I agree there’s no need for GRRM to make Tyrion into an actual villain since he’s already a villain to Westeros, but how does this fit into Tyrion murdering Shae? His treatment of her was in fact monstrous so has GRRM sort of fulfilled those ableist anxieties about Tyrion already? Curious about your thoughts.
sorry this is going to be long. so his murder of shae is about tysha. sort of his entire life revolves around what happened to tysha. she is a formative memory the way jon being ned stark's son is foundational to his conception of the self or the way dany's memory of having had a home once in braavos - in a house with the red door and the lemon tree - is what her identity is founded on. what tyrion has known all his adult life is that when he was thirteen he deulded himself into believing that anyone could possibly love and accept him as he is. tywin made him believe that tysha was a liar and then made him a witness to her rape and finally forced him to be directly complicit in it. he sexually assaulted his son and told him it was his fault for having been deceived. tyrion does not see it that way, i think, because he doesn't have the language to talk about it but it's a traumatic experience, he feels immense guilt and humiliation whenever he thinks about tysha (“He gave her to his guards. A barracks full of guards. He made me … watch.” Aye, and more than watch. I took her too … my wife …)
a couple things going on here which will define his character moving forward - this is a lesson from tywin about tyrion's worth, he's being cast as this abject figure as he's sexually humiliated and made to believe he can only have transactional relationships - it's why he seeks out sex workers. but the memory of tysha and the love they had before tywin distorted it is also something he's forever trying to recreate. this necessarily involves unwanted projection of course, it's pretty clear with how he treats shae, who was never interested in anything more than simply conducting business but it's a big part of the reason why he's so taken with her.
I’m free of Tysha now, he thought. She’s haunted me half my life, but I don’t need her anymore, no more than I need Alayaya or Dancy or Marei, or the hundreds like them I’ve bedded with over the years. I have Shae now. Shae.
—A Clash of Kings, Tyrion VII
the other thing is that whenever we see tywin interacting with tyrion he's trying to deny him independence he should have as an adult, indeed his anger with the tysha business is largely about tyrion getting out of his grasp and making a decision for himself. so this experience is also a lesson about how nobody outside the family will love or accept tyrion, that he owes his life and loyalty to house lannister. which is really how noble houses work in westeros but it's made especially clear to tyrion that because of his disability, tywin is doing him a favour simply by keeping him alive and that he has no recourse outside the family -
Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out to die, or sold me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years. My brother later killed that very same king, as it turns out, but life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king and my repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must do my part for the honor of my House, wouldn’t you agree?
—A Game of Thrones, Tyrion II
so he does his part by perpetuating dynastic violence. the tyrion we see in acok is basically the sole power behind the lannister regime (grrm called him a 'villain' in 1999 when acok came out and what he obviously meant was that he is an antagonistic force against the starks (and stannis) in that book. i also find he does more harm in it (than say, adwd) simply by virtue of assisting the lannister cause. ignores the night's watch's warnings of a great danger beyond the wall while doing it) and if he thinks tywin will ever accept him or show him any affection for loyally serving their family he's completely mistaken, as he slowly realises over the course of asos (But it is high summer for House Lannister. So why am I so bloody cold?)
then he's framed for joffrey's murder and the trial is this grotesque repetition of the tysha incident. he's once against being publicly, sexually humiliated - tywin coerces shae (coercion is implied i think but either way) into revealing his sexual exploits and all his deep seated insecurities in front of the entire court and he's viciously mocked for it. then jaime tells him the truth about tysha and it's the kind of knowledge that destroys his world, his entire conception of the self is revealed to have been a lie and not only did jaime assist in its telling (personally i don't blame him much because he was also a teenager following his father's orders) he also adds insult to injury over here:
Jaime handed him the ring of keys. “I gave you the truth. You owe me the same. Did you do it? Did you kill him?”
The question was another knife, twisting in his guts.
jaime too, on some level, bought into some of the ableist preconceptions about tyrion, or at least that's certainly the impression he gives tyrion here by even bothering to ask this question - that he thinks him capable of joffrey's murder. tyrion now feels betrayed by his entire family, including the brother he loved unconditionally, has been publicly humiliated at court, and climbs up the steps to tywin's chambers to finds shae over there - it's tysha all over again. he's sought to recreate what he had with tysha for almost his entire life and what he's handed is an almost perfect repetition of the aftermath. he had this thing with shae, and sure most of it was harmful projection on tyrion's side but tywin once again invades and like, colonises his personal life - renders something previously beautiful into an ugly and deeply shameful experience. where it differs from the original memory of tysha is that tyrion kills shae of his own accord, not because his hand was forced by his father. he strangles her with the hand's chain of office which is like this manifestation of all the power he had over her in acok as hand of the king but tywin is reinstated as hand in asos so it's also shae being victimised and dehumanised by both men in the end.
"Lord Tywin had me go last," he said in a quiet voice. "And he gave me a gold coin to pay her, because I was a Lannister, and worth more."
After a time he heard the noise again, the rasp of steel on stone as Bronn sharpened his sword. "Thirteen or thirty or three, I would have killed the man who did that to me."
—A Game of Thrones, Tyrion VI
and tyrion kills tywin this time. there's nothing else tywin can use to control him anymore, so tyrion kills him. and it's not even a moment of personal victory because tyrion has nothing else to live for - the meaning of his life that was derived from serving his family, dies along with tywin. that's all i think is going on with his relationship with and eventual murder of shae and no, i don't find this ableist the way the whole premise of "tyrion turning into the societal bogeyman everyone made him out to be" is ableist. it's one very specific instance of tyrion perpetuating a cycle of violence and abuse. and i don't have much trouble wondering how exactly he'll come back from it because of what i said here and because martin sends him east to dany.
the central issue with tyrion is that he'll never get recognition or be the hero he has always wanted to be under the chivalric paradigm. chivalry is for able bodied men who can perform violence and beautiful damsels who remain in their towers and tyrion is excluded from that construction of heroism (same goes for many of our main characters, "cripples, bastards, and broken things") he's a societal other cast out of westeros itself and dany's court is where you go once you're finished with chivalry and its false promises - see, barristan and how dany represents a chance to correct his mistakes with aerys. people talk about how he's only seeking her out of this desire for revenge but dany is also a personally relevant symbol of hope to him.
If I drink enough fire wine, he told himself, perhaps I'll dream of dragons.
When he was still a lonely child in the depths of Casterly Rock, he oft rode dragons through the nights, pretending he was some lost Targaryen princeling, or a Valyrian dragonlord soaring high o'er fields and mountains. Once, when his uncles asked him what gift he wanted for his nameday, he begged them for a dragon. "It wouldn't need to be a big one. It could be little, like I am." His uncle Gerion thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard, but his uncle Tygett said, "The last dragon died a century ago, lad." That had seemed so monstrously unfair that the boy had cried himself to sleep that night.
—A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion II
people take this to mean he'll be a dragonrider and i don't know about that maybe he will be but on the simplest level it just refers to dany!! dany is the dragon he wanted as a neglected and lonely child. dany who has a similar experience with otherness, who also refuses easy categorisation (mother of dragons, mother of monsters) and there's a certain freudian element at play here wherein tyrion kills his father and goes looking for someone who is a mother to all who have been dehumanised.
"[A]nd this Mother of Dragons, this Breaker of Chains, is above all a rescuer.”
—A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion II
They wept and moaned, they begged for an end to pain, they cried for help and wanted their mothers. Tyrion had never known his mother.
—A Clash of Kings, Tyrion xv
Mhysa, they called her. Someone told him that meant Mother. Soon the silver queen would come forth from her city, smash the Yunkai’i, and break their chains, they whispered to one another.
And then she’ll bake us all a lemon pie and kiss our widdle wounds and make them better, the dwarf thought. He had no faith in royal rescues.
—A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion X
Lions. They were going to set lions on us. It would have been exquisitely ironic, that. Perhaps he would have had time for a short, bitter chortle before being torn apart.
—A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion XI
“You swore to me that the fighters would be grown men who had freely consented to risk their lives for gold and honor. These dwarfs did not consent to battle lions with wooden swords. You will stop it. Now.”
—A Dance with Dragons, Daenerys IX
and i don't think he's going to be an unambiguous hero at the end of it, i think he'll continue to resist all attempts of neat categorisation and i'm definitely not saying what he did to shae will be "washed away" so to speak. it's something unforgivable he did (among other stuff), but clearly he has not been set up to continue performing a string of unforgivable acts.
