I love reading her chapters. She's so far gone and paranoid its like a psychological version of watching Ramsay Snow in action. Except its more plausible because her insanity is contained, whereas I can't see Ramsay getting away with his over-the-top villainy and insane antics forever. If Manderly can get his throat cut for a smart-ass remark, Ramsay is going to push someone too far someday and get put down. But Cersei puts up a facade and evades that sort of enmity.

I don't get why character have to die for some readers. Why do people think it improves the story if the point of view characters (and thus our means of learning the story) are eliminated? And it's not like this is some sort of murder-fest with constant killing of PoV characters. Name me one character that has died for good after having a PoV in more than one book. IIRC, EVERY PoV character to die, does so in the book where his first PoV occurs! Martin is plainly only giving them PoV to make their deaths more shocking, which seems kind of like a cheap manipulative trick, IMO.

Where do you get that? How is she even all that badass at any point over the long term? When she was banging Genghis Khan and begging him to conquer her homeland for her? When she sat around reacting to things people told her? When dragons happened to be hatched for her? That was a stroke of good fortune, but it's hardly more badass than Frodo inheriting the One Ring, or Rand being the Dragon Reborn. It's just a characteristic that happened to her. She won the genetic lottery. Whee. Beyond that, she's done nothing aside from reacting to the plans other people made for her life, and been a bitch, but expressed in egotistical terms like Waking the Dragon. Maybe it looked cool when she stole the Unsullied from Astapor and wreaked havoc on the slave city, but it should be abundantly clear exactly what has come of that little bit of "badassery" from reading DwD! In this book, all she did was get upset that her dragon ate a kid, chain up the two innocent dragons and act like THAT was some major tragedy, and fuck her crush's brains out in anticipation of her wedding to someone else. Lovely human being, isn't she? And don't give me that usual fantasy-setting trope about the poor princess forced to marry a man she doesn't love for the good of her people. She married him solely to hang onto her stolen throne in Mereen, completely oblivious to the irony of her cursing the Usurper, who merely took the throne for petty little reasons like HER FATHER TRYING TO MURDER HIM. And then after her attempt to impoverish people by enforcing her morality on them falter, she flies off on her dragon to indulge herself YET AGAIN, and ignore the mess left behind in her wake. THAT'S what being born a princess really means to people like her - drop things wherever and whenever you want, someone else is always eagerly waiting to pick up after you! And by the way, how is it that when she's emotionally disturbed and summons peasant girl to go down on her at night it is portrayed in a way to evoke sympathy for her loneliness, when a male character doing the same thing (i.e. Theon in Winterfell) is portrayed negatively and as a character flaw?

My ass. All I saw in her storyline were some very compelling reasons to be glad of Aegon's survival. Here's hoping the RIGHTFUL king of the Dragon line will spare us the reign of Cersei II: This Time She Has Dragons.
Yeah! Hooray for being born into the right family! Woot! Nothing demonstrates an awesome character like wielding a great and dangerous power over which you have no control!

Yes! Let's hear it for the time-honored method of wielding power by sleeping with a man who has earned the power!



Marvelous demonstrating of rational faculties there! Yet, when Robert the Usurper lost track of time, people probably scorned him for being a drunk.

What did Aegon do that was so wrong as to deserve that?

Yay! The way is being cleared for the spoiled emotional teenager to come claw her way to power and loose her uncontrolled carnivorous pyromanical lizards on the Seven Kingdoms! All those people who will have to die just because one puppet king has a better grounding in moral duties than the other are a mere detail!

And may I say you like some weird people. The silent, devoid-of-free-will partner of one of the scheming, plotting archvillain and architect of betrayal in the Seven Kingdoms; the devious, cowardly eunuch who manipulates events to induce a civil war and inflict further sufferings on the land because of his arbitrary favoritism of one family; and the aforementioned vapid twit of a self-entitled princess. I find it deliciously ironic that as Barristan Selmy recounts his experience in escaping Joffrey he says how the truth was not welcome at that court, only to have his story finish with Daenerys refusing to listen to the truths he has to tell about a man her spoiled, sadistic & arrogant brother told her was a villain. Because he would have been under 10 if he HAD ever met Ned Stark which makes him a much better judge of character than the knight who has served four or five kings and fought against the man and served alongside him on a council.

Seriously? She obviously agreed to the terms offered her to escape said noose in the first place! Namely, to kill Jaime. She was obviously released to lure him into a trap. Given what a bitch Catelyn was in real life, and seriously doubting her resurrection has strengthened her moral fiber, I am almost certain that she would prefer to have Jaime brought to her to be hanged or beheaded or something else in her power, rather than simply send Brienne to whack him on sight. The only question now is to what extent she is willingly complying, or if (almost certainly) she's trying to find a way to go along with Catelyn's demands until she can free Ser Hyle & Pod from captivity. Brienne being nearly as stupid as Jaime's insults made her out to be, she would probably accept Hyle's death as a fair trade to preserve Jaime's life. After all, he gave her a shiny sword and vouched for her honor, so what is an admitted lifetime of treason, incest, oath-breaking and attempted child-murder!

As I noted above, just a little over the top. Martin's villains are not nearly as complex as people like to think. It's more than his heroes suck too.

He's certainly paid for enough of them. As for his unhappy life so far, that's the price he willingly paid to ride the Lannister gravy-train. This, of all books, makes that clear. I like Tyrion too, but let's not pretend that his own choices haven't caused almost as much of his suffering as his shit-bag of a father imposed. When you get right down to it, he resents not getting what normal men get, but how then is his lot any different than a woman? They are seldom given the power, prestige or freedom Tyrion yearns for and is denied, in the society of Westeros (or most of the rest of the world). Tyrion as a son is even less use than a daughter, because he has no reproductive value. He wants the wealth and power, but this is a world in which those things are based on ability to fight for, take and keep them, and he is singularly ill-equipped to do so. He might want a marriage, but when offered one, is forced to admit that him as a groom is a "cruel" thing to do to a woman. People don't want to marry their daughters to him, because they don't want their grandchildren to suffer what Tyrion has lived with. Yes, he drew a shitty hand, but he's also had to "suffer" it in a relatively independent lifestyle supported by the gold of Casterly Rock. How many other dwarfs have their fathers pay for servants to do those tasks for which they are ill-equipped to handle for themselves, or design custom saddles? Tyrion whines when he can't partake of a hooker for a few days, but many men are forced to go their whole lives without even that comfort, because they can't shower a woman with gold to pretend she likes him. The most affecting part of that last phrase of his father ringing through his head should be that he has no idea where whores go, because for all his delusions of treating people nicely, the recurring theme of his sexual relationships to this point has been exploitation & degradation, and his ignorance of the answer to the riddle of "where do whores go" only highlights that for all his politeness to his pretty young hookers, he has really been no more than another john who used them and forgot about them once he pulled out. The idea that Martin seems to be trying to convey is "Poor freak, having to depend on whores for sex," but that's like feeling bad for the criminal who is stuck ripping off the poor to survive, because the beleaguered fellow never gets a chance at the bigger scores. How much thought or pity IS given to the women he is using thus, and who are effectively slaves, despite the official laws against slavery in Westeros.

Yes, what happened to Tysha was sad, but he exposed her to that by marrying her. He knew their marriage was forbidden and would have been disapproved of, or else he would never have taken the precautions he did. While it in no way excuses Tywin's behavior (and the discovery of Shae's last patron should destroy any last vestiges of acceptance of Tywin's remonstrances at face value), Tyrion's own actions provided the openings for that treatment. Tyrion's life sucked, but that was equal parts fate, his father's issues (and Tyrion is hardly the person most wronged by Tywin by a longshot) and his own self-destructive behavior. There is no reason to suppose he is "entitled" to a happy ending, unless you mean the ones he has so generously paid Shae & her ilk to provide. Maybe if he straightens out and does something to be worthy of a happy ending, then we can say so.