Why did GRRM choose to portray Cersei significantly more evil than other greyer characters?

[Lord Damian]

Cercei's words to live by are known by all "The Ends Justify the Means". Call it evil because it is.

[Winds of Winter blow cold]

Maybe Insane is a better word?

[Leif]

she has always been power hungry

There's power-hungry, and then there's bat-shit insane. Cersei is the latter. At the start her wrongdoings against other people were mainly caused by her trying to protect her family and increasing her status in Westeros. Now, she ruins peoples lives because they annoy her or simply because she's bored and can get away with it. And when she doesn't act, she sure thinks about how to ruin someone thoroughly. It's silly.

[UVA]

So by ten, Cersei has it firmly planted in her mind that she can't trust anyone but her father and her twin when she's already dealing with the traumatic loss of her mother. Nothing in her life since then has ever allowed her to recover from or mitigate those psychological scars. So the problems just grow over time, but not always noticeably because of the restrictions under which Cersei, in her traditional gender role as wife, mother and queenly window-dressing, had to live for so long. <snip>

Great post. She's been living under the sword of Damocles since the age of 10, and that goes a long way towards explaining her appalling behaviour

Acknowledgment of Cersei's personal tragedies tend to make us more sympathetic towards her but it does not dilute her enormities. (I don't think you're saying this though.) I don't see a redemptive decency in Cersei. Take Joanna's death, there are several characters who suffer parental-loss (e.g., Sansa, Jon, Jaime) who are not morally unhinged in the way Cersei is. These characters also operate under extreme anxiety where life is precarious. For these reasons and more, I tend to think Cersei has been rotten all along and not strictly as a result of childhood trauma.

[sjmcarter]

Well I don't think she is evil. I think she's a narcissist and has anti-social personality disorder, but I really don't see anything "evil" about her especially when you have people like Gregorr Clegane, and Ramsay Snow/Bolton.

Dude, she had Robert's bastards killed--even an infant!

[Wanderer]

That's such a copout, and a load of bullshit.

If i pickup a bunch of children on a schoolbus, park it in an abandoned lot, lock the bus n set it on fire, that shit is evil. Perspective be damned.

If i some lady took over her husbands company after his death, and her first order of business was to organize the murder of her husbands illegitimate children, and the deaths of her late husbands best friend and CFO and his entire family merely because she wanted to clean house, that shit is evil.

The relativism of people nowadays is crazy, encouraging us to not call out people with evil practices merely because nothing is really evil.

That kind of limp wrist thinking Oks chinese footbinding, honor killings and other such backwards remnants.

Get it together.

And for the record Cersei is immoral, not amoral.

She knows what she's doing and done is wrong, hence her habit of trying to kill anyone who knows and stands against her.

And even more so, her habit of continuously lying to hide the truth.

An amoral person would have no concept of shame or a dependency on a facade of decency. They would simply do and not care who knew.

That's not Cersei.

She knows what she's done is wrong and unlawful, but her desires come first.

But keep going for the gold.

I'm in 100% agreement here. Sometimes I think people read asoiaf thinking it is some morally nihilistic bible. The only thing worse than painting an argument black and white is painting it flat grey.

[elalendi]

I don't think she's really evil, she's just pathetic and narcissistic and incredibly selfish. She drives HERSELF to craziness by Feast. That's why I enjoy her chapters, I like seeing her on the path to self-destruction. Her POV makes me laugh and shake my head like "Oh, Cersei."

But I wouldn't say she's "completely black!" She's got her insecurities, she's desperate and has daddy issues. I can feel sorry for her sometimes, because she's just a woman born power-hungry in a world where power is only for men. Now don't start shouting at me; I'm not defending any of her actions. But I'm just saying, she's still more human than someone like Gregor Clegane (who doesn't even seem to have a personality) and Ramsay (just a sick sadist).

[Lord Damian]

When she kills off infants and innocents in the manner she does is pretty sick and evil. Is there much difference between the two? Is evil behavior not sick and vise versa?

[He Wolf of Winterfell]

Not trying to be offensive ... But people nowdays make a big deal about parental issues, past trauma etc. Especially Americans. People are good and bad, stems from their own weakness and choices made. Not everthing can be assigned as not your fault but by product of circumstances. Jamie and Tyrion grew up in the same household, with more hardships, none of them have gone the Cersei way

[SeanF]

Not trying to be offensive ... But people nowdays make a big deal about parental issues, past trauma etc. Especially Americans. People are good and bad, stems from their own weakness and choices made. Not everthing can be assigned as not your fault but by product of circumstances. Jamie and Tyrion grew up in the same household, with more hardships, none of them have gone the Cersei way

Jaime and Tyrion have more good qualities than Cersei has. But, they each share her bad qualities.

[Tom-Fox]

to know cersei we must consider her influences. she was tywin's daughter and had the whole lion image to maintain. she also had a traumatic experience when she was younger that lead into a life filled with paranoia. women are also not valued nearly as much as men are as they are essentially sold off for diplomatic relations. even though she was first born she would not inherit casterly rock. she was strong willed and the world is constantly telling her she needs to submit - with her kind of personality she's only going to grow and expand to a much greater extent than may be warranted to crush and break anything that may chance effect her. if the world wasn't set up in such a fashion she wouldn't have been half so bad. if she wasn't traumatized by magi she wouldn't have been half so paranoid. if she wasn't a second class citizen (on account of being a woman) then she wouldn't have to inspire fear to claim respect/authority/power. beyond all this we must consider that she's in an extremely high stress environment filled with people grasping for power with a world that she feels is ready to take everything she holds dear. her family, and indeed children are being killed and the imp, the one thing she irrationally fears the most, has gone free. her story is one of loss of control, spiraling downward every chapter, and she's the type to take the world with her. essentially she's losing all the security that has held up the world, her life, around her and she doesn't know what to do except lash out.

[The Prince of Newcastle]

We are watching her paranoia, arrogance and inability to make rational decisions, possibly amplified by witnessing the death of her son, bring her to her knees.

She isn't evil. She's broken.

[jentario]

She's not all that evil, but I guess it's a matter of perspective. I think GRRM made it clear in AFFC that she has an extreme case of paranoia as well as being a general self-involved, power-hungry narcisist. She has the constant fear (because of Maggy's prophecy) that she will have a grim fate- all her children will die before her, then she'll be defeated and cast away by a better, more beautiful queen and when she finally dies herself it will be at the hands of her little brother (or so she thinks). The prophecy was already proven to be true when her friend fell into the well, so it solidified the fact that all that horror was an unavoidable part of her destiny. This paranoia then molds Cersei, as she grows, into a backstabbing, completely mental bitch that wouldn't shy away from any crime to unsure that she and her loved ones are safe.

[Bright Blue Eyes]

We are watching her paranoia, arrogance and inability to make rational decisions, possibly amplified by witnessing the death of her son, bring her to her knees.

She isn't evil. She's broken.

She's not all that evil, but I guess it's a matter of perspective. I think GRRM made it clear in AFFC that she has an extreme case of paranoia as well as being a general self-involved, power-hungry narcisist. She has the constant fear (because of Maggy's prophecy) that she will have a grim fate- all her children will die before her, then she'll be defeated and cast away by a better, more beautiful queen and when she finally dies herself it will be at the hands of her little brother (or so she thinks). The prophecy was already proven to be true when her friend fell into the well, so it solidified the fact that all that horror was an unavoidable part of her destiny. This paranoia then molds Cersei, as she grows, into a backstabbing, completely mental bitch that wouldn't shy away from any crime to unsure that she and her loved ones are safe.

Whom do you take to be evil? Mustache-twirling guys petting white cats while presiding over a sharktank?

Yes, Cersei has reasons to be as she is, but so has anybody not out of a cartoon. Doesn't make them less evil.

[RoamingRonin]

Not every character is grey. Some are eager to show their true colors and Cersei wears her Lannister crimson proudly. She wouldn't want to be considered grey.

[King Zee]

Cersei is evil. She's evil in the banality of evil sense. She doesnt have some grand plan to raise the Anti Christ, but she is incredibly selfish and entitled and bases all her decisions on what makes her feel happy at that moment.

Nor is she unrealistic. I actually know someone at my workplace who fits Cersei almost exactly (excluding the incest but not excluding placing people in physical danger because it advances her position)

[aceluby]

I still think of her as a grey charcter. Almost everything she has done has also been done by some of the other forum favorite characters. I think of her as an example of fans forgiving a few 'ends justify the means' moments, but doing so constantly makes you 'evil', which brings up a good discussion as to where that line is drawn.