It takes awhile, and there is a fair amount of friction to start with, but Brienne finally draws out some decency in Jaime. Brienne gets a POV in AFFC, but she’s nowhere near as interesting as Jaime, or Arya, who is a closer comparison. This is the narratological problem with Brienne: she’s really more of an instrument or foil than a character. She becomes a litmus test for Jaime once he respects Brienne like we do, he’s cleared the books and is now an antihero in good standing. So while Westeros has plenty of reasons to shun her, the readership sees no real faults. She’s strong, competent, and a genuine knight her character tension is that none of these patriarchal idiots can accept this. Therefore, Martin lets us judge Jaime based on his treatment of Brienne.īrienne is an uncomplicatedly heroic figure. Peter Dinklage is a good actor, and Tyrion gets to be funny, but I think a big reason why he’s a fan favorite is that he’s slapped Joffrey half a dozen times.īut, plot circumstances as they are, Jaime can’t spend all his time high-fiving Tyrion or slapping Joffrey. I don’t know if Joffrey is a great character, but he is incredibly functional he’s so loathsome that Martin can boost a character’s stock just by having this character hate Joffrey as much as we do. This is an interesting method of triangulating a character, and it seems to work best when the reference point is unambiguous. Once you’ve managed the hard job of creating a beloved/hated character, just stick another character next to him or her, and a halo effect will get you close. Reader identification/alienation is the writer’s second tool in casting a hero or a villain, and the most efficient. He loves Tyrion, develops a respect and fondness for Brienne, and comes to hate Cersei/Tywin. With access to Jaime’s thoughts, the reader can be pleasantly surprised to find that he’s on their team. There is a reason the asshole is such a well-represented archetype: they generate drama and get all the good lines. Martin’s writing trundles, so a smattering of zingers and barbs can accelerate proceedings, as well as escalate potential conflicts. In fact, readers love cheering the antihero, so paradoxically each bad action makes the forthcoming decent actions seem all the better.Īs the wry action hero type – Indiana Jones in plate mail – Jaime’s inner monologue is much more lively than the very confused Sansa Stark, or plodding Ned. Yet point of view makes an accomplice of the reader, and in fiction we can forgive things we never would in reality. Though not all of them – Jaime misbehaves constantly.
Let’s start with interiority, which is a huge deal for a character like Jaime, whose actions have been grievously misinterpreted in the past. He does so by delving into Jaime’s head and past, maiming him, and pairing him up with Brienne, a female knight. But over the course of Jaime’s chapters, totaling 47,000 words, Martin accomplishes the feat. It’s not easy to redeem a sisterfucker, kingkiller, and kidcrippler. This face turn is prime evidence for that celebrated moral ambiguity, and I was curious about its mechanics, as well as intrigued by its degree of difficulty. Martin’s reclamation project of the Kingslayer. Book three springs Jaime from his chains, makes him a POV character, and inaugurates George R.R. Jaime doesn’t wreak so much havoc in book two, since he’s imprisoned for the duration. Even his virtues have been amplified into flaws: he is too handsome, too glib, and all his skill at arms is used in service of the wrong king. He is violent, cruel, haughty, smug, and slightly sociopathic. He is a manifest villain: the golden boy of the rich and scheming Lannisters, paramour to his own sister, an infamous regicide. Jaime is the one who flings Bran from the tower, and while he doesn’t kill Ned personally, he does order Ned’s friends murdered in the street in a real mustache-twirler of a scene. That’s not even possible to do with Jaime in books one and two. It’s just these are villains you can psychoanalyze. They talk about how “Martin doesn’t write black and white fantasy – he writes with shades of grade,” suggesting there are no heroes or villains, just people. Jaime Lannister is an object lesson in Martin’s brand of misdirection.įans celebrate the series’ moral ambiguity, and I roll my eyes. Martin turns out to enjoy toying with the assumptions of readers. The Starks are not direwolves but dodos, and George R.R. That impression is smashed by the end of the first book: the patriarch Ned is dead, the adorable son Bran is paralyzed in his legs after being flung from a tower.
⌂ The Redemption of Jaime Lannister IntroductionĪt first, A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be the saga of the Stark clan.
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