why does this blog still have 875 followers

http://cerseilannisterss.tumblr.com

“My name is Ozymandelson, Queen of queens: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Cersei Lannister

Cersei takes up numerous archetypal female and even male roles in the ASOIAF universe. She’s a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a wife. She’s a Queen, a Soldier, a Schemer and a Player. Cersei Lannister is a character who represents so many different roles and brings out a lot of different feelings in a lot of people. Yes, she is a dark character; a character who is beyond morally grey, who will do terrible things in order to get what she wants and protect the people she loves. She sees the world as black and white- not as Good and Evil, but as Live or Die. She said it herself, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” She’s not the only character that adopts this view and she’s not the only character willing to do anything to survive. 

Cersei is, above all things, a mother. She and Catelyn Stark are more alike than many members of the fandom will care to admit. They are both strong women who are willing to do anything to protect their children; Cersei is just better at playing the game than Catelyn. Can “protecting her children” be used as an excuse for all of her decisions? No, of course not, but it is one of the main contributors to her whole frame of mind during the course of the books. This just makes her human. I think if you ask any mother, she’ll tell you that she’d do anything to protect her children. Anything. 

“How safe do you think Myrcella will be if King’s Landing falls? Renly and Stannis will mount her head beside yours.” And Cersei began to cry. Tyrion Lannister could not have been more astonished if Aegon the Conquerer himself had burst into the room, riding on a dragon and juggling lemon pies. He had not seen his sister weep since they were children together at Casterly Rock. Awkwardly. he took a step toward her. When your sister cries, you were supposed to comfort her… but this was Cersei!”

Cersei loves her children, that much is beyond obvious. One of my favourite additional scenes was the Catelyn/Cersei scene in episode two because it showed a side to Cersei that we weren’t privy to in the first book. 

“Handsome one, isn’t he? I lost my first boy, a little black haired beauty. He was a fighter too, tried to beat the fever that took him. Forgive me… It’s the last thing you need to hear right now.” “I never knew.” “It was years ago. Robert was crazed, beat his hands bloody on the wall, all the things men do to show you how much they care. The boy looked just like him, such a little thing, a bird without feathers. They came to take his body away and Robert held me, I screamed and I battled, but he held me. That little bundle… They took him away and I never saw him again, never visited the crypt, never… I pray to the mother every morning and night that she return your child to you.”

Cersei is, in my opinion at least, more like her father than Jaime or Tyrion could ever even dream to be.

“That’s a neat little trick you do. You move your lips and your fathers voice comes out.”

Cersei is her father’s daughter; it’s something she revels in and despises all at the same time. If she had been born a man, she would have been the perfect Lannister heir. But she was born a woman and so she is cursed with the woman’s life- marriage, children, a complete lack of agency over her whole destiny. She’s a lion in woman’s clothing and that is her undoing. Cersei is a soldier under a queenly guise.

“I was also trained to kill my enemies, your Grace.”

“As was I.”

What weapon does a woman have in Westoros? Cersei can hardly pick up a sword and fight amongst the men or beside her brother. No, her weapon is her womanly body and her mind. Her weapon is her weakness. Cersei is the product of a misogynistic world, but she uses that to her benefit.

“Necessity makes the best soldiers”

She is politically astute and plays the game by manipulating those around her, especially the men who, on the outside at least, have all the power. She manipulates the line of succession by denying her husband a true heir and so creates a King who is all Lannister. Sure, this might seem selfish, but it’s easy to understand why she would want to keep another Baratheon off the throne. Robert is a lazy drunkard who doesn’t care for the everyday drudgery of running a Kingdom. Cersei truly thinks she could do a better job or, at least, her children could. Cersei knows how to consolidate her power and make the most of what she has. 

It’s easy to hate Cersei, but there was a time when she was much like Sansa- young, hopeful and filled with silly notions of what life would be like as a Queen. Then she found herself married to a man who could never love her, who could never appreciate her as a wife, because he loved a dead woman who would never be anything but perfect in his eyes. Years of emotional and physical abuse later and you can understand why she is the way she is. 

Cersei is the Queen and she plans to stay as such for as long as she can because when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. Cersei plays to win. She plays to survive. Woudln’t you do the same?   

omg all three of my harry potter biwdttd ♥ warning: i have a lot of feelings

this basically boils down to ‘jkr coded the kind of women she doesn’t care for personally in real life as horrid caricatures of people in fiction’, with a side helping of headcanon

pansy parkinson actually has very few lines in canon (i know this because i went dialogue-hunting for my lapsed harry potter genderswap). we mostly see her fawning over draco and making snide remarks about our heros, the golden trio. her most notable contribution to the story is her assertion, during the final battle in DH, that they surrender harry potter. this marks her as Hogwarts Enemy #1 and her entire house is shunted off after that—to the dungeons, in movieverse; in bookverse, i believe they’re simply escorted away by way of hogsmeade.

but i can’t hate pansy for any of this—it actually all makes me want to get inside her head. pansy was raised wealthy, and my headcanon is that her family was rearing her for a political marriage to draco. she simpers over draco from the beginning, always faithful, always acquiescing when he gets bored/annoyed with her—the bellatrix to his voldemort, in a way. it is likely that she knows little more than this: pureblood privilege and her pureblood prince.

hating harry comes from both her upbringing and her idolized crush. how can she not? why would she not? why break away from the path she’s been raised to follow when it’s never led her wrong before? yes, you say she should have had her own moral sense—why? all of the teens in these books are products of the people who came before them, bar harry, who never had adult role models besides the ones who physically and emotionally abused him for ten years (doesn’t build much loyalty and trust).

aside from hating harry, though, she’s done nothing wrong. well, teasing hermione, but that comes from (a) hating harry and by extension harry’s friends, (b) being a young girl. girls sometimes tease each other. girls often grow out of it. cordelia chase, anyone?

the biggest offenses for which pansy is vilified is not being a bully, though, it is disagreeing with our heroes on key points throughout the series, having a pug nose and screechy voice, and being devoted to a boy, namely draco. that is, until DH—when she is dragged into a war she isn’t a part of (regardless of parents’ alliances, no teen save draco is an actual death eater) and told, just like everyone else, that she must face death or give up harry potter.

honestly? if i’m seventeen, terrified, and told to face death or give up harry potter? i might have given up harry potter. we have the luxury of knowing, as readers, that it’s not the right choice, but not everyone experiencing the final battle had the same clarity.

i dunno i think pansy is the translation of some girl who bullied jkr in her formative years onto the page and that rubs me wrong. jkr said, i believe that she wants her daughter to be a hermione and not a pansy. ugh. just say that you don’t want her to bully, or whatever—you don’t need to define the right way to be a girl and the wrong way to be a girl* while you’re at it. (the pink robes vs blue robes debate, btw? is RIDICULOUS.)

* other wrong ways to be a girl: lavender brown, parvati patil, and—

fleur delacour is the motherfucking champion of beauxbatons—which is NOT an all-girls’ school, an egregious error in the movieverse which may seem innocuous at first. but fleur is not the best of the french witches, she is the best of the french witches and wizards, all of them. she is a fucking badass. she faced a dragon, she valiantly attempted to save her sister despite emotional distress and attacks under the water, and she lived through the treachery in the maze. 

she is also a fierce, flawless quarter-veela, though, and therein lies her downfall, because molly, ginny, and even hermione simply cannot have that. neither can jkr - throughout HBP she is continually speaking in an obnoxiously exaggerated french accent, telling the weasleys that everything they do is wrong. and for some reason, preferring lighter foods and lighter music is an offense punishable by … slut shaming? yes, the fact that fleur has long blonde hair and moves her hips when she walks is enough of an excuse for half of HBP’s comedy to be predicated on molly’s and ginny’s mockery of fleur pretty much half the time they’re on the page. hermione’s is to a lesser degree, but i certainly remember her being frustrated with fleur as well.

WHY? fleur is brave. fleur is clever. fleur is in love with bill, deeply and truly. fleur is independent and willing to try new things, like her job at the bank (which is also mocked by molly and ginny, wtf?) fleur is experiencing culture shock so of fucking course she talks about the french way of doing things. she MISSES the french way of doing things. i love traveling and i’m not overly fond of my own country but when i travel i miss the american way of doing things! it’s natural! but for the sin of being foreign and being beautiful fleur gets lambasted. she’s better after her goddamn amazing defense of bill at the end of HBP, and in DH she’s alright, but by the time she’s been reduced to ‘soft quiet housewife’ anyways so like. i dunno man.

victoire weasley’s probably the biggest bamf in wizarding england tho.

fuck i am running out of steam here.

narcissa malfoy is just. oh man. first of all i am a black family stan so like 75% of my appreciation of narcissa comes from my headcanon about her upbringing and her relationships with andromeda and bellatrix. in my headcanon their parents were distant and didn’t treat them well but narcissa tried so hard to be the perfect princess they’d always wanted—prim, proper, demure—but it never helped. bellatrix and andromeda always resented her in that regard, but took them under their wings otherwise. narcissa was intimidated by bellatrix’s bold loud domineering and andromeda’s subtle sideways rebellions, but she never imagined where it would bring them.

she’s betrothed to lucius and angry about it, before they meet—she imagines him as ugly and fat and that his money is the only good thing about him—but when they do see each other she falls in love immediately (and never falls out of it again). as she loses both of her sisters, one to madness and the other to a muggleborn, narcissa and lucius (and eventually draco) become a tight-knit unit which will weather through any storm. lucius does what he can to further their family’s interests and narcissa doesn’t ask questions, even with every worse turn the war takes.

her actions in the series are all about draco. the unbreakable vow and lying about harry’s death, both were completely motivated by her love for her son. and i see narcissa malfoy as a woman who has (well, had) everything—money, good standing, beauty—but didn’t give a fig about any of it. she was always all about love. first her sisters, when her parents were unavailable; when they were gone too, she poured herself into her husband and her son. it fascinates me.