#cersei**

Not only she believes she’s Tywin’s true heir, the only one worthy of carrying on his legacy (as we know what she thinks of Tyrion, and by AFFC her other brother proves to be just another spineless fool)…

If Lord Tywin could see me now, he would know he had his heir, an heir worthy of the Rock.

…but she aims even higher than that. She actually wants to outshadow Tywin’s memory with her own greatness:

The Lord of Casterly Rock deserved rainbows. He had been a great man. I shall be greater, though. A thousand years from now, when the maesters write about this time, you shall be remembered only as Queen Cersei’s sire.

Cersei feels the inequality with which she’s treated (in comparison to Tywin) very sharply:

No one had ever balked her lord father. When Tywin Lannister spoke, men obeyed. When Cersei spoke, they felt free to counsel her, to contradict her, even refuse her. It is all because I am a woman. Because I cannot fight them with a sword.

I mean, she’s really, really BITTER about it.

Aurane had asked her leave to name [a ship] Lord Tywin, which Cersei had been pleased to grant. She looked forward to hearing men speak of her father as a “she.” 

She thinks her gender is the only reason why people don’t take her as seriously as Tywin. Jaime, however, disagrees.

His sister liked to think of herself as Lord Tywin with teats, but she was wrong. Their father had been as relentless and implacable as a glacier, where Cersei was all wildfire, especially when thwarted. […] She does not lack for wits, but she has no judgment, and no patience.

so is Cersei right to believe she’d be the son Tywin wanted? Is Cersei right about anything at all?

I mean, a male!Cersei would be a different Cersei (also different than Jaime, despite their belief that they’re basically the same person). Would male!Cersei have the same drive and ambition that canon!Cersei has—would she have the same hunger for power, in a scenario where power is essentially bestowed on her by virtue of her gender & trueborn status, and she’s expected and entitled to rule her House and doesn’t have to fight for any of those things? Or would she develop the sort of blasé attitude towards power that OT Jaime has? On the other hand, would receiving a proper political/military education prevent Cersei from making the mistakes she does in original timeline? 

Is Cersei’s problem, the root of all her failures, the lack of experience/education in the fields she wants to operate in and the fact that nobody takes her seriously because of her gender, which causes frustration and endless sloppy lashing out in turn? Or is Cersei simply not as good at this as she thinks? (in which case, wouldn’t being born male just highlight her ineptitude even more, rather than fixing it?) 

It’s a bit of a chicken/egg situation: was Cersei actually born as Tywin’s *true heir* but with the wrong gender, or was exactly Cersei’s gender (with all the experiences that came with it) that shaped her into the person who wants to be Tywin’s heir? The Cersei we have in the original timeline—the Cersei who thinks she’s Tywin with teats, who feels like she was robbed of her birthright because of her gender and who relentlessly and violently rages against the system—not to subvert it, but to take control of it—is a Cersei who was largely shaped by her experiences as a woman in that society. Take those experiences from her, and you might get a completely different character. But not necessarily one that’s more similar to Tywin, or that Tywin would respect.

More importantly, is Tywin’s model really a winning one?

Tywin’s M.O., based on fear, repression and rewarding those who cower and accept his despotic rule, only works in the short run. His reign of terror granted house Lannister its 15 minutes of glory, sure. But what did it leave? Destruction and famine. A divided country. Three children at war with each other. Three illegitimate grandchildren, whose illegitimacy caused the shitstorm that is currently eating Westeros from the inside. Nobody is willing to fight for the Lannisters, because everybody either fears, or hates, or wants to use them. Compare it to Ned’s legacy, to a North that, however wounded, will rise in rebellion once again for his children, and you’ll see whose legacy is actually winning the game. Make no mistake, if house Lannister is falling, a good 80% of that is Tywin’s doing, and it KILLS me that he isn’t alive to see the mess he’s done (not that he’d take any responsibility for that, of course).

I think this is why you have not only one, but two parallel (but different) “Tywin’s true heir” examples in both Cersei and Tyrion. Both were, for different reasons, written off by Tywin, who placed all his bets on the able-bodied firstborn son (the irony, of course, is that Jaime is the LEAST like him). But in my opinion Cersei’s ~true heir~ narrative is a red herring, and represents a foil to Tyrion’s. While Cersei spends all her time telling herself she’s the most like Tywin, the Tywin=Tyrion equation is spelled out by the mostly unbiased voice of Genna. Tyrion is the one whose rise as *true heir of Lannister* would offend Tywin the most. Tyrion is Tywin’s most hated child, the one he disavowed in the end. Tyrion literally kills Tywin, an action that is rife with archetypal (and freudian) subtext about replacing one’s father. While Cersei has no problem or inner conflict about embracing Tywin’s violent legacy, Tyrion has much more ambivalent feelings about it (although his ADWD arc might suggest otherwise, and although he has his own share of darkness, for all his life Tyrion has rebelled against the idea of being a monster). While Cersei will probably die in the attempt to give her best performance as Tywin-with-teats, uncritically replicating Tywin’s violent and oppressive ideology, Tyrion is bound to rise ABOVE it. (Literally, maybe, on the back of a dragon.)

tldr; I don’t think asoiaf’s thesis re: Cersei is “OH, IF ONLY SHE WAS BORN MALE, SHE’D BE SO GREAT AT HAVING ACTUAL LEGITIMATE POWER”, no. (That would come with a troubling subtext that Cersei deserves power because she is the best at being ~A REAL MAN~ despite her gender, as if being masculine-spirited or whatever is the only thing that gives legitimacy to her feelings of being unjustly denied opportunities—which, incidentally, is what Cersei believes, and she’s wrong. Nobody “deserves” to have power, especially not on account of having more “masculine”-coded traits, but all people deserve to have the same opportunities. Cersei could be as meek as lady Tanda, and a society that discards her because of her gender would still be wrong.)

But this is hardly surprising to me. I’ve always thought that Jaime and Cersei are built around different tropes. For Cersei, it’s the Evil Queen. And notably, Evil Queens do NOT bond with their female younger selves. 

Like, at all. 

Jaime’s tropes are a mixed bag; he’s a bit of the Mirror (personified) and a bit of the Huntsman and a bit of a Lancelot archetype, but most importantly he belongs to a larger antiheroic type of narrative. In most antihero narratives, what triggers the antihero’s journey is meeting a good character (often a girl) who inspires a change of heart in the protagonist. You can see evident traces of this in Jaime/Brienne. And while I do expect some degree of deconstruction/subversion to happen in that arc, I think for Cersei’s one GRRM will follow the Evil Queen archetype quite straightforwardly. Which, you know, tends to end up in loneliness, misery, and generally death. (note that Cersei has a prophecy predicting this, Jaime does not.)

We can discuss how it’s not particularly progressive on GRRM’s part to systematically and carefully steer clear from female redemption narratives, despite redemption being admittedly one of the things he wanted to explore in asoiaf, or how Cersei *could* have been a fantastic -and rare- example of a female antihero rather than an almost literal adaptation of an Evil Queen trope, or if it’s sexist to *redeem* the male twin while condemning the female twin to a downward spiral into madness and self destruction. But before we can discuss this, we need to acknowledge that this is what GRRM is doing, rather than insisting that *jaime’s arc has nothing to do with redemption*, which is unproductive and contradicted by the author’s own statements on the topic.

Book!Cersei is an extreme character, with very few likable nuances. she never questions herself, she never dwells on her actions and behaviors, she only sees two categories of people (the pitifully useless and the enemies). Thing is, Martin doesn’t exactly write Cersei in a sympathetic light, and I have conflicting thoughts on this. While I appreciate how radical it is to make a female villain so unapologetic, it is a bit unfair that Cersei, unlike various male asoiaf baddies, isn’t even given the luxury of an identity arc. That said, her chapters are extremely fascinating because of the complete disconnect between reality and what she perceives as reality. Under that relentless (occasionally hilarious) stream of bitterness and anger, you can see her tragedy coming a mile away. She doesn’t, which creates loads of dramatic tension.

Show!Cersei doesn’t have that tragically ironic internal monologue so she needed to get under the viewer’s skin in other ways. The writers also needed to appeal to a much wider, more varied audience who isn’t necessarily ready to see so few redeeming qualities in a female lead. TV audiences are really unforgiving with female characters, so they gave her extra humanity and nuance to sweeten the pill, and made choices—e.g. Joffrey being the one who orders to murder all of Robert’s bastards, Cersei giving Robert a chance in the early days of their wedding; Cersei having an emotional breakdown with Tyrion, etc.—that constantly challenged the audience’s perception of her a villain. Giving Cersei a full range of human emotions also ensures that Lena Headey delivers a strong, compelling performance, which is essential because she’s the cornerstone of the King’s Landing storyline. The audience needs to care about her, otherwise the moment Sansa and Tyrion leave there’s no emotional value left in that storyline anymore.

one, it essentially falls flat from a character perspective. 

Aerys means something to Jaime, but he’s virtually no one to Cersei. Not only there is no established prior relationship between Cersei and Aerys, but she doesn’t even have an identity vacuum, so to speak, to be filled or to angst over (as Jon does, for example). Cersei never questions her own identity or even remotely feels some kind of dissonance between what she is and her familial roots, so there’s no narrative groundwork laid out for a subversion of her biological identity. It doesn’t even work in a “ha! you modeled yourself on Lannister values but you aren’t even a true Lannister” sense, ‘cause even in the craziest scenario Cersei remains a *true Lannister* (whatever the fuck it means) via Joanna, who is certainly her mother. 

two, it trivializes Cersei’s downward spiral into paranoid tyranny, making it a rather simplistic narrative of “inherited” madness. 

GRRM has already established a parallel between Aerys and Cersei in the way she is growing fond of wildfire. While this symmetry might be relevant for future plot points (between Jaime being the valonqar and replicating his assassination of Aerys by killing his sister, and the fact that one way or another King’s Landing is going to BURN), Cersei doesn’t have to be the Mad King’s biological daughter to follow his steps. In fact, it would make this parallel less poignant. The way Cersei is now—her disdain for the common folk, her despotism, her casual ordering people to be murdered or tortured, her rampant misogyny and ableism—that’s Tywin’s doing, with a bit of help by Maggy the Frog. Even her paranoia is an inevitable byproduct of the “better be feared than loved” ruling principle that she internalized from Tywin (because, of course, you reap what you sow, and if you establish a reign of terror, expect nothing but living in fear yourself). Making it a matter of genetics instead of a larger discourse around cycles of abuse, and the use and misuse of power in an oppressive society, is tantamount to saying “hey, it doesn’t matter how Cersei was raised, or how Tywin (or the patriarchy) influenced her personality, she’s paranoid and despotic because she took after her biological father the Mad King, she was going to become like him regardless”. 

three, like every other *secret targaryen* theory, it undermines the impact of the one reveal that has been carefully built up since the get go, Jon Snow being Rhaegar’s and Lyanna’s child. 

Being a Secret Whatever is Jon’s thing. Let the kid have his 15 minutes of glory, for fuck’s sake. ;) Jon’s true parentage isn’t only important as far as Jon himself is concerned, but also relevant for the bigger picture, as it would finally reveal the truth about the event that sparked a gruesome civil war, annihilated a dynasty and tore the realm apart. This is probably the biggest mystery of the series, and I don’t want it to be watered down and redistributed among other characters. A “who are my true parents” narrative only works if used sparingly, because it’s a hilariously overused trope. Having Cersei&Jaime, or Tyrion for that matter, being “the secret descendant of (x)” in addition to Jon would simultaneously steal the spotlight from his reveal, and make it less believable (how many mysterious babies turning out to be a Special Someone can a story have before becoming a joke? Just one, in my opinion, which is why I also think Aegon isn’t that Aegon.)

And this is why “it’s such a big deal”.

I will admit, there is a dark irony to this theory, that fascinates me in some aspects. But being “fun” in some fandom-wanky way isn’t necessarily a good reason to turn a solid narrative into a convoluted soap-opera of unknown fathers, dub-con secret liasons and family members who savagely fight each other without knowing they’re related. 

Like, seriously. I get the appeal of making every character who isn’t a Stark a secret Targaryen (because they’re the two “magical” dynasties, and everyone else is just ordinary, I guess?), but this isn’t Star Wars where there’s one family fucking up the whole galaxy with their drama as they say in that post circulating on tumblr these days. Diversity in asoiaf is important, that’s why you have multiple povs. It’s the story of several families, not just one. Making it all about either the Starks or the Targaryens feels counter-intuitive to Martin’s approach to the genre, in my opinion.