#but shes still very pragmatic abt it. but she grew up in a house where no one really cared about her feelings so she made them small | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

queenxcersei · 7 years

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emotional about jaime | cersei parallels yet again: tywin’s death. this episode - dealing w grief for prominent figures they aren’t 100% sure how to deal w their own emotions about. main focus on cersei b/c this is a cersei lannister blog, but i have feelings abt jaime i’ll try to contain for the sake of clarity / focusing on the muse. jaimes feel free to @ my w/your thoughts

“The queen felt strangely calm. [... ] And my father. My lord father. Should I scream and tear my hair?** (see readmore) They said that catelyn stark clawed her own face to bloody ribbons when the freys slew her precious robb. Would you like that, father? She wanted to ask him. Or would you want me to be strong? Did you weep for your own father?” - cersei, affc

“It was queer, but he felt no grief. Where are my tears? Where is my rage? Jaime Lannister had never lacked for rage. “Father,” he told the corpse, “it was you who told me tears were a mark of weakness in a man, so you cannot expect that I should cry for you.” “ - jaime, affc

so, i’ll start off w/ the man himself. the paradox with tywin is he’s obsessed with ‘family’ but does not actually care for his individual children beyond their purpose to propagate lannister power-- by forming alliances through marriages, increasing their renown (and thus the family’s), etc. he is pragmatic, yes, but to the point he fucks his kids up so much that they hate him, or at least cannot decide how to feel about him.

just from these quotes as they stand, you can see both twins struggle plainly with connecting any grief to the death of their father. “he felt no grief / the queen felt strangely calm”. how can you mourn someone you grew to hate? when, some part of you, though you can’t quite acknowledge it (isn’t it wrong? aren’t you supposed to be sad when a parent dies?), is glad that this immense shadow has faded, the eyes that made you feel “weak/worthless/ugly” are closed forever? their reactions are great examples of kids trying to deal with their emotions towards an abusive parent. they made your life hell, but they’re your parent. that’s meant to mean something, right? but tywin was never a father in the conventional term. he never cuddles his children or tells them they’re doing good. he starves them of any attention and projects his own hypocrisies and fears onto them. despite his icy facade, tywin lannister is a hypersensitive dick. he has a guy locked in the bowels of casterly rock until he starves to death for making a joke about his shit being gold-flecked. insecure much????? and he projects this onto his kids, primarily his ‘’’’golden twins’’’’’ because they hold all the hopes for house lannister, in his eyes. cersei is to be a queen, and jaime is to be the pinnacle of Man ; but both quiet and subordinate as far as concerns their father’s wishes. but also never cowing to the sheep. but also aware of the sheep. but also not caring what they think. but also you’re better than all of them anyway. he highlights his disgust of certain virtues and implies to his kids that they suffer from the same ‘ills’ when they displease him. peak manipulation! and people wonder why cersei and jaime are the way they are.

there is some relief, for both of them. of course it is a terrible event for the sake of their house, as tywin is believed to be the main power of the lannisters throughout the seven kingdoms ( though i have to talk sometime about how that idea is FAKE NEWS! and tywin is not this infallible mastermind everyone thinks he is, he is a huge hypocrite---- back to focus ). cersei fears the brightest star in the west has fallen, but she also revels in the idea of never being forced into a marriage again. never having to take someone into bed again that she does not wish there. she feels like with her father’s death some of her own agency has been restored to her-- a pipedream, of course. this is westeros, and we see in the latter part of the book and the next just how much she will suffer at the hands of patriarchal ideals ( fuck kevan lannister! ). they revere him, but they hate him. a perfect example of this love/hate is exemplified by cersei here:

“Such a man deserves a retinue to attend his needs in hell.” - cersei i, affc.

like?? this?? speaks for itself?? she believes tywin deserves accompaniment in the afterlife akin to a king. and i can’t help, personally, thinking of the ancient rulers ( especially in egypt ) that had servants buried with them to aid them beyond the grave. it shows her idolisation of tywin, but also how she views him. he’s not going up, he’s going down. and i don’t just believe it is because cersei is aware of the atrocities he has committed; it’s how she feels about him. tywin makes his children yearn for that pat of the head, but always withdraws the hand an inch further, forcing them to chase after these impossible ideals he puts in place for them! tywin gets his wish with cersei, she becomes a queen: but it’s still not enough. jaime becomes a renowned knight with many accomplishments: it’s still not enough.

“would you want me to be strong?” / “you told me tears were a sign of weakness in a man”

they even question how their father would want them to process grief!!! he has fucked his kids up so badly they can’t even be sad about his death, nevermind deal with it. the twins don’t even know if crying is ‘correct’, or if their father would be glaring down on them, disgusted with the show of ‘’’’’’weakness’’’’ (SUCH a toxic concept). it’s more Lannisters Bottling Up Emotion, and it isn’t healthy.

talking specifically of cersei: own father kept her locked up in a tower from the age of twelve to fifteen when he sent for her to join him at court. he denied every suitor because he wanted his daughter to be queen no matter what. jaime even talks about cersei growing more beautiful and ‘womanly’ locked up there; i can’t help think of rapunzel in her tower, locked up and barred by some patriarchal ideal that she has to be kept pure and untouchable until her [parental figure] finds her a husband suitable (in their eyes) for her. ( then she burns her tower, her PRISON FOR YEARS, in affc..... my emotions ). and tywin makes a prisoner of cersei in more ways than just the literal. his control over his daughter is immense, and i believe he is a huge factor in her paranoia, her overreaction, her constant self-checking------ -- - and, of course, her internalised misogyny. his gaze pins her to her chair, and even tyrion feels pity for cersei. TYRION. “you are the queen, he should be begging your permission to leave” or w/e the quote is. cersei is the most powerful person in the room, but she turns to a child every time her father is near. a huge indicator for an abuser; i don’t believe tywin hit his children, but the emotional abuse... i’m not even touching on tyrion here, but think tysha. tyrion certainly gets the ABSOLUTE WORST of tywin’s treatment, but i don’t think cersei and jaime got off anywhere near scot free. tywin uses her as a pawn, and blatantly does not give a shit that his daughter was constantly r/aped and a/bused by her husband. women were made to smile and reproduce. as long as cersei did not make a fuss about it ( and i hc part of her silence is the idea that her father would condemn her for being so weak as to either let it happen (disgusting), or to complain about it to him as if she cannot deal with it herself. which, she does. but how horrific is it that his own daughter didn’t feel she could come to him with her abuse? instead, she turns to jaime. but that’s a whole other meta. )

talking specifically of jaime: tywin disowns his own son for not acquiescing to his desires!!!! he tells his prized son that he is not a member of this family anymore, for not obeying Orders. as he should, because tywin’s children should be wrenches and hammers, tools for exercising his will. and tywin usually gets what he wants, by whatever means necessary. his brutality is legendary; his kids are no exception to this rule. jaime, it could be said, suffers the worst of all three from his father’s endless (impossible) expectations. he is to rule the rock, but also be an infallible knight, but also a commander, but also loyal to tywin/TheFamily alone, but also have wives and produce heirs, but also never complain about any of it and have any desires of his own. also let’s just mention how tywin uses his knowledge of jaime+tyrion’s closeness to manipulate jaime into aiding with the whole tysha scheme, leaving jaime with immense misplaced guilt and troubling memories. his father tells him at the age of ~eight that love is worthless because you cannot feed a horse with it, or keep a house warm with it.

he wants control of them, and to get that control, he makes them compete for his approval / ‘love’. this obviously creates resentment, discord; and is another example of why i think tywin isn’t all the tactical mastermind people believe him to be. his tactics are all very well short-term, but long-term... there are many examples and fgs i’ll write this later, but in terms of his kids: they don’t know what parental love is meant to feel like, they idolise this abusive prick who is a hypocrite of his own ideals (married for love/has whores/is hugely insecure/ACTUALLY MAKES BAD DECISIONS SOMETIMES??) and places such high expectations on his kids that they break their backs trying to reach them. he wants his children to be empty little vesicles for his own desires, and by ignoring their individuality and pitting them against one another, he creates the downfall of his own house! i love this house of self-destructive idiots! i hate this house!

below: for me it is further evidence of how fucked the children of tywin are that they can’t even process SADNESS because what is an attachment beyond each other, as one another are the only love each has ever come to know? forget conventionality, forget the realm, forget what other people think. no one matters but each other, because, FAMILY IS ALL THAT MATTERS. ANYONE BUT A LANNISTER IS LESSER, right? thanks for the life fuckery lessons, dad.

“He was curiously calm. Men were supposed to go mad with grief when their children died, he knew. They were supposed to *tear their hair out by the roots, to curse the gods and swear red vengeance. So why was it that he felt so little?” - jaime asos

just had to highlight this Cool Comparison between cersei and jaime’s povs and how the parallels reiterate what i’m trying to say here about difficulty processing grief. and also, vague sidenote, about tearing hair out and how both twins lose their hair as a symbol of death/rebirth and the various literary implications of that------- but focusing on grief:

this quote is jaime finding out about joffrey’s death. he explains his difficulty feeling sadness, telling himself that it is because ‘joffrey was more robert’s than his’ as an excuse. he had no attachment to the boy, bc he didn’t feel like he should have one. cersei told him early on how that could endanger them, and he didn’t care. ‘robert was welcome to him’-- though this might be bias of hindsight-- he dislikes joffrey in the present-- but it is also seen in jaime’s jealousy colouring his view------ jaime lannister is inherently selfish, especially when it comes to his twin, and joffrey “took up too much of cersei’s time, cersei’s love, and cersei’s breasts.” ( still laughs 100 yrs later at jaime getting jealous of a baby breastfeeding ).

#meta.#long post //#[ does this make sense? i do not know.#mostly stream of consciousness but i had to Get It Out Somehow. ]#house lannister #| ♕ █ ` you shall be remembered only as queen cersei's sire. ( tywin )#| ♕ █ ` hear me roar.

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