User blog comment:QueenBuffy/Game of Thrones Season 4, Trailer 1 is now Here!/@comment-5014364-20140113161054

I'm anxious to see the return of Jaime to King's Landing - he hasn't been there in over two years. He's been in stasis, almost like Captain America - I mean the last time he was there was episode 5 of Season 1:  Robert was King and Ned Stark was Hand. Now Joffrey is king, his father Tywin is Hand and really in charge, and Joffrey has turned the court into a grisly echo of the Mad King's reign - he even redecorated the throneroom back to how the Targaryens used to keep it.

The biggest change, which some of you may have forgotten, is that Cersei and Joffrey foolishly fired Barristan Selmy back at the end of Season 1 (which is utterly illegal, as their sacred vows are taken for life). Tyrion and Tywin in the books point out how stupid this was, given how much respect Barristan holds among the populace (it gives Daenerys a *massive* boost in perceived legitimacy that her father's last "real" Kingsguard, and Rober'ts Lord Commander, now serves her). And when they dismissed Barristan, Cersei and Joffrey replaced him as Lord Commander with Jaime...in absentia, given that Jaime was besieging Riverrun at the time.

So Jaime comes back to King's Landing, sees what Joffrey turned the court into (there are bodies everywhere), and Cersei cheerfully tells him what she did to Barristan....a man he respected and revered his whole life, even after Barristan looked down on him for killing the Mad King.

Tywin, meanwhile, as we saw in Season 3 always considered Jaime his real heir...even though Kingsguard are forbidden to inherit. He never respected Jaime as a Kingsguard....a great honor for lesser Houses, but it would mean that Jaime isn't following Tywin's planned course and that the Lannister heir would be Tyrion, his hated dwarf son. So now that the Lannisters are in power, Tywin rather flippantly thinks he can just cajole the High Septon into dismissing Jaime from the Kingsguard...a plan which utterly stuns Jaime, because his father is bluntly admitting that he was never proud of him as a Kingsguard, not for the past twenty years.