Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150611205707

Cersei is one of the core characters and VERY complex in the novels. I wonder if the TV series made her a bit too sympathetic - though it would be very difficult to get across such a nuanced character.

Basically, in the fourth novel Cersei becomes a POV narrator - and once we actually see her inner thought monologue...it's all of the greyness from before cranked up to eleven.

On the one hand, we learn how...truly insane Cersei actually is. How she genuinely blames everyone but herself, BELIEVES that the war is the Starks' fault and not something she caused, thinks Joffrey was a wonderful son and king. It's this warped, warped worldview, through the eyes of madness, as it were. There's a point I'm sad they cut (mostly) in which Cersei rants and raves at the Small Council that Sansa Stark betrayed HER - rambling that she "welcomed" Sansa into her family and home, asks "what did I ever do to Sansa?", and that Sansa returned her welcome and "love" by helping to kill Joffrey (Sansa actually didn't, but irrelevant as she would have had she known). Ignoring all of the torment she let Joffrey inflict on her *publicly* (having the Kingsguard beat and strip her in front of the entire court, *killing her father*, etc).

On the other hand...and it's hard to describe this to someone who hasn't read it...you also get a very loathsome sympathy for Cersei. All of the factors in her life that led her to be who she is; mental flashbacks to how badly Tywin and Robert treated her over the years. She never had functional parents of her own (her mother died when she was young, Tywin was a terrible father)...so you get the idea that she really couldn't be anything else.

In short, it's sort of like one of those serial killer movies, I'm thinking "Red Dragon", "Silence of the Lambs" type stuff - in those movies they actually point out: the serial killer is almost never just "born bad", but was shaped into that broken mind through years upon years of systematic abuse (Will Graham finds the Red Dragon's diary at the end of the book/movie, and after flipping through it even he is moved to pity at the horrific child abuse he suffered - but then explains that the Red Dragon kills entire families and still needs to be shot to death).

I mean I keep mentally turning to this scene in the novels, how the Riot of King's Landing played out - stunned peasant mothers are holding up their dead babies and pointing at her, shouting that their children died of starvation due to the war that *Cersei herself* specifically started in her coup....and she just feels absolutely no responsibility for it. And later on, when the Sparrows start piling the bones of clergy who were slaughtered in the war outside the Red Keep -- in protest that Cersei is ignoring the violence she unleashed on Westeros. Saltpans gets wiped out by marauders (the former Brave Companions)...and she just flippantly waves it off; "how is this my problem?" Being a monarch means nothing to her, she feels ZERO responsibility and thousands of people are suffering because of her.

This was all hard to do in the TV show; so they made little tweaks here and there: that she had a baby with Robert who died in the cradle, saying Joffrey and not Cersei ordered Robert's bastards killed, etc.

And on the other hand they do have her do some crazy stuff - imply but not really show that she indulges Joffrey beyond all sense or reason, that her alleged "care" for "all" her children really meant ignoring Myrcella and Tommen, turning on Eddard Stark, etc. etc.

So I'm not automatically faulting the TV show for this: Cersei in the novels is this really warped character who does awful things, is utterly non-repentant about it, no regrets, yet you feel disgusted at yourself for being drawn in sympathy to her - almost. (In contrast, Stannis doesn't "repent" burning Shireen, but he at least feels bad about it as something he had to do. Cersei sleeps easy - everything bad is everyone else's fault.

So should the TV show have demonstrated just how crazy and out of control, vindictive and cruel Cersei actually is?

I mean they did depict fairly well, albeit condensed, that her "plan" to take out Margaery is the height of stupidity (Olenna is even basically gaping at her, realizing she is BADLY imitating Tywin's intimidation routine -- but is seemingly oblivious that she needs the Tyrells' money for the debt crisis). But she's walking around smirking as if it was a master plan.

What I'm saying is that once the Faith Militant actually imprisons Cersei....

....in the novels, I felt that their "treatment" of her was Laser-Guided Karma, a well-deserved punishment directed at an awful person who earned it many times over (hundreds of children are dead because of a war she started, and she doesn't even think about it).

I'm worried, however, that others will see the Faith's punishment of her as needlessly cruel.

Oh there's the "Two wrongs don't make a right" argument, but I think that by any objective measure, book-Cersei really earned everything that happens to her - and even falls to the Faith by self-imploding.

That's the moral: the Starks might be too honorable to live, but the Lannisters are also so dishonorable, selfish, and petty that they collapse from within (Tywin killed for his mistreatment of Tyrion, Olenna kills Joffrey because of his treatment of Sansa - indirectly - as it proved she would never let him live to harm Margaery, Cersei's stupid backstabbing and short-sightedness turns both the Tyrells and Faith against her). 