Why is Cersei hated so much when neither version is even in top 25 most evil characters of the whole Ice and Fire franchise (which includes the books, TV show and games)?

[csuszka1948]

Fine. I have to admit that you are right that she loved her children more than the extension of herself (definitely more than Tywin after Joanna's death), the dream you provided proves it.

Still, even if she was protective of her children, she was a bad and occasionally abusive mother. It doesn't seem that she paid much attention to tje flaws of his firsborn, for example Joffrey abusing Tommen. Tommen didn't dare going to her because he knew (or suspected) that his mother wouldn't believe him. She also tried to use him as a proxy to rule.

We get the impression that even the very few times she is well-meaning (I think to an extent she believed herself well-meaning to Sansa), she is usually a failure. Characters that are 'mostly evil' and 'incompetent' are generally not well-liked. 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by csuszka1948

[Cas Stark]

Objectively, Ramsay Bolton is certainly worse than Cersei, not by a huge margin, but okay.  However, he is the child of the rape of an uneducated peasant by a sociopathic father.  He receives no reasonable education, is tainted by his mother's hatred of Roose and then given his 'pet' who is himself a depraved nut job.  Cersei was ? 10? when her mother died, her personality already formed, and she had a loving, fairly normal mother.  She was abusing Tyrion immediately.  She and her brother already had a sexual thing going on while her mother was alive.  Then there is Melaria down the well.  My point is, that Ramsay Bolton had many, many strikes against him that Cersei Lannister didn't have, and she is almost as bad a person as he is.

[Alester Florent]

16 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

 The reason why I am doing this ramking is because she is no more morally worse than her brothers, Jaime and Tyrion who are beloved by the fandom.

I really think she is much worse than either of them. Jaime and Tyrion certainly have their flaws, but they have the self-awareness to recognise those flaws. By the point the books have reached, Jaime is actively trying to make things better and fix some of the problems the realm was facing (many of which Cersei caused).

Nor do I think either of them was ever as appalling as Cersei in the first place either. Almost everything that's wrong with Jaime is down to Cersei's influence. The worst thing he ever does is push Bran out of a window, because (he thinks) Cersei told him to. Tyrion is repulsed by the murder of Barra, an innocent child. Both Jaime and Tyrion have some sense of decency. Cersei has none.

16 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

 It's not just Ramsay. We also have Gregor Clegane, Joffrey, Rorge, Craster, Euron, Littlefinger, Walder Frey, Aerys, Maegor, Karl Tanner, Dalton Greyjoy, Qhored Hoare, the Bloodstone Emperor, Tyanna, Valarr Hill and many, many others who are way worse than Cersei. This list to show how fans GREATLY exaggerate how evil Cersei is because there are dozens upon dozens of characters who unlike her have no excuses for their actions while she has justifiable motivations for her own actions that could be used to justify her bad actions to an extent unlike Ramsay and has lots of redeeming qualities unlike the characters I listed and no, her love for her children is not her only redeeming quality as I already explained.

So I'll make what I would hope is an unnecessary - but apparently not - point that evil isn't a zero-sum game and that there are worse people than you around doesn't make you somehow better. If someone ranks a 9.5/10 on the Evilometer, that there are a few people at 10 doesn't let them off the hook. And I would hope that everyone is capable of disliking multiple people. It's not like we only have space for five villains in our heads.

The question is in any case why Cersei attracts hate, relative to various other characters, with a list of villains given above for our reference.

To which I say, firstly, who the fuck are Karl Tanner, Dalton Greyjoy, Qhored Hoare, the Bloodstone Emperor, Tyanna, Valarr Hill etc. in the context of the novels? Absolutely nobody. Are any of them even mentioned? Maegor is ancient history, too.

Rorge and Craster are minor characters. They are both eminently hateable, but ultimately they are largely background characters whose actions in the narrative are essentially incidental. They're not lightning rods for dislike.

As established earlier in the thread, those characters who are dead attract less ire because they are dead, too, which accounts for Gregor, Joffrey and Aerys. It's not that they aren't awful, but they received punishment for their crimes (quite cathartically in some cases) and they're not in a position to do further harm. Cersei is still at large and liable to do further damage.

That leaves Euron, Walder and Littlefinger. Leaving aside that I'm not wholly convinced that Littlefinger or Walder, shits that they are, are actually markedly worse than Cersei, one critical difference is that we don't see inside any of their heads. We're not treated to a litany of self-congratulatory smugness about their brilliant schemes, which immediately makes them less annoying. Moreover neither Euron nor Littlefinger seems quite so obtuse as Cersei, who genuinely seems to believe she is a transcendent generational genius in the fact of all evidence to the contrary. Lack of self-awareness is also really annoying.

And with Euron, he makes his appearance in the story quite late, so although we can tell he's an appalling person, he's only just begun to actually do the crimes that make us hate him: Cersei has had five books to work on her rap sheet.

This is part of it. Cersei attracts hate (albeit I think the level of active hate for her implied by this thread is overstated: I have seen fewer Cersei-hate-threads than, say, Arya-hate-threads lately, and I'm fairly confident I see more hate for Walder than for Cersei) not just because she is morally bad but because she is really annoying in a way that most of the other terrible characters aren't. 

[boltons are sick]

8 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Objectively, Ramsay Bolton is certainly worse than Cersei, not by a huge margin, but okay.  However, he is the child of the rape of an uneducated peasant by a sociopathic father.  He receives no reasonable education, is tainted by his mother's hatred of Roose and then given his 'pet' who is himself a depraved nut job.  Cersei was ? 10? when her mother died, her personality already formed, and she had a loving, fairly normal mother.  She was abusing Tyrion immediately.  She and her brother already had a sexual thing going on while her mother was alive.  Then there is Melaria down the well.  My point is, that Ramsay Bolton had many, many strikes against him that Cersei Lannister didn't have, and she is almost as bad a person as he is.

Cersei is not almost as bad as Ramsay. Like I said, Ramsay is Pure Evil, meanwhile Cersei is Inconsistently Heinous (which is the same category where Tyrion is listed) and Inconsistently Heinous characters are less evil than even Near Pure Evil characters (which is where her father Tywin is listed) because they have lots of redeeming and sympathetic qualities and Inconsistently Heinous means characters who still do terrible things but are very far from being Pure Evil while Near Pure Evil characters are close to being Pure Evil. Ramsay has nothing redeeming or sympathetic (we have zero evidence how his backstory has affected him, it's not played for sympathy and he is motivated purely by sadism, so his backstory doesn't count and he is under the category Fake Tragic on the Pure Evil wiki). Him being a child of rape doesn't affect him because he wasn't the one who experienced the rape, but his mother. Him spending some part of his childhood in poverty is not enough to explain why he would turn out the way he did.

[Cas Stark]

Those are totally arbitrary designations.  Cersei is not hugely sadistic, but that doesn't make her not evil.  I could make a pretty good argument that she is a worse person than her father because the majority of her evil acts are unsuccessful so she creates havoc and harm to no purpose.  She is so stupid she never knows when to stop, when to make a deal, when to show mercy.  She has unraveled all of her father's work in securing the Lannister family in an extremely short time.  In terms of their actions, what has he done that she hasn't done?  Ordered murder, check.  Betrayals, check.  Baby killers, check.  I don't believe Tywin was a killer by the time he was a tween, so she's outdone him there.  He loved his wife, so he's bested her there also.  And no incest.

[boltons are sick]

23 minutes ago, Alester Florent said:

So I'll make what I would hope is an unnecessary - but apparently not - point that evil isn't a zero-sum game and that there are worse people than you around doesn't make you somehow better. If someone ranks a 9.5/10 on the Evilometer, that there are a few people at 10 doesn't let them off the hook. And I would hope that everyone is capable of disliking multiple people. It's not like we only have space for five villains in our heads.

The thing is, if there is an evil meter, Cersei wouldn't even scale 9.5 if there was such thingsbecause that would mean she would be Near Pure Evil. And like I said, she is Inconsistently Heinous, and the definition of Inconsistently Heinous is a character who has done terrible things but they have so many redeeming and sympathetic qualities that they DON'T COME EVEN CLOSE TO QUALIFY AS PURE EVIL. She would scale at most 5 if we assume that Ramsay is 10.

 

23 minutes ago, Alester Florent said:

That leaves Euron, Walder and Littlefinger. Leaving aside that I'm not wholly convinced that Littlefinger or Walder, shits that they are, are actually markedly worse than Cersei, one critical difference is that we don't see inside any of their heads. We're not treated to a litany of self-congratulatory smugness about their brilliant schemes, which immediately makes them less annoying. Moreover neither Euron nor Littlefinger seems quite so obtuse as Cersei, who genuinely seems to believe she is a transcendent generational genius in the fact of all evidence to the contrary. Lack of self-awareness is also really annoying.

And with Euron, he makes his appearance in the story quite late, so although we can tell he's an appalling person, he's only just begun to actually do the crimes that make us hate him: Cersei has had five books to work on her rap sheet.

Littlefinger is singlehandedly responsible for instigating the War of the Five Kings (and, no, I don't consider Cersei cheating on someone who rpes her as deliberately instigating a war) which gives him the body count of hundreds of thousands of people which means that in terms of body count he surpasses Cersei and he even surpasses most of the other characters who are listed as Complete Monsters in terms of hos much death he has caused. He sends assassin to kill the young Bran, so that he could frame the Lannister House for it and create tension, tries to have Tyrion executed for it by lying to Catelyn about the dagger she has found, poisons John Arryn and lies to Ned that it was Cersei who did it which causes Ned to hate her and go against her, then betrays him and his men and slaughters them and gets Ned arrested so he could be executed by Joffrey, so that Robb would get angry and go to war with the Lannisters and cause a huge war which would engulf the kingdoms, solely so that Littlefinger could profit from it. He also keeps a horrible brothel where he pimps underage prostitutes and mutilates them like cutting off limbs or kills them (because some of his clients like corpses) to satiate the desires of his clients. He gives the prostitute Ross to be tortured to death by Joffrey when he discovers she is a traitor who spies for Varys. He tricks a knight into helping him get Sansa out of King's and then kills him and frames Tyrion for Joffrey's death to get him executed, before killing his own wife, Lysa, to take power over the Vale and in season 7, tries to convince Sansa to execute her own family members. He also doesn't have any redeeming qualities or excuses for his actions unlike Cersei, so he is definitely worse than her.

 Walder Frey literally kills 3500 people at once while they are under his roof, which includes Robb's pregnant wife and reveals his treacherous nature and that he doesn't respect one of the most sacred laws in Westeros. He also throws his wife away and allows Catelyn to kill her, stating that he would find another and unlike Cersei, doesn't love his family and has no excuses for his actions. He also has much less power than Cersei, which means for the amount of power he has, he is definitely bad enough and he would have done MUCH worse with more power, so he is a Complete Monster.

 I could also write about Euron and how he is much more sadistic a needlessly cruel than Cersei, how he has no redeeming qualities and list all of the crimes he has commited, but I feel too lazy to that after writing about Littlefinger and Walder, so I will skip on that one. All I am going to say is that, Cersei didn't cut off her men's tongues for fun, didn't kills and rape her own siblings, didn't go on raiding across the entire world where she would murder thousands, torture countless, rape many women and sell even more into slavery and doesn't plan to start the apocalypse and reshape the whole world in her image. It's pretty clear who is more evil just by reading these actions Euron has done.

Edited April 6, 2023 by boltons are sick

[kissdbyfire]

2 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Those are totally arbitrary designations.  Cersei is not hugely sadistic, but that doesn't make her not evil.  I could make a pretty good argument that she is a worse person than her father because the majority of her evil acts are unsuccessful so she creates havoc and harm to no purpose.  She is so stupid she never knows when to stop, when to make a deal, when to show mercy.  She has unraveled all of her father's work in securing the Lannister family in an extremely short time.  In terms of their actions, what has he done that she hasn't done?  Ordered murder, check.  Betrayals, check.  Baby killers, check.  I don't believe Tywin was a killer by the time he was a tween, so she's outdone him there.  He loved his wife, so he's bested her there also.  And no incest.

Exactly. She’s worse than Tywin, and that’s really an achievement since he is a totally despicable and utterly unlikeable man. And a big part of that is precisely b/c she is so fucking stupid it hurts. 

[boltons are sick]

18 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Those are totally arbitrary designations.  Cersei is not hugely sadistic, but that doesn't make her not evil.  I could make a pretty good argument that she is a worse person than her father because the majority of her evil acts are unsuccessful so she creates havoc and harm to no purpose.  She is so stupid she never knows when to stop, when to make a deal, when to show mercy.  She has unraveled all of her father's work in securing the Lannister family in an extremely short time.  In terms of their actions, what has he done that she hasn't done?  Ordered murder, check.  Betrayals, check.  Baby killers, check.  I don't believe Tywin was a killer by the time he was a tween, so she's outdone him there.  He loved his wife, so he's bested her there also.  And no incest.

 First, Tywin has a MUCH higher body count than Cersei. He has ordered the complete extermination of two noble Houses, ordered the sack of King's Landing and ordered the pillaging of the Riverlands where countless villages and towns are destroyed with their inhabitants raped, tortured and slaughtered by his minions causing at least tens of thousands of innocent peasants to die in the Riverlands due to his pillaging.

 In comparison, Cersei has just commited some political murders and a few tortures, but that's really it. She hasn't caused much widespread death and destruction like her father and doesn't order scores of villages and towns to be slaughtered and just kills a relatively low number of people in her political schemes even though she has the power to do it.

 Also, Cersei never ordered a young girl to be gang-raped by an entire garrison of soldiers and didn't force her own son to participate in said rape which alone makes her a better person than Tywin.

 Also, the reason why Tywin is listed as Near Pure Evil while Cersei is Inconsistently Heinous is because Tywin has much less redeeming and sympathetic qualities than Cersei.

 Those are Tywin's preventions from being Pure Evil:

 

Quote

He has a tragic backstory as he had to watch his house and his father being mocked by other houses, so it fell to him to restore the Lannisters to prominence, and his wife died in childbirth, which is the reason he hates Tyrion, and it certainly made him harsher and colder. However, its not treated with too much sympathy in universe, so it is minor, especially the latter part since he was already a ruthless individual even before that and it is more just an extension of his next prevention.

While his relationship with Jaime and Cersei is murky at best, he has some family members that he genuinely loves, such as his late wife Joanna, as he married her purely for love, and never remarried after her death. He also seems to love his father Tytos, calling him a good man though also a weak one, and possibly his mother as well, and his brother Kevan, who he as a good working relationship with, and never shown to manipulative towards him, and his grandson Tommen, whom he shields from having to witness Joffrey's death, and acts grandfatherly towards him and tries to mentor him when he is crowned king.

And those are Cersei's preventions from being Pure Evil:

Quote

She loves her family members except for Tyrion (more specifically, her children,her father, Tywin and her mother, Joanna). She is very protective of her children, doesn't want them to die and constantly fears for their safety.
When her son Joffrey dies, she breaks down over his corpse and cries and then she stays with his corpse and mourns it for days. At one point, she has a nice dream where Joffrey is still alive and she marries her brother, Jaime.
She is angry when Tyrion sends her daughter, Myrcella, to Dorn without her permission and starts threatening him. She breaks down into tears when he mentions that if Myrcella stays, she could be killed in the coming battle. She is also shocked when she learns that Myrcella has lost one of her ears.
In the fourth book she gets very protective of her son, Tommen, after the death of Joffrey. When Tommen chokes on his wine, she is afraid that someone had poisoned him, quickly stands up and goes to him to help. When she discovers that no one has poisoned him, she goes away and starts crying. During her imprisonment by the Faith Militant, she constantly thinks about her son and how she wants to go back to him. When she goes back to him, she starts spending a lot more time with him than ever before because she was relieved to see him again after her long imprisonment.
At one point, she had a nightmare where Tyrion has tied her up. She begs him to spare her kids, even though in the dream her own life is in danger.
She loves her father as she wants his respect, constantly thinks about what he would do and is sad when he dies.
She loves her mother. She blames her younger brother, Tyrion, for "killing" her mother because this is what she saw from her father. She also mentions to Sansa that when she was a little girl she prayed to the Gods to give her mother back.
Another prevention is that Cersei is a bit too tragic and her tragedy holds up. She lost her mother at the age of 7, she was born in a highly sexist society where women are inferior to men and she had to witness every day how she and Jaime would be treated differently (one example is that Jaime was groomed to be Tywin's heir because he was a boy, even though Cersei was older than him) and this treatment made Cersei extremely resentful of her status.
At the age of 10, Cersei received a prophecy from Maggy that all of her kids would die, that a younger and more baeutiful queen would take everything she holds dear and then Cersei herself would be killed by her younger brother. Needless to say, this made Cersei very paranoid about her life and the lives of her children and made her even more abusive towards Tyrion because she believes that he is the younger brother from the prophecy. A lot of the crimes that are listed above are an attempt to prevent this prophecy from happening and saving her children and herself.
Another aspect that makes her tragic is that her father, Tywin, was neglectful most of the time and he was a brutal ruler who taught his kids that they should be merciless, that they should care about morality only about the end results and so on. There is enough evidence that Cersei was seriously affecte by this upbringing. For example, on one occasion, while she is torturing the Blue Bard, she feels bad for him and wants to stop the torture. But then, she remembers that her father would probably be ashamed of her sign of weakness and he wouldn't do something like that, so she continues with the torture.
She was married to Robert Baratheon, who cheated on her and abused her by sometimes even raping her which also has an affect on her because she feels powerless during the rapes and she doesn't want this to happen again.
In the world of Westeros if it's discovered that she had cheated on her husband with Jaime, she and all of her kids would be executed. The reason why she kills Robert and Ned is because she wants to protect her life and the life of her kids from execution.
In general, she has suffered from systematic sexism for most of her life starting from childhood where she and Jaime were treated differently because of their gender and Jaime was groomed to become the heir to Casterly Rock while she was groomed to be married off despite being older than her brother. When she was married to her husband, she also suffered from the sexism of her society because her husband was allowed to cheat on her while if she was caught cheating, she and her entire family would be executed. She was also raped because there was no definition of marital rape in Westeros.
She suffers from a lot of insecurities (about being a woman, winning her father's approval, being fit to rule, etc.). She also has insecurities about not having any friends and she immediately decides to befriend the first woman she meets in the fourth book simply because she doesn't want to feel lonely.

Even though she is rude to Sansa, she still tries to give her advice about how to rule as a Queen, about the specifics of the female body and that she shouldn't love too many people or else she would get hurt. It's implied that the reason for this is because Cersei sees Sansa as a younger and more inexperienced version of herself. While, Cersei lates desires to execute Sansa because she believes that Sansa was involved in Joffrey's death, it doesn't entirely subvert her prevention because during her Walk of Shame, she still noticebly feels bad about how things turned out and that Cersei could have provided a good marriage for her if Joffrey hadn't beheaded her father. Sansa is also one of the people Cersei hallucinates about which indicates that she feels guilty about how she treated her
She is capable of feeling remorse on certain occasions. After the torture of the Blue Bard, she feels bad about it and tries to justify herself
She is also played for sympathy a lot as shown by the above examples. Aside from the examples that are already mentioned, during the Walk of Shame when she paraded naked through the streets of the city and the common people throw things at her, the story tries to frame the moment as an "Alas. Poor Villain" by presenting it from Cersei's point of view, presenting it in excrusiating detail, showing how it affects her psyche. The story clearly tries to make the readers feel bad for her during this chapter.

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by boltons are sick

[illrede]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

Tywin was “Lawful neutral”, firm but fair.

 

2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

UGH, the “lawful neutral” bullshit! What it really means is, “yeah, we love Tywin coz he’s so awesome!”

GRRM really did "Lawful Evil" well with Tywin. Observing the exposed facets of the personality and contemplating events from a middle distance- firm but fair! And in there is an emotional flywheel of malevolence and unappeasable hysterical fear and spite, all his triumphs are fragile because they are sustained through constant escalating out-of-context aggression, and he's torn down the supporting structures that would let anything survive him. I have honest sympathy for Kevan, because I suspect his character fell into this trap concerning his older brother, making Tywin's bad good was his great flaw and moral compromise.

 

(AJP Taylor fell into the trap with his WWII history, concerning German prewar behavior. Yes, the ostensible acts and aims could be a responsible and well-done foreign policy from a normal state given the initial conditions... but it wasn't. It was the thrash of a revolutionary radical racist utopian and there was a lot of baggage.)

[boltons are sick]

9 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Exactly. She’s worse than Tywin, and that’s really an achievement since he is a totally despicable and utterly unlikeable man. And a big part of that is precisely b/c she is so fucking stupid it hurts. 

I already explained all the ways in which Tywin is worse than her in my answer to Cas Stark. He not only does far worse things than her, but also has a lot less sympathetic and redeeming qualities.

 One more thing which makes Tywin worse than her is that Cersei actually loves her children while Tywin doesn't seem to do it. 

Edited April 6, 2023 by boltons are sick

[kissdbyfire]

3 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

The thing is, if there is an evil meter, Cersei wouldn't even scale 9.5 if there was such thingsbecause that would mean she would be Near Pure Evil. And like I said, she is Inconsistently Heinous, and the definition of Inconsistently Heinous is a character who has done terrible things but they have so many redeeming and sympathetic qualities that they DON'T COME EVEN CLOSE TO QUALIFY AS PURE EVIL. She would scale at most 5 if we assume that Ramsay is 10.

 

Sigh. Only everything you’re saying and the points you’re making in Cersei’s defence come from a site that proposes a grading system for evil acts, i.e., an “evilometer”. The difference here is this site’s system was created by whoever, and here you’re dealing w/ people’s direct and objective opinions about Cersei. 
I suppose definitions such as “inconsistently heinous” can be used subjectively but they don’t function like a maths test where 2+2=4. And again, it’s silly and futile to try to tell people that their opinions are wrong because a site says whatever. Because it’s not a matter of debating about facts; facts are established ‘truths’. Opinions are different, and trying to convince [a whole lot of] people that their opinions are wrong b/c they’re different from your own opinions is a complete waste of time. 

[SeanF]

6 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

 First, Tywin has a MUCH higher body count than Cersei. He has ordered the complete extermination of two noble Houses, ordered the sack of King's Landing and ordered the pillaging of the Riverlands where countless villages and towns are destroyed with their inhabitants raped, tortured and slaughtered by his minions causing at least tens of thousands of innocent peasants to die in the Riverlands due to his pillaging.

 In comparison, Cersei just has commited some political murders and a few tortures, but that's really it. She hasn't caused much widespread death and destruction like her father and doesn't order scores of villages and towns to be slaughtered and just kills a relatively low number of people in her political schemes.

 Also, Cersei never ordered a young girl to be gang-raped by an entire garrison of soldiers and didn't force her own son to participate in said rape which alone makes her a better person than Tywin.

 Also, the reason why Tywin is listed as Near Pure Evil while Cersei is Inconsistently Heinous is because Tywin has much less redeeming and sympathetic qualities than Cersei.

 Those are Tywin's preventions from being Pure Evil:

 

And those are Cersei's preventions from being Pure Evil:

 

Cersei has plenty of responsibility for the body count in the Riverlands (as does Tyrion).  She’s the head of the government whose soldiers are conducting the slaughter.  She feasts and revels as the people of Kings Landing starve.

She and Tyrion are their father’s enablers.

Edited April 6, 2023 by SeanF

[kissdbyfire]

5 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

I already explained all the ways in which Tywin is worse than her in my answer to Cas Stark. He not only does far worse things than her, but also has a lot less sympathetic and redeeming qualities.

 One more thing which makes Tywin worse than her is that Cersei actually loves her children while Tywin doesn't seem to do it. 

Sorry, but you don’t get to condescendingly tell others that you “already explained all the ways” in which their opinions are wrong. So kindly just bugger off. 

[boltons are sick]

6 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Cersei has plenty of responsibility for the body count in the Riverlands (as does Tyrion).  She’s the head of the government whose soldiers are conducting the slaughter.  She feasts and revels as the people of Kings Landing starve.

She might be the "head" of the government, but Tywin is still the one ordering her around, telling her what to do, forcing her to accept Tyrion as Hand and forcing into her a marriage against her will. The soldiers commiting atrocities in the Riverlands were directly serving  House Lannister and not the Crown, meaning they were following orders from the Head of House Lannister (who was Tywin at the time) and they served him before they served the Crown. Cersei didn't order him to do any of the things he did, it was Tywin's own idea.

 Do you think that if Cersei (or Tyrion) ordered Tywin to stop his pillaging in the Riverlands he would stop or that his soldiers would listen and turn against their liege lord? Even if the two of them were in control of the capital at the time, I think you really overestimate how much control they actually had over what Tywin and his pillagers did during their campaign in the Riverlands.

Edited April 6, 2023 by boltons are sick

[Cas Stark]

I'm not sure Cersei's body count is lower than Tywin's.  It was her stupidity and failure as a regent that caused the war of five kings in the first place.  If she had control of her teenage son, or was overall a better judge of character and events Ned Stark would not be dead and no war. 

She sent her own alleged friend to be tortured, presumably to death.  Is that not worse than a gang rape that left the woman still alive?  Again, I am in no way saying Tywin Lannister isn't a terrible, awful person, he assuredly is.  However, on some level his evil actions are balanced by the fact that he is a capable ruler.  He commands the loyalty of his own troops, was a good hand of the king during a peaceful and prosperous time.  His use of violence is strategic, not emotional like Cersei's. Those points must count in his favor.  Just the same way that while Dany also commits/allows atrocities to be committed, she is given more leeway because this is done in furtherance of positive goals, not for personal glory or spite.  

 

[Springwatch]

2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

Sorry but this is a weak and even weird argument imo. I mean, it’s weird b/c assigning this type of subjective knowledge about Cersei’s feelings to Jaime doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. He’s just jealous, as you said. He doesn’t want to share her w/ anyone. Just b/c he uses the words “Cersei’s love” doesn’t mean a thing. He used to think she loved him as well, and she never really did. 

Not weak. Not weird. Jaime is a witness to Cersei's loving behaviour to her child.

She did love Jaime: How could I ever have loved that wretched creature? she wondered after he had gone.

I don't get it why people are so fixated on Cersei being incapable of love, to the point of dismissing all the evidence in the text as 'narcissism', or 'animalism' or whatever. Shall I add 'false memories' to the list? Might be a problem for the author when he's developing his 'love is a poison' theme that Cersei against all his intentions is immune.

[Craving Peaches]

This entire argument is based on what TV Tropes says but no reasons are given for why we should just blindly trust TV Tropes. TV Tropes is not objective, it is made by people with subjective opinions just like everyone else, so it is hardly an authority on the matter. In fact reading over some of what it says, it has less authority than some people on these boards given some of the 'tropers' sound very biased or like they haven't even read the books in the first place...

[Springwatch]

52 minutes ago, Alester Florent said:

Nor do I think either of them was ever as appalling as Cersei in the first place either. Almost everything that's wrong with Jaime is down to Cersei's influence. The worst thing he ever does is push Bran out of a window, because (he thinks) Cersei told him to. Tyrion is repulsed by the murder of Barra, an innocent child. Both Jaime and Tyrion have some sense of decency.

I hate this take. It's pure scapegoating.

And Tyrion was not repulsed by Jaime's attack on Bran. Neither of them are bothered.

[boltons are sick]

20 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I'm not sure Cersei's body count is lower than Tywin's.  It was her stupidity and failure as a regent that caused the war of five kings in the first place.  If she had control of her teenage son, or was overall a better judge of character and events Ned Stark would not be dead and no war. 

 While she bears some responsibility, you could say the same about Ned who still tried to arrest Cersei even though he knew that this would cause a war and Cersei didn't actually do it intentionally and was actually trying to prevent the war from happening in the first book by trying to negotiate with Ned and then convincing Sansa to write the letter to Robb. Even if it was for self-serving reason, she still tried to stop that war from happening and she didn't cause it intetionally.

 Also, Littlefinger is the one who bears the most responsibility for deliberately instigating the War of the Five Kings for his own profit which the main reason why he is listed as a Complete Monster in the first place.

20 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

She sent her own alleged friend to be tortured, presumably to death.  Is that not worse than a gang rape that left the woman still alive? 

 It really depends because being raped dozens and dozens of times is considered a very bad psychological torture where the person would most likely live out the rest of their days as a crazed wretch. Either way, we see the Mountain torture scores of captives to death during his raids in the Riverlands and even if Tywin didn't directly order him to do it, he still knows what he is doing and allows him to do it because it would benefit him if his enemies fear the Mountain.

 

20 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Again, I am in no way saying Tywin Lannister isn't a terrible, awful person, he assuredly is.  However, on some level his evil actions are balanced by the fact that he is a capable ruler.  He commands the loyalty of his own troops, was a good hand of the king during a peaceful and prosperous time.  His use of violence is strategic, not emotional like Cersei's. Those points must count in his favor. 

 Being a good and capable governor doesn't count as a redeeming quality because he is doing it purely for himself and because he wants more power and respect for himself and he makes it clear he despises the smallfolk he rules over and just does anything to acquire more power for himself. The wikis I just mentioned don't consider being intelligent and knowing how to preserve your own interests as something redeeming because otherwise we would have to disqualify a lot of characters who know how to inspire loyalty and are capable rulers, but don't actually possess any genuine redeeming qualities or care for their followers from the Pure Evil wiki (like Griffith from Berserk who is all of those things, but is still Pure Evil).

 Cersei herself tries to govern the kingdoms well just like her father did, she is just so mentally unstable that she makes many mistakes but that doesn't make her morally worse than Tywin.

 And about him using violence only as a strategy, him ordering the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl whose crime was being a lowborn and marrying his son and forcing his hated son to participate was such an overkill that no matter what he claims, I don't believe there wasn't a lot of spite when he ordered that. He has some clear handicaps, he is just better at hiding them.

Edited April 6, 2023 by boltons are sick

[Alester Florent]

10 minutes ago, boltons are sick said:

The wikis I just mentioned don't consider being intelligent and knowing how to preserve your own interests as something redeeming...

I really don't know how we (where by "we" I mean pretty much everyone in this thread apart from you and apparently Springwatch) can make it any clearer that we are not interested in the wikis' take nor do we care, at all. TVTropes is not an authority on the books. It is not an authority on morality. It is not an authority on our subjective opinion as to who we dislike.

It's already been established that you're not going to prove anyone wrong on this. You might be able to persuade someone to change their minds, but not by referencing TVTropes as a source. 

Personally I am still baffled why you're apparently willing to go to the wall for Cersei. Whether she's in the top 10 villains in the books or the top 150, she's still a terrible person.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Alester Florent