Game of Thrones: For Whom “The Bells” Tolled…
There’s been a fair amount of backlash online over the events of Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode, “The Bells.” Specifically, there has been a lot of backlash about the deaths of everyone’s favourite incestuous power couple, Jaime and Cersei Lannister.
As Danaerys Targaryen gave in to her worst nature and laid unrelenting waste to King’s Landing, a wounded Jaime made his way into the Red Keep and found Cersei, convincing her to flee with him. As they reached the bowels of the castle, they found that their escape route was blocked by fallen debris. Cersei, for perhaps the only moment in her life, showed humility and admitted that she was afraid, weeping to Jaime that she didn’t want to die. Jaime, with nothing left to lose or gain, held his twin and told her that they were the only ones who mattered, as the whole palace came down on their heads and buried them under untold tons of rubble.
The internet hasn’t been happy about it.
For starters, Cersei Lannister has been the Big Bad in the series for a while now. Sure, there was the Night’s King, a seemingly unstoppable undead warlord who was raising a zombie army and marching relentlessly on the realms of the living. But the Night’s King (the show dropped the possessive and made him the Night King, but I just don’t think it’s as good a name…) was more like a force of nature. He was something inhuman. He wasn’t evil, so much as he wasn’t anything moral, one way or another. He simply was. Cersei, by contrast, was very human. Too human. She was petty and vain and short sighted and cruel, a spoiled, drunken hypocrite with a mean streak and a power complex. We might have feared the Night’s King, but as an audience, we hated Cersei.
Largely because of this, some people are angry that the show humanised Cersei in her last moments. If anything, this makes me wonder if these people have ever understood the show. George R. R. Martin, on whose works the series is based, has said that it’s always important to remember that the Bad Guys in a story have more in common with the Good Guys than they have difference. We all have more in common than we would perhaps admit, because we are all people. Even Cersei, monstrous though she became, was a frail and all too human specimen, unable or unwilling to see that every action would bring repercussions until it was far too late. At the last, she was simply a woman who knew she was doomed and who was afraid to die. Will any of us, regardless of our meaningless labels — good or evil, heroic or cowardly — meet the reaper with any different emotions? Probably not, and that’s exactly the point. People who don’t like feeling sympathy for Cersei are admitting that they’re uncomfortable feeling a connection with a frightened woman who is facing death. She might have been a monster, but like everyone outside of the Night’s King and his army, she was still a fellow mortal.
If some people were unhappy about how a nominal villain met her end, others were unhappy with how a nominal hero met his. Jaime Lannister has had a long and intriguing character arc, from loathesome, incestuous murderer to a figure who came off helpless and wounded and noble. The same people who were angry that they were made to feel empathy for Cersei have bewailed that Jaime died with her. “He didn’t deserve that, he deserved a hero’s death!”, they shout (or at least tweet), once again proving they haven’t grasped some important concepts.
Perhaps above all else, Jaime Lannister has been the show’s main proof that, as the line in “Unforgiven” had it: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Jaime was a good man — in many ways a great hero — but helplessly in thrall to his manipulative sister. He’d saved the city of King’s Landing once before by murdering the Mad King, permanently sullying his own reputation in the process, and never breathed a word about it, enduring endless scorn for his secret good deed. He was a man who took his undeserved punishment stoically, always tried in his own imperfect way to do what was right, and knew in his heart that he wasn’t smart enough to out-maneuver his father or siblings. Jaime was a poor dumb jock and for all his noble birth and fortune he was never anything more than a pawn in the games of others.
As such, Jaime was always doomed. Olenna Tyrell, as savvy a player as the game of thrones ever saw, told Jaime as much in their last conversation after he (again, out of a sense of morality) allowed her a painless suicide by poison rather than torturing her to death as his sister had demanded. “You really do love her,” Olenna said in wonder. “You poor fool. She’ll be the end of you.”
And so it was. For some time now, much had been made by fans of the books of the Valonquar prophecy. A witch, many years previously, told Cersei that her valonquar would be the cause of her death. The word is from the old Valyrian and means “younger sibling,” which is one of the many reasons Cersei hated Tyrion. Speculation was rife as to who this “younger sibling” could be — Tyrion was indeed a few years Cersei’s junior, but Jaime, too, was born a few seconds behind her. Some believed that this meant that Jaime was destined to kill another mad ruler in his lifetime as Cersei became increasingly unstable, but in the end the show once again went with a far more human angle.
Jaime could never have killed Cersei. He was horrified by what she became, but knew in the end that he could never leave her. Even the chance at a new life with Brienne of Tarth couldn’t break the incestuous, lifelong hold Cersei had on Jaime, and he accepted this. The prophecy was still fulfilled — Jaime does, after all, unwittingly lead Cersei to the underground tunnels where they both meet their doom — but for better or for worse, Jaime really did love her. The poor fool — she was the end of him.
For all the backlash against recent Thrones episodes, I’m standing by the show. There are a few justified gripes (not least season seven’s impatient, impossible time jumping and some slightly undercooked moments in this series as a result) but overall, like the Lannister twins, Game of Thrones is going out the way it came in: Breaking narrative traditions and telling a story in which the monsters are sympathetic and the heroes don’t get the endings they deserve.
Don’t even get me started on Danaerys’ breakdown…