots of people. Would the new King Robert have decided to blow up Dragonstone and get rid of Queen Rhaella and Prince Viserys? Why should Jaime have assumed he wouldn’t? 2d. Therefore, the pool of people he could have reasonably told about the wildfire caches was very, very small. 3. To assume Jaime would have salvaged his reputation by telling someone about the Wildfire Plot presupposes that someone would have believed him. 3a. Even if he’d persuaded someone to come with him and see some of the wildfire stored beneath the city, all that would have proved is that the wildfire was there. They still might not have believed Jaime’s account of the king planning to blow up the city. 3b. Which means the consequences of his hypothetical disclosure would be: 3b1. King Robert gets his hands on tons of explosives and does something awful, as Jaime has learned powerful men are likely to do. 3b2. The realm still thinks Jaime killed the king for the most venal reasons and is an untrustworthy piece of shit. 3b3. And on top of that, he’s seen as having puked up this self-serving malarkey about having to save the city, rather than just admit he killed the king because his daddy asked him to. 4. Jaime has told someone about the Wildfire Plot, and he didn’t have to. He volunteered the story to Brienne. 4a. Why does no one ever ask why Brienne hasn’t shared the Wildfire Plot with anyone else? Why does no one ever characterize her as putting King’s Landing in danger of nuclear holocaust by keeping Jaime’s story to herself? 4b. If Brienne has good reasons for not blabbing about King Aerys having planned to blow up the city, it stands to reason Jaime has equally good reasons for not telling anyone except her. 4c. The better question is why Jaime told Brienne, after he spent 17 years telling no one else. And that brings us to… 5. Both Ned Stark and Stannis Baratheon were advising the new King Robert to send Jaime to join the Night’s Watch as punishment for committing regicide. In that environment, Jaime had a good incentive to want King Robert to know his side of the story. That he did not tell the king suggests he had much better reasons for keeping quiet than “pride” or “spite.” 6. The question of why Jaime didn’t tell anyone about the wildfire has already been posed on-page, and we have already seen Jaime’s response to that question. “Do you think the noble Lord of Winterfell wanted to hear my feeble explanations? Such an honorable man. He had only to look at me to judge me guilty.” 6a. We could spill metric tons of ink speculating on why Jaime is so focused on Ned in particular, but we do have this much: he imagines his story would have come across as “feeble explanations” if he’d tried to tell Ned what happened. 6b. Ergo: 17-year-old Jaime would have liked to tell someone, like Ned Stark, about the Wildfire Plot, but he was already being treated like a filthy fucking liar based on his having killed the king. 7. Rather than asking “Why didn’t Jaime tell anyone?” (as if Brienne doesn’t exist), we could instead ask: “Why didn’t any of these powerful men ever try asking Jaime why he did what he did?” Barristan Selmy, as the new Lord Commander, could have asked his youngest Sworn Brother why he’d wiped his golden ass with his oaths, and he did not. King Robert could have asked; he didn’t. Jon Arryn could have asked, and I think Jaime would have actually told him, but the new Hand of the King did not have that meeting with the boy he’d convinced the king to pardon. Stannis Baratheon could have asked, and I don’t think Jaime would have told Stannis, but the interaction might have shown Jaime there were some trustworthy people who would give him a chance. 7a. All of those men knew Jaime was the last Kingsguard knight left at the Red Keep with Aerys at the end of the rebellion. 7a1. Why the fuck did none of them ever consider Jaime could be the most generous, primary source for Aerys’s last acts? Surely they could have gotten something for the history books by asking for his side of the story? 7a2. If the answer is “they assumed he’d lie his golden ass off,” then why the fuck do we need any further explanation for why Jaime never went out of his way to volunteer the information? 8. "He didn’t tell anyone because he had every reason to think no one would believe him" is a perfectly sufficient answer to the question of why he didn’t tell anyone, given his sudden faint-in-the-tub display of emotion in sharing his story with Brienne. 9. I have seen plenty of commentators simply presuppose that Jaime’s keeping quiet about the Wildfire Plot was an act of perverse narcissism, but so far I haven’t seen anyone present an actual argument for why “he chose to keep quiet because he likes being despised for his finest act” is a better explanation than “because he had every reason to think no one would believe him.” 9a. To go from Jaime’s railing against Ned Stark’s self-righteous ghost, to insisting he’s just the kind of asshole who likes to let everyone think the worst of him, is a substantial claim which requires substantial evidence. I haven’t seen anyone attempt to offer any evidence to that effect, probably because it doesn’t exist. 10. At the time of becoming the Kingslayer, Jaime was a 17-year-old boy who’d spent the past two years combining the roles of bodyguard and hostage to a king whose preferred hobbies included setting people on fire and abusing his sister/wife. The guy who seldom flung children from towers to improve their health did not yet exist. (Another note: there may be a very few characters in ASOIAF who can travel through time. Jaime is not one of them.) Jaime’s attitude as a sister-fucking, child-tossing 33-year-old does not explain his decisions as a traumatized, isolated, vilified teenager. The fact that he was traumatized, isolated and being treated like a filthy fucking liar for saving the city, at such a tender age, is more than sufficient to explain why he didn’t share his story at that time. 10a. If you read the Bathtime at Harrenhal scene and what you got out of it was, “Oh, now I get it! Jaime let everyone treat him like a shithead because he’s just that type of asshole!” Then you’re missing out on a lot of Jaime’s arc. 10b. There is literally no stage of Jaime’s arc, including backstory, in which his behavior supports the theory that he willfully kept the wildfire a secret because he loves to play the cynical anti-hero. Jaime has never enjoyed being called Kingslayer. 11. Jaime is absolutely right to say he is despised for his finest act. At the time of his act of regicide, there was no other reason for people to dislike or mistrust him. He’d fucked his sister at least once by that point, but that wasn’t public knowledge. The line of succession was not front-loaded with three blond children named Baratheon. No Stark child had been tossed out of a window. He had not served in his father’s invasion of the Riverlands. Tyrion had not been told his first marriage was a sham. Jory and Wyl had not been killed in the street behind a brothel. All of those things happened well after Jaime was established in his reputation as a filthy oathbreaker. There was no reason why Jaime, fresh off killing the king, would need to lie to himself about why everyone hated him. 12. If it is so very difficult to imagine that a grown man doing shitty things was once a good kid who got screwed up and screwed over by people who should have known better, maybe ASOIAF is not the series you should be reading. No, Virginia, Jaime is Not a Proud Anti-Hero swwswwsww: Excellent point about Brienne knowing about wildfire and saying nothing about it. I’d also like to add an extra motivation for Jaime to have kept quiet. It’s very probable that he didn’t know and still does not know where exactly the wildfire was hidden. He had only heard the piromancers talking about it, not seen it for himself. He had no immediate proof of his story and would have needed to convince people such as Robert and Ned to go search through all the catacumbs of an entire city on just his say so. Out of all people in KL at the time, the only one who could be convinced to do this was probably his father, and seeing as Tywin had just sacked the city I don’t see Jaime going to him for help. when that wouldnt have proved aerys plan to blow up kings landing it would have just proved he put alot of wildfire around the city . Quote Here is an occasional reminder that Jaime Lannister does not represent a bottleneck of information regarding the Aerys-era wildfire caches hanging around under the surface of King’s Landing. A number of people in the present day know that much of the King’s Boom Juice remains unaccounted-for, emphatically including his brother Tyrion The part that only Jaime knows is WHY the Mad King filled the city with Boom Juice, and even that bottleneck isn’t nearly so tight since he told Brienne. For the purposes of ensuring the citizens of King’s Landing don’t get incinerated, Tyrion knows more than Jaime. Tyrion knows not just that there’s still lots of fancy hot sauce under the city, he knows a fair amount about the relevance of the passage of time and the resurgence of magic, especially dragons, to dealing with fancy hot sauce. and tyrion never came to the conclusion that aerys was going to blow up the city. not to mention ( the people who act like there was something wrong with jaime killing aerys and saving the city was somehow wrong cant be taken seriously but I find it ironic that they claim jaime was wrong in breaking his oaths but a part of the kingsguard oath is to keep the kings secrets. though the person I am talking about ridiculously tried to claim that he didnt keep his oaths to cat when he did he never took up arms against house tully he managed to keep his oath utilizing his own bad rep to be able to keep his oath to cat by making the threat to edmure to force him to open up riverrun. ( and that person tried to act like making a threat or what he did about the blackfishetc is somehow akin to breaking his oath when it was just a threat ( he utilized his bad rep to keep both of his oaths and not be forced to break one to uphold the other.)) he swore he wouldnt fight against them not that he wouldnt threaten them etc I find the attempts to jump through hoops to justify demonizing jaime to be ridiculous Quote re: the unending chorus of “but Jaime should have TOOOOOOOOOOLD somebody about the wildfire!”? I am LMFAO at the idea that the average ASOIAF commentator could have gone through even half of what Jaime did during the rebellion and then STILL gone out of their way to volunteer sensitive information in such a hostile environment. Originally posted by samdunn Originally posted by usedpimpa Like FUCK would 95% of us have done anywhere near as much to ensure the safety of the realm as he did under those conditions. Of the seven Kingsguard knights serving the Targaryens during the rebellion, Jaime was the only one with a backbone. That he maintained his sense of right and wrong despite the pressure to the contrary for as long as he did should tell us something about the story GRRM is telling us. jaime did not act like a bad guy until he was treated like one jaime doesnt owe the realm an apology for that Quote By what right does the wolf judge the lion? This is an occasional reminder that a) Jaime Lannister did nothing wrong by keeping Aerys’s wildfire caches a secret, b) Jaime has never behaved like someone who is proud to be despised for his finest act, and c) his experiences at age 17 led to his attitude at age 33, not the other way around. JAIME LANNISTER DOES NOT OWE THE REALM AN APOLOGY MORE LIKE THE OTHER WAY AROUND THE BOY WHO KEPT QUIET ABOUT THE WILDFIRE PLOT WAS NOT THE GUY WHO SELDOM FLINGS CHILDREN FROM TOWERS TO IMPROVE THEIR HEALTH ANY OF THOSE POWERFUL MEN COULD HAVE ASKED JAIME FOR HIS SIDE OF THE STORY I DO NOT FAULT THEM FOR THEIR LACK OF COMPASSION I FAULT THEM FOR THEIR LACK OF CURIOSITY Quote https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/165517402715/why-do-so-many-prominent-asoiaf-commentators-think Why do so many prominent ASOIAF commentators think Jaime committed a great sin in not running around telling everyone of Aerys' wildfire plot? I see it all the time. He was a traumatised teenage hostage- surely it's equally on the likes of Barristan (especially him) and Jon and Robert that nobody thought to take this kid aside and ask 'hey, so why exactly did you break this most sacred vow?' I think in that light Jaime's totally justified in feeling that no one would believe him. Why, yes, Anon, I agree that Jaime was absolutely justified in feeling that no one would believe him. To take Jaime’s transition-era mindset even deeper, I think he was concerned that the wildfire caches would be used for destructive ends if they were made public knowledge. This kid’s father is the guy who literally annihilated two entire noble families in response to their defiance of House Lannister. It’s not just a question of what Tywin would have done; this is Jaime’s primary model of a powerful man. He probably thought it was to be expected that a new king, with access to tons of explosives, would use those explosives to do something terrifying. Blow up Dragonstone to get rid of the last Targaryens, for example? Jaime didn’t want that to happen. I think he killed the pyromancers associated with the wildfire plot because he needed to restrict the knowledge of the wildfire caches to someone who could be trusted to use that knowledge appropriately. In order to divulge the wildfire plot, Jaime needed someone who a) was in a position of sufficient power to either ensure the wildfire was properly disposed of or keep it in the dark, b) would listen to him and believe him long enough to investigate and see the wildfire caches up close, and c) would want to find the wildfire, but not use it. (Sort of like Harry Potter with the Sorceror’s Stone: find it, but not use it.) I have a little headcanon that Jaime was really looking forward to telling Ned all about why he killed the king, and he thought Ned would be just the right guy to either keep the wildfire caches secret or persuade Robert to get rid of it all without blowing anything up. But then Jaime saw how Ned responded to seeing him perched on the throne, and, well, that idea was a non-starter. Jon Arryn might have been a good candidate if he’d ever asked Jaime for his side of the story, but he didn’t. As to why so many of the Smart People of ASOIAF act like Jaime kept quiet because he’s just the type of asshole who likes being treated like a bad guy? Ehhhh…what I see is a tendency to impose 33-year-old Jaime’s “I seldom fling children from towers to improve their health” attitude on 17-year-old Jaime’s actions. Which doesn’t add up, but why does this idea have traction? When we accept that he was unfairly vilified as a kid, then we start to see his antisocial behavior in adulthood in terms of his response to trauma. It could be argued that his response to trauma doesn’t justify impregnating his sister, and he could have and should have dealt with his injuries differently, but what I see happening is a refusal to consider that his injuries were not self-inflicted. It’s an insistence that his shit-for-honor reputation is yet another offense that Jaime perpetrated on the realm, rather than something that was done to him. So how did this view of Jaime gain traction? Well…I think it’s a general discomfort with seeing the guy who attempted murder on Stark kids in terms of victimization. Additionally, I see a lot of discussion of Jaime presupposing access to power that he didn’t (and still doesn’t) have. I think it’s tempting to see him as having always been that guy who seldom flings children from towers to improve their health, because when we see someone doing terrible things, we want to get angry at him. We don’t want to hear about how low he ranks in the power structure, and what kind of consequences he’d face for insubordination. We don’t want to think his ripe jackass behavior in adulthood is informed by war-crimes-level trauma compounded by unfair vilification before his brain was fully developed. Basically, I think the issue is that we don’t like to think of how big the problem really is; if it’s simply a matter of Jaime being awful because that’s how an antisocial narcissist keeps himself entertained, then the problem is right where we can see it, and it’s not too big to contain and dismantle. neds belief that the lannisters were planning a coup is laughable Quote Serious, genuine question here: what was the definition of “coup” the Lannisters supposedly had in mind? Lord Stark and his posse rode into the throne room and saw 17-year-old Jaime’s gold-armored ass perched on that ugly iron chair. That’s the sort of imagery that would suggest a coup in progress…until the moment when Jaime saw Lord Stark giving him the snow-capped stink-eye and hopped right up off the throne. If a young knight who won a tourney melee at age 13, had the chutzpah to leave his monarch’s corpse in a pool of blood in public view, and now has his papa’s flag flying over the castle and his papa’s bannermen mounted all around him, is so willing to hand over the throne to King Robert’s foster-brother, how does that work with Ned’s idea of the Lannisters planning a coup? on this point, Robert is right to laugh. Ned mistakes optics for context and demeanor for decision. By Ned’s own description, the Westermen could have given him a hard time riding up to the throne, but they made way. With them filling up the room, Jaime could have kept on planting his butt on that chair, but Ned didn’t even have to say anything before Jaime hopped right up. Who gives a fuck about his golden armor or his shiny lion’s-head helmet? Who gives a fuck about the dragon skulls staring down at them? One dirty look from the wolf, and the lion rolls right over. Who gives a fuck if Jaime parked his ass on that ugly iron chair, when he was so quick to give it up? If that was supposed to be a power grab for the Lannisters, Jaime sure was happy to surrender. By that logic, what a disappointment to his father. as makerkenzie states jaime wasnt a threat to roberts throne his relationship with cersei on the other hand https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/165697500550/id-be-disappointed-if-he-were-mine also when ned thought about jaime being the one to push bran …and he’s all like, “You know, if I were in his shoes, I’d be lying if I said I knew I’d handle it better.” people try to ignore that quote or ignore that ned who knew the truth about the 3 kids thought it and grrm statement about it . to try and act like grrms statement doesnt apply or they try to claim jaime didnt do it for his kids and cersei trying to bring up his reaction to joffrey ( a monster who jaime knew was a monster) death which was a year after the event Here are two interviews, where George tells what he thinks about what Jaime did to Bran. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/game-of-thrones-season-3-characters_n_1854918?guccounter=1 : "Obviously a lot of people, when Jaime throws Bran out the window, and we like Bran, we've seen his good points, tend to think that makes Jaime a bad guy. But then you understand, if you understand the situation, if Bran goes back and tells what the saw, and is believed, Jaime will be put to death, his sister will be put to death, and there's an excellent chance that his own children will be put to death. So I said to my friend, what would you do if some other eight year old kid was in a position to say something and you knew that would mean the death of your own young daughter. And he said, that eight year old kid is dead! And this is what we would consider a moral man. So how do you make that choice? The abstract of the morality vs. the lives of your own children. I mean, I don't know that I'm a prostelitizer who says this is the answer to that, but I have to question the painful, difficult question, the difficulty of the choice, that's what I think makes powerful fiction." 2. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/george-r-r-martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-242487/ : "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." Ned thought, If it came to that, the life of some child I did not know, against Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon, what would I do? Even more so, what would Catelyn do, if it were Jon’s life, against the children of her body? He did not know. He prayed he never would. -AGOT Eddard XII neds thoughts make it obvious where grrm was going with this and that jaime was sympathetic from the beginning and there were hints to it from the start when jaime said t sh"”“The things I do for love,” he said with loathing " when he pushed bran showing he didnt want to do it or like doing it but he had to ( and people try to claim cersei didnt want bran pushed when cersei did want it to happen she told jaime to do it nonverbally but she sent the message Quote If Jaime - or Brienne at this point - had dutifully called the EPA hotline, what would the material difference have been? Hallyne tells us in ACOK that wildfire cannot be exposed even to sunlight for very long. When they removed the cache discovered beneath the GSoB the prior year, they worked at night. And they do not destroy the wildfire because they do not have the *staff*. Too much knowledge has been lost. They store it under exacting conditions instead. Tyrion notes that the fruit-shaped clay pots holding Aerys’s wildfire are so fragile he has to be careful not to crush them just in handling them. And they keep it cold down there because even heat can set it off. If I am *forced* AGAINST MY WILL to create a pulley system for this goddamn horse, then I also get to force others to address the overwhelming *logistics* problems presented here: explain to me how, in the biggest city in Westeros, without proper staff, without exacting written directions on just where and how the hidden wildfire is stored, working only at night, do we really think ANYONE was going to successfully locate, access, remove, transport, and store what is likely ten thousand or more jars of wildfire without setting it off, without alarming the citizenry, without tempting idiots being like “hold mah smallbeer” and searching for it themselves? Who exactly are you going to hire to do it? How are you going to keep it quiet? Especially immediately after Robert’s coronation. I mean…this is the guild that was doing Aerys’s dirty work. You trust them to not pretend to work for you while they carry out his plans? The wildfire is safer where it IS. They found the GSoB jars - 200 - in a storeroom. You gonna have every storeroom beneath every KL landmark searched and every crate broken open? With people who unlike Hallyne aren’t used to treating their own torches which they will require in order to carry out the search like the dangerous items they become with wildfire present? This is likely the reason why George introduced the idea of stockpiles of Aerys’s wildfire being hidden beneath the city well in advance of Jaime’s recollection. He gave you all the info you needed to understand why the question of a huge search and destroy effort was not being asked by his text. But people gonna insist on hauling horses up mountains anyway. https://makerkenzie.tumblr.com/post/154980548715/whats-your-opinion-on-jaime-keeping-the-wildfire jaime Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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