Maybe i am too italian but..Tywin Lannister and Robert Baratheon's deaths are too "DANTESQUE" for you to ignore it.
Tywin and Robert's supporters often, when analyze their favorite characters, avoid to discuss their deaths and how the narrative is actually trying to teach us a message : their deaths not only seems to satisfy Dante's law of retaliation, aka contrappasso, too meticulously to ignore the critic on their actions but seems even to leave no doubts on the fact that they are unredeemable characters.
[ Dante And Virgil In Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.]
Tywin is not just a mastermind that only act in a cruel and ruthless way to protect his family and you should not unironically think that his actions are goods. He is a greedy monster that condamned his direct bloodline to collapse after his death because he refused to let his position to the son that mostly resemble him and that most fit the his role, for him being a dwarf. He is incredibly myopic. There is a reason for which GRRM give to him a Dantesque punishment according to the law of contrappasso : he only cares about power and pride and legacy and for this he dies on a throne yes, but a throne of fecis killed by his own son. A man who forced his dwarf son to watch as his soldiers take turns raping the only woman that has ever really loved that son because she is poor and not noble is not a man who use violence only to protect his family, but a monster that only cares for his "noble" name.
[ Tywin, by Magali Villeneuve ]
NO, Robert was NOT a good king: GRRM himself define him as someone better fit for violence and brutality than being a wise and rightful king. He lost his life among the mud and the dirty soil, but not in a valiant and dignified way, as a great king against a terrible enemy, he was just too drunk to mind his own actions and too fat to react against the animal that killed him. He did not lost his life against a great warrior to protect what is pure and good, like a king, but against a suina, an animal symbol of the inability to holds back instincts, addicted to sexuality and violence, a stupid and dirty beast. He did not lost his life leaving a legacy: his reign collapsed in a war that killed one of the two legitimate brothers he had and on the throne there is a bastard and not his blood. His reign was paeceful yes, thanks to Jon Arryn.
[ Robert Baratheon by FanArtWorlds ]
For those that are unfamiliar with italian literature Dante is the "father of italian language" and his masterwork is La Divina Commedia, in english the Divine comedy. In this work, divided in three books, Dante make a journey through the three kingdoms of after life : from hell, where the souls are condamned to the eternal damnation, to heaven, where the angelic creatures sing the praises of the Lord and the souls can finally lie in the eternal heavenly bliss, after crossing the purgatory, where the souls spent their times learning from their errors before reach heaven. Divina Commedia's first and most acclaimed book is Hell, where Dante create and explore the Contrappasso, the law that regulate Hell's punishments : contrappasso, from Latin contra and patior, meaning "suffer the opposite", is the punishment of souls "by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself." The souls are punished with a castigue that is similar or opposite to the crime the made in life : sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets have their heads turned back on their bodies such that it is "necessary to walk backward because they could not see ahead of them."
[ Dante And Virgil In Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. ]
Obviously i am not here to say that George Raymond Richard Martin was influenceded by Dante Alighieri, even if he surely know him in the same way english writers in Middle Ages were aware of Dante's work, but i just wanted to offer a different key to read those deaths.
