Jaime Lannister is an arrogant motherfucker. He will cut you with a smile and be satisfied when you’re crawling on your hands and knees, begging for mercy. He is self-absorbed and egotistically vain. He is selfish and fundamentally uncaring, and he doesn’t really give a fuck about anything that is not what he deems important. let me tell you what he thinks is important:
- His family. (Namely his sister, his brother, his father; marginally, everyone else. Quite marginally.)
- His duelling abilities.
- Other people’s fear of him.
- Pride.
Now, in order.
Family is unquestionably the most important, the fuel of Jaime Lannister’s actions, ever since he was born. He came into the world holding Cersei’s ankle, and loved her more than he loved himself. He loved his little brother when everyone else thought him a monster. He loved his father in his own way, because he had to and it was expected of him, and because the family name is all that matters, and if there is something Tywin taught his children, it’s just that: family comes before everything. Jaime took that quite literally, as we know. [But we’re not here to discuss Jaime and Cersei (SURPRISE! SHOCK!); though one could object how in order to speak of Jaime one can’t avoid talking about his relationship with Cersei, I’ll try and keep it less prominent for this premise, knowing I will have to delve into it further through the post.
This is all good and fair, but Jaime Lannister has to be seen in more than just the light his family casts upon him (or shadow, according to points of view). The more defining characteristic is surely enough his talent with a sword, and the fact that he is (in)famously one of the most talented duellers of the Seven Kingdoms, ever since the golden era of knights such as the Sword of the Morning. He was knighted when he was 15 years old, and even though he was only appointed a Kingsguard because of Aerys’ petty plans of control over Tywin, one cannot argue that the boy he was deserved it. Jaime Lannister had dreams of glory and greatness, and that was an important step. HOWEVER: “He had joined the Kingsguard for love, of course.” Dreams or not, it is impossible to ignore this, and so we take it into consideration for what it is, and that is ultimate proof of Cersei’s grip on Jaime ever since they were very young. Jaime joins the Kingsguard for Cersei, but ultimately their plans don’t work out and Jaime is alone in King’s Landing, with his father and sister long gone, miles away, safe in Casterly Rock, while he is matter-of-factly a pawn, a political hostage of the Mad King. This is undoubtedly the most important moment of Jaime Lannister’s youth, the moment that turned the boy who wanted to be Arthur Dayne into “the Smiling Knight, instead”. When faced with a choice between his vows and his own blood, Jaime chooses family (see point 1) and kills Aerys, becomes the Kingslayer and loses the enchantment of a member of the Kingsguard. He’s always been a killer (he killed, when he was only just a squire), but after Aerys’ murder, he becomes the killer. Everything he did before was erased with the Targaryen’s royal blood that ran down his blade, and suddenly Jaime Lannister became an oathbreaker rather than a knight. But no matter what other people thought, he was a knight still, he thought himself a knight. He protected his family, and that alone was validation enough. He hates the nickname Kingslayer, but he learns to live with it, strong of what he knows, things the smallfolk are not privy to: not everyone knows what really happened in that throne room, but he doesn’t care to tell the tale. He doesn’t care for anything, because in his heart he knows he did what he was meant to do, the right thing.
Which brings us to point three, and that is fear, his (nick)name preceeding him, the aura of terror that surrounds him, because what is scarier than a member of the Kingsguard forsaking every vow he took? What’s scarier than a cold-blooded murder, a man who killed an old man stabbing him in the back, with no ounce of honour or respect or conscience? Someone like Ned Stark would not have been able to live with it, but Jaime Lannister (not unlike Tyrion) makes it his armour, and he basks in that glory, bathes in the fear he sees in other people’s eyes. He can live with a lack of honour, he can live with a shitty reputation, as long as he knows people will take a step back when he walks by: to quote Machiavelli, “It is better to be feared than loved.”
And wow, look at how this premise is flowing, because here we are at point 4, Jaime Lannister’s pride. A consequence of all the previous elements, it’s his biggest flaw (which will eat away at his soul from halfway through “A storm of swords” to the very last drop “A dance with dragons”). As proud as Cersei, as proud as Tyrion, and way more proud than Tyrion, Lancel, Kevan and all the other Lannisters, Jaime fights for pride where honour has failed and left him forever. It’s a matter of overcompensation, a search for balance of sorts. A knight must fight for something: he fights for Cersei, and he fights for Tyrion, but mostly he fights for himself and what he wants to stand for. (Please notice, what he wants to stand for, not simply what he stands for. because what Jaime Lannister wants to be is very different from what he actually is. In his heart he is way more ruthless than he actually is. People often say Tyrion is the good Lannister: as much as I hate that expression, I think it’s wrong, and the most compassionate Lannister is Jaime. If compassionate is even a thing that can ever go together with a Lannister character, which is questionable.)
A STORM OF SWORDS
Undoubtedly Jaime’s book, along with a few others, “A storm of swords” covers the most controversial moment of Jaime’s life. Controversial, because there are too many takes on what really happens in this book, which makes me wonder just how people are reading it, and how some people can be so blatantly blind to the obviousness of his arc. But I digress, I don’t want to be a bitch in this post, I’ll try and keep judgment to a minimum
(Thought, seriously dudes. Seriously. Redemption? Seriously. SERIOUSLY.)
After being captive for a long time, Jaime is freed by Catelyn and put in Brienne’s trusted hands: the goal is exchanging Sansa and Arya for Jaime, taking advantage of Tyrion’s sworn vow. So, for most of the book, Jaime is on a journey of sorts, with a woman who is his antithesis on every level. A knight, just like he is, but one who still believes in the charming fairytale of the spotless, pure knight, everything Jaime forgot a long time ago (if he ever truly believed in it). Jaime’s journey has deep roots in the confrontation with Brienne, because Jaime is truly faced with all that he is not but should have been according to public opinion, and that irks him. He rejects it because he knows it’s all lies, he knows Brienne is living a lie, and he knows she will learn it sooner rather than later, just like he did. But she keeps him safe, she does her duty, and she does it because her vow is the only thing that matters.
Jaime may not understand it, may not accept it, and he might even find it ridiculous, but part of him is amused at how strongly she believes in it. He is much more experienced than her, and he knows things Brienne has never known nor witnessed, he has fought wars in more than one battlefield, words that are not necessarily fought with swords. he’s seen how ugly the world can be, and Brienne has too but not as much as him. He looks at her with the mocking patronizing attitude of a father glancing down at his child while he tells of their first riding lesson. They don’t know how many times they will fall, but he does, because he fell before, and broke a couple of bones in the process. It’s poetic, and it’s heartwarming for a while, until it becomes tragic.
As a friend of mine always says, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a hand.”
Jaime and Brienne are captured by the Brave Companions, and they amputate Jaime’s fighting hand, thus wounding him in two of the aforementioned characteristics: his duelling abilities and people’s fear of him. Without his sword hand, Jaime loses more than just five fingers. He loses half of what he is. It’s pure mathematic. If you imagine Jaime Lannister as a Vienn diagram, half of it is completely erased. He can’t fight with his left hand and people no longer fear him because he becomes the shadow of what he was.
A very moving excerpt of the book, following the amputation, says:
"Jaime’s walls were gone. They had taken his hand, they had taken his sword hand, and without it he was nothing. The other was no good to him. Since the time he could walk, his left arm had been his shield arm, no more. It was his right hand that made him a knight; his right arm that made him a man.”
And also, a little earlier:
“Let them kill me, he thought, so long as I die fighting, a blade in hand.”
This is just a few of the parts that state how deeply the loss of his hand cuts through Jaime’s being, way beyond the physical pain, which is also unsufferable. Through the festering wound, what he thinks about is the loss of his manhood, the one thing he was good at. The deconstruction of Jaime Lannister’s character starts with this, but it’s only destined to grow worse and worse.
After many misadventures, Jaime Lannister manages reaching King’s Landing, where a grieving sister, a dead son and an imprisoned brother await him. We are towards the end of “A storm of swords”, and even though what Jaime left behind was far from an ideal situation, what he finds upon his return is utter and total devastation; it doesn’t help that he is only half the man he used to be, he is defeated and his slow process of self-loathing is in full swing. He hates himself because he wasn’t there, hates himself because he is not able to protect Cersei and Tyrion, and he is angry because without his sword hand and after such a long absence, people no longer know him, nor fear him. There is nothing left for him, he is no longer a feared murderer, he is just the shamed Kingslayer without a hand.
In King’s Landing, he faces the same fears that had been chipping away at his soul during his way back: he is the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, but how can he hope to be as good as Selmy or Dayne without his hand? He doesn’t tell anyone that his left hand is completely useless, he hides behind smugness and bitter arrogance, that an outsider might mistake for the same old no-fucks-given attitude, but for someone who knows him (and we know him, as readers, because we have been inside his head) is obviously just a shield to keep others from knowing the true capacity of his sense of failure.
Jaime Lannister shows talent, as a Lord Commander. He takes some decisions that are absolutely worthy of the noble knights that came before him, but it’s not enough. He is not a strategist, he is a fighter, and the loss of his hand has made him bitter about everything. Jaime Lannister was sarcastic, ironic funny, witty even, before he fell in the Starks’ hands. In “A storm of swords” he still laughs at people, and he still keeps that unique quality to his thoughts that often make the reader think of his chapters as funny and amusing: little do most people realize, that that humour is not Jaime Lannister as we know, it’s the resigned desperation of a man who has lost everything and laughs about it because it’s the only thing that keeps him from crumbling. You think it funny, I honestly think it tragic and absolutely soul-crushing. But maybe I am biased, because Jaime Lannister and Cersei lannister are my favourite characters. As I said very early in this post, feel free to ignore the ramblings (though, if you’ve come this far, I have a mind that you agree with me, at least in soem capacity.)
Remember when I spoke of maths and diagrams? And remember the four elements I listed as components of Jaime Lannister? Right now we have: family, pride. Two down, two to go.
In King’s Landing, Jaime realizes his family is facing self-destruction. His father disowns him because Jaime is tired of doing his bidding, Cersei is slowly losing her mind to grief and paranoia, and even his little brother is in a small cell accused with kinslaying and kingslaying, and Jaime is not sure where to turn. Because yes, Tyrion and Cersei always turned to him, but it’s also true the opposite: Jaime is only as strong as his family allows him to be. And his family is growing apart, destroying itself, with their own hands. Even Cersei, whom he fought so hard to come back to, grows distant: she is afraid he is no longer the man she needs him to be, that he is changed while in reality she is the one who has changed. And eventually Tyrion turns his back on him too when Jaime confesses that the one thing he allegedly did that had earned him Tyrion’s unquestioned trust was a lie, a plot, a scheme of Tywin’s that’s he’d agreed to. He loses Tyrion, he loses Tywin (at the end of ASOS) and he is fairly sure he is well on his way to losing his sister/lover/reason/everything. Not to mention the stunning revelation that Cersei has been sleeping with other people. (Of course, by now he is too angry and blind to the reasons, and he doesn’t see why she did it, he only sees the betrayal, as is often the case when a person cheats on another.)
A FEAST FOR CROWS
How long can a person go on before he breaks, when the only thing left to him is pride? Add anger to it, and you’ll have a lethal mix that will drastically upset even the strongest characters. It’s maths, really. I will never get tired of repeating this: it’s basilar mathematics. You take away, bit after bit: that’s what deconstruction is, and Jaime’s deconstruction is majestically put in action. It is, probably, the best deconstruction of the whole arc, because it doesn’t include magical elements and stuff. It’s just a game of betrayals and discoveries, a political chess game that Jaime Lannister loses so fucking epically that in the end he is left with nothing but a few angry pawn, and they are nothing.
With Tywin dead and Tyrion gone, the two people that we need to analyse are Jaime and Cersei, obviously. “A feast for crows”, with the introduction of Cersei’s POV alongside Jaime’s, gives us further insight to what really happens in King’s Landing between the two of them. It’s a terrible face off of angry people, a battle of egos that positively roar at each other, each firm on their own beliefs, unwilling to take a step towards each other. They try, once or twice, but it’s feeble, it’s appearance, it’s just to convince themselves that they can keep it together, that they can control it. But they can’t. Cersei is drowning in her deliriums, Jaime is drowning in his depression.
Many people don’t seem to realize that halfway through “A feast for crows” Jaime falls prey of depression. He hides it, he makes a joke and the reader thinks everything is okay, but Jaime has nothing left to live for. It’s very important, when you think of how likely it is, for the fulfillment of the prophecy, that Jaime will end up killing himself after he’s killed Cersei.
"A storm of swords" was easier to write about because I am in the middle of my reread, "A feast for crows" is a bit more foggy because it’s been a while; but it is my favourite book of the series because of all of this. Cersei and Jaime being my favourite characters, this it the book that watches closely as they hurl themselves towards their own downfall, and as a trademark sadist who deeply enjoys as much as she hates her favourite characters’ suffering, it’s hardly difficult to see that it is the turning point for both of them.
Jaime leaves King’s Landing, eventually. One might say he is driven away by his own anger: he leaves on Kingsguard duty, he leaves for the siege of Riverrun (iirc?). the details don’t matter, what matters is that he leaves and during his time away from king’s Landing he thinks, and thinks, and thinks. And he always thinks of the same two things: his sword hand and his sister. The two things he loved the most that are lost to him. And it is with a mixture of nostalgia and anger and desperation that he thinks about it, during the nights where he forces Ser Payne to fight him to train his left hand. He longs for Cersei and he hates her, he hates her so intensely for what she did and for what she has become, for lettng herself be overpowered by the demons inside her head. He hates her because their love is so strong and unhealthy, to the point of obsession.
[Please notice that in the same page, Jaime thinks of Cersei as the “queen of whores” only to later think “I don’t have a wife, I have a sister”. Like, literally a bunch of lines after he calls her a whore he calls her his wife. That’s telling of the confusion and dicotomy that stirs his whole being.]
I like to call Jaime’s mission his “hiatus from King’s Landing”. You know how we bloggers sometimes need to get away from here, go on hiatus for a week, ten days, two weeks? Because people get on our nerves, because we don’t like the way people respond to things, whatever the reason, we get away from it, because sometimes being away helps. That’s exactly what Jaime does. He gets away from Cersei, Tommen, the Tyrells, the Kingsguard, Kevan, everyone, because he is tired and depressed. He will take anything, not to think of what he left behind, of the ghost of the sister he can’t help but love despite her mental downfall.
This is when he also offers to fling Edmure Tully’s baby against Riverrun’s walls, if the Tullys don’t give in, with a nice trebuchet. (Actually I don’t remmeber if this was in AFFC or ADWD, but still. Nice person, huh? I can totally see the redempton there.)
A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
We see little of Jaime during this book, but he does pop up towards the end, in full angry douchebag mode, the same way we left him at the end of “A feast for crows”. Cersei’s cry for help falls on deaf ears, for the same reasons why he left King’s Landing in the first place: he is tired of everything, tired of being looked down on, tired of being pushed away, so much that when she tries to rope him back in he’s the one to tug at the chord instead. The letter burns, and so does Jaime’s anger. it burns bright hot, it stings with betrayal and bitterness and sadness and he can’t bring himself to get over it because he is a man wounded and in despair.
Remember the calculation? Remember the elements? Remember what remained?
Pride.
That’s why he throws the letter in the fire. How many of us are guilty of the same crime? I, for one, can say I totally am. I did disregard people just because they hurt me first. And not because I didn’t love them, but because pride is the worst dormant beast that dwells in the human being, it fuels anger and it makes us do things we will regret more often than not. I will sya this again, Jaime is angry and depressed and everything he was has been destroyed, every single element, until only his pride was left to him, the one thing he could armour himself in to pretend everything was alright. A smug neglect, an arrogant blindfold to all that surrounds him.
And when he follows Brienne, it’s not because he prefers to go with her rather than running to Cersei: it’s because, as I said, he will take anything that will get him away from the terror that awaits in King’s Landing, away from Cersei and all that she has become, away from that duty which he knows fully well he can not sustain without his sword hand. He leaves the camp and he follows Brienne because it’s a way of escaping the bad and the ugly.
A CONCLUSION
I don’t know what will happen to Jaime, but I have my theories. Theories that need Jaime to come back to King’s Landing, or at least meet Cersei one last time, because I am convinced he is the valonqar, according to the very common opinion that the prophecy is always the opposite of what the prophetèe (is it a word?) thinks. Cersei is so sure that Tyrion is the valonqar, therefore it will be Jaime. So I am sure whatever happens with Lady Stoneheart, Jaime will live, because he has a much bigger arc to fulfill. And as I previously stated, when I mentioned Jaime’s depression, it makes sense that he will die eventually, very possibly by his own hand.
We have reached the end of this…essay. It is a fucking essay oh my God, if you actually read all of it I am going to send flowers or something, because it’s really long and I ramble a lot. Anyway yes, this is the end, but I want to close with a simple request.
Stop defining Jaime’s arc as a “path to redemption”. it is not. If we could replace that expression with “path to acceptance” I will sleep better at night, and it will spare me a lot of bitter bile and bad blood.
What is your thoughts about Jamie Lannister?
Ygritte is part of a wildling scouting party in Rattleshirt's band, including Orell and one other, that is ambushed in the Skirling Pass by men of the Night's Watch including Jon Snow andStonesnake. Her companions are slain, but Ygritte is spared as Jon balks at killing a woman. She yields, but only offers very minimal information. As she and Jon wait for the arrival ofQhorin Halfhand, Jon reveals to her that he is Ned Stark's bastard, and she tells him the story of Bael the Bard, a song which insinuates that the Starks have wildling blood as well. Jon scoffs at this idea, calling the Bard a liar. She shrugs it off and is brought to the Halfhand, who instructs Jon to do what must be done with her. Presuming that to be an order to kill her, Jon nevertheless lets her escape.
