Mycella is good and sweet, Tommen is the same...how did Joffrey turn into such a hellhound?

[Luthien Targaryen]

Anybody else up for another unlikely baby swapping conspiracy? I really do wonder if somebody got into the Red Keep and kidnapped the real Myrcella and Tommen and swapped them for two blonde, nice, well adjusted lowborn kiddies....Joffrey was clearly too old or woke up at the wrong time.

The heir usually gets all the attention and the fuss made of him, he's a nasty spoilt little brat in the book, not a million miles away from Sweetrobin. He's older and more of a homicidal maniac on TV, but I think it's not unreasonable to believe that Joff turned out badly because he never had to wait or ask for anything in his life, nobody ever told him no, except on a couple of occasions and everybody at court went out of their way to please him.

Still, i won't be entirely surprised if it's revealed in later books that Tommen and Myrcella are fakes. ;-)

[Sansa_Stark]

People think inbreeding leads madness because of certain show scene.

[falcotron]

I feel like Robert isn't getting enough credit on here for his contributions, or even lack thereof, to Joffrey's personality.

We've accounted for the roles of Cersei and genetics, but not so much for the severe lack of a father figure in the boy's life.

As I said near the start of this thread, a present but neglectful fatherwhich probably describes Robert for most of Joffrey's lifehas the highest correlation to psychopathy of any environmental factor. So year, this could be a big deal.

Of course that assumes that Martin actually _knows_ anything about modern psychiatry. It could also just be a coincidence that he happened to explain Joffrey's condition even better than he'd planned to.

By contrast the Targ "madness" gene behaves like a dominant gene (perhaps with a recessive trigger). In this case 50% of kids would be crazy over time. Where there is inbreeding and both parents have the crazy gene then out of 4 kids you would expect one kid to be stark staring bonkers, two to be just mad and one to be perfectly sane.

No, no, only Ned's brother can be Stark raving bonkers; Dany's brother can only be Targ raving bonkers. :)

[Silent_Hero]

Joffreys just a bad person, it's in his nature or his soul. And he's a sociopath. Tommen and Myrcella would have been exposed to the very same elements that Joff had( Robert and Cersei ) but they turned out very well, Joffrey just grew into a very shitty person, it happens all families have a bad apple, but goddamn he was a evil bastard.

[Eira Seren]

I'm thinking he's leading by his mother's example, when it comes to scheming. And Robert's when it comes to sheer, self-indulging. In a lot of ways he has only/oldest child syndrome. . . as far as he's been lead to believe, he is the only one who matters. No doubt this is openly encouraged by Cersei, and supported by Robert being the eldest Baratheon. The only ones who won't let him do as he likes are Tyrion and Tywin, which to him is a real shocker.

[The Storm King]

The genetics stuff. The effects of inbreeding aren't seen in just one single generation. Targaryens were victims of generations of inbreeding polluting the gene pool which results in madness etc.

Joffrey was just a rotten horrible guy.

[King Tam Stark]

if joff is acting the way he did is to get Roberts attention why aren't the other two doing the same? Robert didn't have time for any of them so in that respect he was consistent whereas cersei wasn't

[kiasyd]

I think Myrcella may still surprise us... In a good way! :-)

[Aeternum]

Joffrey's a little sociopath because of incest.

Inbreeding doesn't always result in genetic fuck-ups, but it tends to "sharpen" features that the parents had. Two related people have mild forms of certain features, they fuck and reproduce, and those features become much more pronounced in their children. You see that in the famously inbred Habsburg faces - a brother and sister might have mildly deformed faces, but their kid has a hideous ultra-deformed face and can't even eat properly. An inbred gene pool results in people sharing a lot of traits (hair color, eye color, certain mental predispositions) and those same traits getting more and more "sharpened" down the generations.

Jaime and Cersei were pretty low on empathy, among other things. Their father totally lacks it, and he married his cousin. And when we get to Joffrey, this trait is amplified to the max.