Fanfic / Purple Days

Our hero, ladies and gents. Disclaimer: Not kidding.

King Joffrey Baratheon dies to the Strangler on his wedding day. In his final moments, he falls into endless agony as his vision melts into purple waves.

He wakes up back at his apartments in the Red Keep, three days after the death of Jon Arryn.

Certain that this can only be divine will, he lives his life again, making sure to punish those he considers responsible...

...and dies again. And again, he returns to the same point. Over and over and over.

Mired in despair at the neverending cycle of life and death, he rapidly tires of sitting and ordering others, each life luring him into worse and worse revelations. Frantic for answers, his mind ever-fraying, Joffrey rises to seek the answers to the Cycle, an endless journey that takes him from King's Landing to Winterfell, from Valyria to Yi-Ti, from Sothoryos to Asshai, life after life, seeking the truth of the mysteries buried beneath Planetos and the horror of the Long Night...

Will Joffrey sink into the madness of the Purple? Or will he emerge as something... changed?

Only time will tell...

This A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones fanfic by baurus can be found on Spacebattles and alternatehistory.com

Completed May 2021.

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Unmarked spoilers ahead.

Tropes Are:

• Actually, I Am Him:
  • A later loop has "Ser Jonnel" the Silver Knight, the winner of Robert's tourney, openly proclaim Sansa Stark his Queen of Love and Beauty, despite her being betrothed to Prince Joffrey Baratheon. A whole lot of outrage among the nobility is sparked until Sansa pulls off his helmet and reveals that Ser Jonnel was Joffrey the entire time.
  • When Joffrey and Sansa arrive at the court of Yi-Ti's Yellow Emperor in Carcosa, they see a huge, imposing hooded figure sitting on the throne, quietly observing court activity while not interacting with anyone. A helpful servant by the name of Vajul helps them get a grasp of what's going on, as well as offer them clues as to the aspects of the Purple. The pair quickly figures out that Vajul is the actual Yellow Emperor, and he acknowledges this once they are speaking in private.
• Adaptational Abomination: The Others were Humanoid Abominations in canon, but the key word there is Humanoid. In Purple Days, they are merely appendages of the Long Night itself. And no, the Children of the Forest did not create them. They've been around much, much longer than the Children. Also qualifies as Adaptational Badass, because while in canon they can still be defeated after Westeros has been ravaged by multiple wars, nothing less than a Westeros near full strength will be able to challenge them here.
• Adaptational Heroism: Lampshaded by Sansa during the Blackworks loop, seeing the Kingsguard who in the original timeline were little better than Joffrey's thugs die heroically for her and King's Landing. Given the right motivations, many of the despicable people of canon can be better. But not all.
  • Played very straight by the Deep Ones. In almost all depictions of them, they are Eldritch Abomination-worshipping monsters bent on destroying humanity. Here, they hope to save humanity rather than destroy it.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Averted. While other fics may be inclined to lean heavily on Joffrey's troubled upbringing and lack of moral role models as an excuse for his awful character or create new additions to his backstory that exist In-Universe for that fic only to justify his immorality, as well as give the impression that he had the potential to be a good person all along, Purple Days does none of those things. Joffrey starts the fic as the same monster from canon and its made clear that he alone is responsible for the unspeakable things he does. It takes several lifetimes, countless screw-ups, a massive amount of trauma, and slowly becoming aware of himself and the world around him until Joffrey has his Heel Realization, and starts making an effort to become a better person.
  • Played straight with Robert. His abuse and rape of Cersei is never touched upon by Joffrey or in the story. In the loops where is his given a bit more focus, he is tended to be portrayed as a fun loving guy who is miserable with ruling rather than the selfish Manchild whose laziness and actions (or lack thereof) laid the foundation of the War of the Five Kings. Possibly justified in that the story is mostly from Joffrey’s point of view and this may just be how he sees Robert.
• Adaptational Villainy: Despite Joffrey's time-looping, he's not omnipotent and can't get everyone on his side no matter how hard he tries. Many characters that otherwise had sympathetic traits in canon inevitably end up being Joffrey's enemies due to circumstance.
  • Played with in the case of Daenerys Targaryen. Despite starting off kind-hearted and sympathetic much like in canon, the Blackworks loop revealed that if Ser Barristan doesn't go off into exile and save Daenerys from being poisoned by the manticore, she will eventually be Driven to Madness by both the poison's effect on her mind and body and the Trauma Conga Line she is to undergo during her time in Slavery's Bay. This is later deconstructed in the Summer Isles loop, where despite mirroring the same story in canon until the point where the fifth book ended, and even actually making it to King's Landing and positioning herself as queen, Daenerys undergoes Sanity Slippage due to the massive strain of ruling the utterly broken continent and still fighting off rival claimants to the Iron Throne.
  • This particular instance can be justified when considering that it is still unknown how Daenerys' story will end in canon, and the author of this fic had to piece together the most likely scenarios given how she and the story itself will be affected by both outpacing the source material and living in Alternate Timelines. While Daenerys' story remains unknown in the books, at the show's end, she does indeed develop a strain of megalomania, giving credence to the possibility she could do likewise here.
  • It's implied by Joffrey himself that if time wasn't of the essence, he and Sansa would have tried to find a way to get Daenerys by their side, exploiting the Purple to find some measure of compromise. However, Joffrey also had to reason that if he did try to do that, he will face severe backlash from those who supported the Baratheon regime and that he could not risk Daenerys betraying him to get back what was hers. Especially, since having dragons, some people in the Seven Kingdoms might be inclined to follow her and fracture Westeros when it desperately needed unity. By the time of the final loop, Daenerys is unfortunately too much of a risk factor to left alive and Joffrey loathes the very fact she became a villain in his story and considered it rather hypocritical of him.
  • Stannis is also hit with this. Since he's offscreen most of the time - due to the loop starting AFTER he fled King's Landing, he's tended to be treated as an enemy that needed to be eradicated whenever Joffrey has to deal with matters in Westeros.This is due to because Joffrey was not close to his 'uncle' and Stannis only has canon!Joffrey in his memory. So even if Joffrey's prowess and sudden personality change is brought to Stannis, the man would be inclined to dismiss it as rumours or propaganda. Just like Daenerys, he is pushed into the role of villain since his belief that he is the rightful heir to the Iron throne cannot be reasoned with. Therefore Joffrey has no choice but to kill him (and also Melisandre) to avoid further fracturing of the Seven Kingdoms.
• Adaptational Wimp: While Renly's large army received some criticism for being ill-prepared even in canon, this fic has Joffrey heavily deconstruct the problems with both them and Renly who is implied to be far less politically astute than canon made him seem. Much is made of how such a large army needs to move much faster towards its goal, lest it become under-supplied, and that Renly doesn't realize he's just politically convenient for his supporters. In short, even without the shadow-demon, Renly is always the first king knocked out of the war and for good reason.
• A God I Am Not: Joff. He's seen the works of the true Gods, and for everything he's done, learned and lived, he isn't anywhere near. Earlier, when Robar Royce begins hearing the Song of Existence, he outright asks if Joff is the Warrior, which he denies.
• All for Nothing: The revelation that Daenerys' entire omnicidal rampage might have been entirely worthless and that life might triumph despite everything maddens Daenerys into whipping Drogon into a frenzy against Joff.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Joffrey has one of his arms amputated from facing off against a White Walker with a rocket weapon in the Yi-Ti loop. He has it replaced with a mace prosthetic.
  • Edmure loses an arm taking down Rhaegal.
• And This Is for...: The fake Aegon, about to stab Joffrey with Blackfyre, invokes the name of Duck - Ser Rolly Duckfield.
• Apathetic Citizens: Joffrey is the only one to call for a Maester when he poisons Tyrion at his wedding, meaning that his entire family (besides Jaime, who ran to his side), multiple noble houses, and the citizenry present did nothing but watch as a member of the royal family died right in front of them.
• Apocalypse How: The Long Night actively threatens to cause a Class 4-5 via a combination of Zombie Apocalypse and Glacial Apocalypse, with the Others (who are its "platforms") and their wights systematically exterminating "ALL CURRENT SENTIENT/NEARSENTIENT LIFE" on the planet. It's revealed this has occurred dozens if not hundreds of times before the present, wiping away as many Precursor civilizations.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Joffrey starts living a lot longer when he just grabs some gold and runs at the start of each loop.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: Joffrey's "Raiders" are this. A group of thugs, thieves and prostitutes plucked from Fleabottom for each having something resembling a personal Code of Honour. They're used to bloody and ruthless work but have just enough morals and discipline between them to terrorize unruly lords supply lines and destroy their resources efficiently without devolving completely into Rape, Pillage, and Burn. If anything, their sheer nature as a group of heavily armed, competent smallfolk defiant to usual authority figures are enough to disconcert the majority of Westeros nobility.
• Artificial Limbs: After losing an arm to Rhaegal, Edmure Tully has it replaced with a dragonbone prosthetic.
• Bait-and-Switch: In Chapter 45, Joffrey visits Sansa to ease his conscience after brutally killing a Royal Guardsman who raped and killed an officer with a hammer to the chest. When he explains his reasoning, even though she knows that what he wants most is absolution, Sansa chides him for not starting with the groin.
  • When Randyll Tarly hears of a Septon fervently declaring Joff to be the embodiment of both the Warrior and the Father, a position Randyll feels is tantamount to heresy, he asks what the Most Devout think of his stance, only to be informed said Septon is one of the Most Devout.
• Balancing Death's Books: Quaithe does this in the Final Loop to revive Daenerys. Unfortunately, it works in the most awful way possible.
• Band of Brothers: The Dawn Legion, and by implication, the rest of Yi-Ti's border Legions. They become even more so as the siege wears on, and Joffrey acclaims them as such in his speech before the final suicidal attack.
  • A later loop has Joffrey trying to forge this out of the sons of some noble houses, including his cousins Lancel and Tyrek.
• Bastard Angst: Joffrey suffers quite a bit of this upon discovering that the rumors about his incestuous lineage are in fact true, compounding upon his several other traumatic experiences and triggering his Villainous BSoD. After his Heel–Face Turn, his bastardry doesn't weigh as heavily on him as his other existential dilemmas, but it still feeds into his feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation. Joffrey starts to get over it when he forms a close friendship with Jon Snow in the Broken Knights loop, learning that one's birth is not all that defines one's character. His worries about his true identity completely disappear during the Braavos loop when Sansa reveals that she knew about it for years and she makes it clear that she likes him for the person he is deep down.
• Batman Gambit: The real reason Gerion Lannister left Casterly Rock was, well, precisely, to leave Casterly Rock and Tywin, whom he found insufferable. However, he was also realistically aware he needed a good excuse to escape any plans Tywin might have imagined involving him. So he made up the story of going off to find Brightroar, knowing Tywin's greed would let him go for a chance to hold Brightroar, but his practicality would lead him to write him off as dead until he returned, with or without the sword, something Gerion had absolutely no intention of doing.
• Battle Couple: Between Joffrey's decades of training and battle experience, and Sansa's mentorship under Joffrey and mastery of dark arts like Shadowbinding and Blood Magic, the two become a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield.
• Battle in the Rain: The end of Chapter 47 has Joff brutally confront the last remains of Renly's Rainbow Guard in the middle of a storm. His victory leads the Stormlords to name him Stormking.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: Joffrey doesn't understand how much he's improved, and in one later loop while people are still startled by the sudden change, they can't understand why he's so harsh on himself. In particular, he has trouble trusting himself with being in charge of large groups of people, but ultimately accepts the responsibility despite his misgivings about it in the Yi-Ti arc due to The Chains of Commanding.
  • He gets a particularly horrible refresher on how much he's changed as a person when, after accidentally damaging the Purple, he and Sansa return instead to a different point in the canon timeline: just after the Lannister defeat at Oxcross, at the very moment when Sansa was getting a beating from Meryn Trant in the middle of the throne room, on Joffrey's orders.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Becoming a Groundhog Peggy Sue causes this to happen to Joffrey Baratheon. After being completely broken by his repeated failures and (often delightfully unpleasant) deaths in the earlier loop iterations, and after gaining a mentor in Ned Stark of all people once he gradually starts recovering, Joffrey resolves to take advantage of his effective immortality and the chances it affords him in order to better himself. After a subjective century or two in the loop, Joffrey has transformed from a cowardly, spoiled, inept, sheltered, classist, incompetent, witless, sociopathic brat with a cruel streak the width of King's Landing and an utter vicious idiot boy-king; into a fiercely brave, disciplined, multi-skilled, multi-learned, worldly, experienced, strategic, penitent, kind and personable soul, who comes to value almost everyone around him except for Jaime, Cersei and Littlefinger, and who is hellbent on saving all of Planetos from the encroaching Long Night once and for all. By the Final Loop, he's about the single greatest king that Westeros has had since Jaehaerys I, arguably even greater.
• Berserk Button: Downplayed, especially considering how violent Joffrey is capable of becoming even after he becomes a genuinely good person. After Joffrey recovers from his total breakdown, he can barely stand seeing both his twincesting biological parents in the same room as him without feeling physically sick, and directly bringing it up in any way always makes him feel genuinely upset.
• Beware the Nice Ones: In one very early loop, Joffrey tortures Ned Stark to death, leading to the deaths of Arya, who attacks him, and Sansa, killed while trying to escape the Red Keep. This leads Robb to become a vengeance-fueled Determinator who wrecks the opposition.
  • In another, Joffrey himself is seen as a green boy-king by people who think he is his canon sociopathic self instead of an experienced commander with "future" knowledge. Then he crushes an opposing force in an unprecedented night raid and personally tears through eighteen men in less than half that many minutes. By the end, knights and smallfolk alike from both sides are forming a several meter clearing around him out of sheer pants-shitting terror. Possibly due to him taking a wound that would lame older men like it was nothing and appearing completely nonchalant about being covered from head to toe in gore.
• Big Book of War: The Yi-Tish have one: Elemental Principles of War, by Fol-Fing, The General Who Fought a Thousand Battles and Lost None. Officers of the Legions are expected to memorize the whole book and understand its precepts front to back. Joffrey still occasionally quotes the book, albeit in his own (self-described as "awkward") Westerosi translation, in subsequent loops.
• Big Entrance: Queen Sansa arriving at the wildling parley camp riding her huge direwolf in full battle armor surrounded by her loyal soldiers and servants, knowing of the threat of the White Walkers and ready to negotiate with the Free Folk to enlist their help. Whatever Mance Rayder and his allies were expecting when he set up the meeting, it certainly wasn't that.
• Black Comedy: Many of Joffrey's deaths are treated as humor both because he's Joffrey and because it's actually hilarious, like when he went suicidal mad in several loops, or complained about dying as a virgin again in another, or death by falling after conquering the tallest peak of Westeros’ Mountains of the Moon only to remember that he forgot to leave the bronze plaque at the summit right in the middle of the fall.
  • Also happen to another OC whose mutiny on Joffrey's ship always ended in his very quick death, and Joffrey complained about killing him is like a boring, almost time-wasting chore that he had to do constantly to keep the ship under control.
• Blackmail: Archmaester Marwyn is Pycelle's supplier of his drug of choice, and aside from the regular reports on the life of the Red Keep, he reserves the right to use Pycelle as a meat puppet.
• Blood Magic: All magic utilized by human beings in the setting appears to be this.
  • We learn more about it in Chapters 54 and 55, after Sansa starts learning it.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: In the Oxcross loop, after putting down too many rebellions with dragonfire, Daenerys ends the same way as her father when Barristan Selmy pins her to the Iron Throne with his sword while she screams "Burn them all!". Unlike Jaime Lannister however, Ser Barristan doesn't manage to prevent the city from being wiped off the map in a burst of wildfire.
• Body Horror: In one of the early loops, not long after he learns of his true parentage, Joffrey snaps and decides to become a Baratheon... by scalping himself and cutting out his eyes, removing the features that "make" him a Lannister. And he's still conscious enough to talk to the Hound afterwards.
• Bond Creatures: The Stark direwolves. Lady survives the trip(s) to King's Landing due to Joffrey averting the events that led to her execution. Sansa is able to maintain her strong connection to Lady even across time loops and starts unknowingly developing her warging abilities.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: When Joffrey first meets Daenerys, he mistakes her for a slave, then a bastard, and then a bastard slave.
• Break the Haughty: The initial premise of the story. Once Joffrey accepts it, it changes to Character Development.
  • Everything Joffrey does to House Darry. "You reap what you sow" indeed.
• Call-Back: Baratheons are meant to greet the Stranger warhammer in hand. First seen when Robert's dying in Chapter 45, then at his final death in Chapter 68.
• Came Back Wrong: After the failed assassination attempt, Daenerys did die in the Red Wastes; Quaithe had to sacrifice herself to bring her back. However, in the process, she became unhinged by seeing the abyss, thinking it preferable to incinerate all life rather than take a stand against the White Walkers, and began an omnicidal campaign into Westeros that only stopped when Joff challenged her at Harrenhal.
• Character Development: The entire point of the fic. Joffrey goes from an Ax-Crazy Royal Brat to The Wise Prince and savior king of Westeros, one loop at a time.
• Chekhov's Skill: When Joffrey goes on his multi-loop study spree in Chapter 16, he noted that he spent way too much time studying astronomy for no practical reason, as even though the experience proved spiritually profound, it did nothing to help him uncover the mystery of his stone tablet. Fast forward to Chapter 29, Joffrey comes to a stunning realization that the strange markings on the tablet didn't represent some obscure language or mathematical code, but were a diagram of constellations he could use to pinpoint the next destination on his quest to discover the secrets of the Purple.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The whalebone amulet that Joffrey carves during a storm in Ib follows him through the time loops. Brightroar becomes this as well after he recovers it.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Joffrey has become quite learned in this. He detests himself for resorting to it, fully aware the loops have not been enough to temper his sadism. He tortures and mutilates his confidante Nalia upon the revelation that she was under the orders of Littlefinger to help declare Joffrey insane in one loop, and tortures Jennet Waters to death to learn more about Baelish's enterprises in another; in the same loop, he likewise tortures and kills Baelish in Chapter 35.
  • Varys gets his turn in Chapter 50, when it turns out he arranged for the tableau that was Tyrion's murder. Interestingly, he dies without breaking.
• Combat Pragmatist: Joffrey has grown into one after decades of war experience. When he goes to war against Renly in Chapter 46, Joffrey knows he can't afford to wait to marshall the largest military force he can (with his Royal Guard and the combined armies of the Crownlands, Westerlands, North, and Riverlands) and even if he could, he'd be hard pressed to beat Renly's superior numbers. Instead, he opts to use Renly's overwhelming numbers against him and enlists a large force of cutthroats, thieves, and bandits to ransack the stag king's food and weapons supplies. While most lords and knights like Ser Jaime look down on Joffrey's tactics and use of lowborn scum, the "Raiders" are able to produce devastating results; sneaking into Renly's poorly guarded camps, silencing the guards, setting his supply caches on fire, and sending legions of committed and well-trained warriors running around and panicking like headless chickens. To top it off, when Renly's forces collapse into Civil War, Joffrey has his men parade around the chaos proclaiming loyalty to King Joffrey in an attempt to convince any of Renly's men to switch sides, before taking advantage of the chaos to kill his Rainbow Guard and confront Renly himself.
• Comet of Doom: The Long Night is triggered by several astronomic phenomena, the most visible of which is the Red Comet.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: In one loop, Joff speculates that killing Baelish and Slynt early in the loop forced Renly's hand after Robert's death, pushing him into trying to exterminate all Lannister and Stark presence in the Red Keep. In future loops, he limits himself to just Baelish to limit the fallout.
  • In the Blackworks loop, Joff approaches the disintegrating Stormlands-Reach army and politely addresses Lord Lester Morrigen, giving him the chance to turn on the Reachlords. Furious at the disastrous state of the campaign and the poor synergy between the two factions, Morrigen immediately throws his lot with Joff.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Suddenly takes a right turn into this around chapter 16.
• Coup de Grâce: The Mother's Mercy.
• Covered in Scars: Sansa, as a result of her training in Shadowbinding and Blood Magic.
• The Cowl: Joffrey develops into this in another loop, as a means to systematically understand and take control of Baelish's criminal empire.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • After the Yi-Ti Arc, Joffrey carries an obsidian dagger on him at all times in case a White Walker attacks.
  • In one of the earlier arcs, after Joffrey foils the attempt on his life at his wedding, his assassins manage to arrange for a bottle of poisoned wine to be given to him, killing him that night.
• Culture Chop Suey / Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Yi-Ti culture seems like a mishmash of real-life Asian cultures, primarily Chinese with some Japanese flavorings. Of the Chinese component, the inspirations also seem to derive from various historical periods; the Emperor of Yi-Ti is only nominally all-powerful much as in the Spring and Autumn era, while the troops have access to gunpowder weaponry (invented during the Song dynasty).
• Culture Shock: Since Joffrey has taken to travelling across the known world, he experiences various shades of this, but nothing shocks him more than the Yi-Ti culture. For one thing he finds their use of paper money quite absurd and notes the Dawn Legion's methods to train a soldier would have cause mutiny and rebellion in Westeros. Also, unlike Westeros' "Night Watch or Death" choice for convicted criminals, Yi-Ti offers three choices: join the legion, some sort of community service (public works projects like building roads), or become a miner for five years, after which they are free to leave and have a bit of money to boot. However, he admits that the Yi-Tish way of governance, despite its paper-killing bureaucracy, is far more efficient compared to that of Westeros. He experiences a sort of reverse culture shock when that loop ends and he's forced back into Westeros' culture and way of thinking.
  • Another aspect of his reverse culture shock has to do with his social station in the two societies. In Yi-Ti, as a professional soldier and then officer, he took care of himself and enjoyed strong camaraderie with his troops. In Westeros, as a highborn prince, he is waited on hand and foot by servants, so everyone's eyebrows are raised when he thinks nothing of performing manual labor that would be far below his social station. His attempts to bond with the Lannister bannermen the way he did with fellow legionaries in the previous loop doesn't quite succeed either, due to the social gulf as well as their lack of shared experiences. While this form of "class shock" also happened with previous loops, it is much more pronounced with the Yi-Ti loop due to just how long he'd been serving in the Dawn Legion in that loop.
  • Happens again after he and Sansa spend a loop married in Braavos. Though that's also because they have to go from being a public married couple to engaged-but-chaperoned teenagers.
  • In his Interlude, Randyll Tarly and his entourage get stuck in a narrow alley partially blocked by a broken wagon the Royal Legion is moving. His son Dickon, an entitled noble, and, as such, used to having his way, demands that the Legion step aside to let them pass, and every single one of the lowborn soldiers mocks and jeers him, to his utter disbelief. He draws his sword, and only through Randyll and the experienced commander a brutal riot is averted. It's made clear that how the New Way Joff is building clashes with the nobility's usual rights and privileges, and the commander notes to Randyll to ensure his household is on its best behavior, since things are really starting to change for the smallfolk.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Joff and around five thousand Raiders against Renly's army of over 100,000. You'd be hard pressed to find a more humiliating example.
• Dare to Be Badass: A later loop has Joffrey beat the hell out of six noble scions at once, then yell at them to stand again and become his Royal Guard. This especially counts for Lancel "Lumpy" Lannister, up until then the court fool.
• Darkest Africa: Sothoryos. Joffrey has to journey there to inspect the Ruined City of Yeen.
• Dead Man Walking: Robert. Between the heavy poisons Pycelle has been secretly giving him and the ramifications of his hedonistic lifestyle, Robert is one of the few people Joffrey is never able to save.
• Death by Adaptation / Spared by the Adaptation: Joffrey is trying to do as much as possible of the latter once his character development has kicked in, but many loops he's not able to save people he really wants to save. Some he avoids or avoids in certain ways because of the consequences.
  • Loras dying will almost always send Renly off the deep end. Thankfully Renly usually dies first if Joff leaves things be.
  • Ned often dies despite Joffrey's attempts to save him. Whether to Goldcloaks, shadow demons, or other things, Ned can be very hard to keep alive.
  • On the other hand, Joff considers killing Baelish and Slynt a priority in his loops, though he eases up on Slynt as time goes on. If he doesn't kill Baelish, Baelish will often get Ned and others killed.
• Death by Despair: It's heavily implied that at least one of Joffrey's deaths after learning of his parentage was this, in Chapter 7.
• Death Is Cheap: So very cheap to Joffrey that he eventually using his deaths as a mean to learn all knowledge possible and then taking breaks between loops to go on long vacations around the continents.
• Decadent Court: The Red Keep. Joffrey's realization that the throne gets people killed is almost the beginning of his character growth.
• Defector from Decadence: Joffrey comes to appreciate the authenticity of common folk after a lifetime spent as a runaway sailor, and engages in a variety of trades and hobbies that would horrify the aristocrats of the court.
• Defiant to the End: Varys. Torture never helps in making him talk. Sansa is forced to use her magic to rip the knowledge she needs from his mind.
• Demonic Possession: Archmaester Marwyn remotely controls Pycelle to directly talk to Sansa in the Final Loop.
  • The Yellow Emperor of Yi-Ti does something similar to a servant in Harrenhal to briefly chat with Randyll Tarly (not that he knows who the strangely mouthy servant really is) and warn Joff that the Walkers aren't stirring on his side, so their big push will come from Westeros.
• Demoted to Extra: Several major characters from the series, due to Joffrey not having any reason to meet and interact with them. Of particular note are Brienne, who is just seen as another member of the Rainbow Guard of whom Joff only knows Loras, as well as Jorah, who's just another servant to Daenerys in his mind. Anyone from the Wall other than Jon are also affected. Averted with many Essos characters, who Joffrey has run into during his "run the heck away" loops.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Joffrey hits his very early, as his attempts to salvage his reign turn to desperate tries at staying alive and everything he's ever known turns out to be lies.
  • In the Oxcross loop, Barristan Selmy unclips his white cloak and kills Daenerys when she orders her dragons to incinerate Flea Bottom.
  • Daenerys hits hers in the Final Loop when she dies and sees the truth of the White Walkers and the Cycle. When Quaithe resurrects her, she's left hopelessly insane, believing there is no way to win against the Long Night and preferring to incinerate all life rather than allow the Walkers a definitive victory.
• Determinator: The Red Wolf. And Joffrey himself after countless deaths and Heel Realization.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Joffrey’s cause of death in some loops. Tropes Are Tools though, as these typically end loops after Joffrey has already learned all he can glean from the setting.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • The Stormlords in the Broken Knights loop declare for King Joffrey after Renly's death, seemingly hoping that he would forget that they killed two of his best friends only days prior.
  • In one of his earlier loops, Joffrey kills Robb in Winterfell with a crossbow. He does it in an incredibly public place with no way out, so Jon stumbling in on accident is enough to ensure his demise.
• Disease Bleach: It's noted in the Blackworks loop that Jorah's hair has turned white by the time he and Daenerys reach King's Landing, likely due to the stress he's under thanks to Dany's madness. Combined with how he looks much older than he should, Joffrey almost doesn't recognize him.
• Disney Death: A squad sent by Joff tries to kill Daenerys in Essos. Despite being numerous, well-trained and supported by Sansa and her sorcery, Daenerys manages to get away with her dragons and several major wounds into the desert. Her horse dies not long after, and some time after, Sansa scries the corpse of one of the dragons, but as for Dany herself, they Never Found the Body...
• Dissonant Serenity: When Joffrey engages Robb in combat for the second time across the loops, Joffrey starts reciting, not singing, The Rains of Castamere, with chilling calm, not stopping despite receiving blows to the face that make his enunciation less than clear.
• Doorstopper: 800,000 words.
• The Dragonslayer:
  • Joff earns the title several times: first, he successfully kills the dragon living in the Valyrian Agora in Chapter 36, kills both Rhaegal and Drogon in Chapter 52, and Drogon again in Chapter 74. Of these, he only has help against Rhaegal, and had there not been a concurrent Zerg Rush against him and him alone in the second instance, he would have likewise butchered Viserion.
  • Jon and Edmure, with the help of the King's Fourth Regiment and a group of loyal Riverlords, take down Rhaegal. The Fourth as a whole subsequently become officially known as such.
• Dramatic Irony: In canon, Ser Barristan is one of many people who judges Jaime for his Kingslaying, disparaging him as someone who "profaned his blade with the blood of the king he had sworn to protect." Come the Oxcross loop, and Barristan is forced into the same situation Jaime was by Daenerys and makes the same decision, stabbing Dany through the back. Only, unlike Jaime, he didn't prevent the destruction of Kings Landing.
  • At one point, Sansa chides Joff for weaving grand plans for dealing with Daenerys, up to imagining a scenario to detonate Harrenhal. In the Final Loop, Harrenhal is destroyed in Joff's last fight against Daenerys.
• The Dreaded: Inhabitants of Asshai-by-the-Shadow, and for good reasons.
  • The Red Wolf (Robb Stark after losing his father and both of his sisters to Kings Landing) terrifies Joffrey for a long time. It's only until the two meet in combat again that he realizes that Robb isn't inherently the terrifying force of nature that killed him before, just a scared kid.
  • The Silence, the all-consuming and omnicidal cosmic force brought about by the White Walkers and the Cycle that repeatedly seeks to destroy all life in the world whenever the Red Comet comes to Planetos. So horrific and overwhelming is its presence that a terrified Warlock of Qarth outright kills himself when he gets a glimpse of it through Joffrey's bone tablet.

"NOT THE SILENCE! PLEASE NO!"

• Dressing as the Enemy: As a final blow to Renly's army, Joffrey has some of his men don Stormlands armor and parade around the chaos caused by his army's Civil War declaring themselves as loyalists to King Joffrey in hopes of persuading any of Renly's forces to switch sides.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Captain Xu, the Red Gorilla, is this to 'Jof-ri' during his training at the Border Forts of Yi Ti.
• Driven to Madness: Joffrey had this in spades in earlier chapters after his cruelty and horrendous decisions backfired and he suffered severe physical and mental torture. He does get better, but viewed that episode with shame and tries to avoid succumbing to it after his Character Development.
  • Happened to Daenerys in chapter 52 after she survived a poison attack by the Warlocks of Qarth. This turned her from a kind and righteous character, if somewhat misguided in her entitlement, to a pyromaniac lunatic who burned Slaver's Bay and King's Landing with nary mercy nor sanity and topped with a penchant of feeding her perceived enemies to her dragons.
  • Happens to Daenerys again in the Final Loop, when a successful assassination attempt shows her the true horrors awaiting Westeros in the Long Night, and Quaithe brings her back, leaving her with the absolute conviction anything is better than allowing the monsters to kill everything - even if she has to do the same thing herself.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Joffrey kills himself several times in early loops, sometimes in particularly spectacular fashion. In the ones following his Character Development, he mainly does so out of convenience, when he deems a particular loop unsalvageable or having made the most of it.
  • In the Blackworks loop, his humiliating defeat and the death of Loras have Renly hanging himself, much to Joffrey's vexation.
  • In the Final Loop, Lysa Arryn jumps out of the Moon Door as she is unable to cope with Baelish's death and her son Robin being taken away from her to live in King's Landing. The son of House Terrick also hangs himself as the prospect of war with the White Walkers looms ever closer.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: A few of Joffrey's less glorious loops. For instance, in the first loop he and Sansa travel together, they die when a sudden storm capsizes their ship en route to Lys.
• Duel to the Death: Joff and Daenerys have one at Harrenhal for the fate of the Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys fights via Drogon, and Joff fights with the aid of Stars. Unfortunately, when Drogon dies, the crazed Daenerys, with her last breath, cheats by ordering Rhaegal to fight.
• Dumbass No More:
  • One of the three main cruxes of Joffrey's Character Development, along with Took a Level in Badass and Took a Level in Kindness. Joffrey starts the fic as the same ignorant, oblivious, and witless loser we know from canon, but slowly starts learning from his mistakes and shortcomings through his failed plans and deaths. Kicks into overdrive in Arc 2 when Joffrey starts traveling around the world to gain knowledge and experience, even undergoing a several decade long education run to the Citadel to study as many different fields as he can under the maesters.
  • Happens to Sansa as well, after Joffrey brings her into the loop, both figuratively (by explaining her how flawed her Wide-Eyed Idealist vision of the world was and his daunting purpose of stopping the White Walkers) then literally (by stabbing her through the heart with his connector — Brightroar — after she declined his offer to reset her memory and spare her the trauma of having witnessed her siblings massacred in Renly's bloody coup). While she isn't quite stupid to begin with (Joffrey noticed early on her sharpness beneath the stifling naivety brought about by her sheltered upbringing), she is desperate to bridge the gap of several lifetimes worth of experience between Joffrey and her, so she can stand as his equal, which eventually leads her to become a skilled fighter, a consummate politician, and an accomplished skinchanger and shadowbinder.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • Joffrey's Last Stand against the White Walkers in the Yi Ti Loop.
  • In the Blackworks Loop, Sers Meryn Trant, Boros Blount, Preston Greenfield, and Barristan Selmy, Lyra Mormont and Lady all die fighting Stannis' numerically superior army. The Kingsguard in particular fight like demons to the end.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first chapter or epilogue of the fic contains scenes where Joffrey narrates his thoughts via (a rather stilted) first-person point of view. The author uses a (smoother) third-person POV onward and hasn't returned to the First person POV since.
  • The Prologue is littered with this. Especially since a lot of Joffrey's characterisation here, does not mesh with that of the recent chapter (47 as of this edit). In the prologue, Joffrey invites Sandor as protection when he goes to assassinate Petyr this is in contrast with the current Joffrey who is badass enough to take out Petyr's entire protection gang and prefers to do his dirty work alone. Even though at each reset, his body is weak, Joffrey has shown to have been able to take out Baelish without any help whatsoever. His death at the end of the prologue (before the flashback), indicates that he's still afraid and angered by the loop, rather than being extremely determined and focus on his role as the Purple's weapon against the White Walker. And the biggest one is the fact that Sansa's role as his partner is not mentioned and it's implied that the Sansa in that loop is still canon-GOT Sansa. Considering that Joffrey had already met with the Children of the Forest - a plot point that would not have been delegated to the background - but not loop!Sansa it's heavily implied that the Prologue is now this.
    • The Prologue is now no longer canon as per Word of God and is pending a future rewrite to fit into the current lore.
  • There had also been a deleted OMAKE chapter, which depicted the future (around the earlier pre-Yi-Ti Arc). In that scene, Baelish is actually Joffrey's ally and Sansa is told of Joffrey's looping adventure but does not loop with him. This chapter was eventually removed for obvious reasons.
• Eldritch Abomination: Whatever the White Walkers are. Possibly The Purple too. In-universe the Red Priests and Warlocks of Qarth view Joffrey as this.
  • Sansa is worried that Joffrey and she are turning into this.
  • Whatever monstrosity Joffrey glimpses in Stygai is also this.
• Eldritch Location: Stygai appears to be just a barren valley in the mountains, at least until the Sun passes zenith. It was tainted by a mass sacrifice during the last cycle, which spawned the aforementioned eldritch abomination.
• Empowered Badass Normal:Joff and Sansa have come to the conclusion that they have to learn at least some amount of magic after Melisandre's Shadow Baby attack on Ned in the Blackworks loop. While the first attempts to join any of the main sorcerous guilds at Asshai have little to no success at first, eventually they begin training, Joff as an aeromancer and Sansa in Blood Magic / shadowbinding.
• Enemy Civil War: Renly's army collapses after being harried by Joffrey's much smaller but vastly better trained force. It only gets even worse when Dickon Tarly, the son of one of Renly's biggest disciplinarians, is killed in a Council meeting Gone Horribly Wrong and Lord Randyll begins hacking away at nominal Stormlord allies. In the end, Joff seizes the momentum before the host can fully disintegrate, convinces the rebelling Stormlords to join him, annihilating the Reachlords and capturing Renly.
• Enemy Mine: In one loop, Cersei and Ser Barristan Selmy team up to prevent Robert from pursuing Joffrey to Essos.
  • In another loop, Ser Barristan and Ser Jaime Lannister team up to take down the Mountain after he nearly kills Joffrey in a joust.
• Entertainingly Wrong: After one time loop where Joffrey came in intimate contact with a Shadow Assassin, he comes to the conclusion that Stannis is a powerful sorcerer. He eventually comes to realize he's fuel for Melisandre's ambitions.
• Epic Fail: Joffrey's first two time loops end up like this. He first tries to poison Tyrion only to drink from the wine he meant to use to kill him by accident. The second loop sees him kill Robb Stark with a crossbow only to be discovered right away by Jon Snow, who easily dispatches him in retaliation.
• Eternal Recurrence: What the White Walkers and the Purple are revealed to be.
• "Eureka!" Moment: As Joffrey despairs to change his destiny (beginning to see his repeated failures at reaching the top of the Mountains of the Moon as proof that You Can't Fight Fate), Sansa unwittingly renews his hope through a comment she makes on his musings: "What is a different song if not a sequence of changed keys?"
• Eyepatch of Power: Robb gets one in the Final Loop after losing his eye to a Walker arrow.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • Joffrey initially faces his deaths with fear and denial, but gradually accepts death as an inevitability and resolves to live his lives as productively as he can, becoming comfortable enough with ending his own life to do so casually when he sees there is no point in continuing a current loop. Best exemplified at the end of the Yi-Ti arc when he contemplates killing himself before the final battle with the White Walkers, but resolves to fight to the bitter end alongside his brothers-in-arms.
  • Sansa does this when she is first brought into the Purple, as she resists giving into her fear and despair of a Fate Worse than Death as Joffrey described becoming a looper would be, and convinces him to take her with him so she can help him save Westeros from the Cycle.
  • Sandor does this as much is possible for a man with pyrophobia who's facing a dragon. He doesn't last long, but in the few seconds the fight lasts, he first saves Joffrey's life by throwing him out of the way of the fire, and then charges the thing with his sword ready to fight it. He gets eaten almost instantly, but he did not go out without being ready to fight to the end.
  • In Chapter 45, Robert crashes a feast Joff's throwing. He has a wonderful time, beginning with an impromptu melee fight against his son, lots and lots of booze, countless friends and their descendants, all capped with the realization he is perfectly satisfied with how his life went and that his son will be a great king with Sansa at his side, Ned as his Hand, and Tyrion as his Master of Coin. After a while, he leaves the party and begins searching for his warhammer for something. When he finds it, he clutches it as he remembers why... Baratheons are meant to meet the Stranger with hammer in hand.
  • Varys in Chapter 50 merely sighs when he realizes his getaway skiff has been captured and Joffrey prepares to torture him. He dies without breaking.
  • The Rite of Last Love for the Summer Islands. Two lovers consume poisonous fruit, then spend their remaining time in vigorous lovemaking.
• Failed Future Forecast: When visiting the Free Cities, Joffrey's captured by the priests of R'hllor. The head priest attempts to divine Joffrey's timeline, and instead gets the canon events, which Joffrey has long since averted. The inconsistency of seeing a future that simply no longer exists renders the priest insane.
• Familiar: In some ways, Stars, the Silver Lion counts as this for Joffrey after the Yi-Ti loop. It follows him through his loops, is stored inside Joffrey's soul, and can materialise itself and attack on Joffrey's command.
  • In the Final Loop, Daenerys uses Drogon in this capacity, citing how he's part of her to justify using him in what was supposed to be an honorable Duel to the Death with Joff. To her horror, Joff pulls Stars at a critical moment and uses the same argument against Daenerys.
• Fantastic Fallout: There are a bunch of these floating around, but both Valaryia and Asshai are examples.
  • The Doom that destroyed Valaryia was apparently a magical effect of some kind that had a metaphysical component that could pierce magical protection. The active effect had mostly subsided by the time of Joffery, but the evidence left behind caused Joffery to speculate on it when he went to go find Brightroar.
  • In Asshai-by-the-Shadow the titular 'Shadow' is this. In the distant past there was a magical ritual created in an attempt to fight the Red Comet that caused the whole city to be covered in a sort of shadowy haze even at high noon. There's also enough power left in the echos of that event to send people caught within the more contaminated part of the city on the memorial of the event to an illusion of the event itself, complete with hostile inhabitants.
• Fatal Family Photo: Not exactly a photo, but the spirit of the trope is present when Joff and Jon discuss how the latter will ask for Meera Reed's hand once they have crushed Aegon's rebellion. Predictably, Jon doesn't survive the final battle.
• Fate Worse than Death: Being denied reputation and martial fame and the realization he has lost the great warrior he always wanted, for Lord Tarly. In the Final Loop, he realizes too late what it means for Sam to have become Joff's Chronicler - the person in charge of deciding the information flow into the history books - and when he tries to attack him, he gets beaten to a pulp, showing Samwell has at last overcome his father.
• Fed to the Beast:
  • When Joff confronts Aegon, he cripples him by cutting both hands off, and then tosses him to Ghost to finish off.
  • At the end of that loop, Daenerys apparently feeds Tywin Lannister to one of her dragons, which Joffrey finds oddly fitting and darkly amusing.
• Feuding Families: In the Blackworks Loop, after crushing Stannis' forces, Joffrey gets cute and grants the notoriously feuding Riverland families, the Blackwoods and the Brackens, small neighboring ports so their pointless feud can continue on in their new holdings.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The purpose of the Structure.
• Foreshadowing: In Chapter 17, a warlock of Qarth kills himself out of fear of “the Silence.” While readers familiar with canon might think he meant Euron Greyjoy, who captains a ship called the Silence, he actually meant the Long Night, the Silence standing in opposition to the Song of Existence, which Joffrey first faces later in the same loop.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Joffrey eliminating Baelish and Slynt early in one loop makes Renly more paranoid. See Cornered Rattlesnake above for the tragic consequences.
  • Ser Barristan staying to serve Joff and Sansa in the Blackworks loop has consequences. For one, nobody saves Daenerys from that manticore...
  • This was also present in earlier paths. Joffrey choosing to torture Ned Stark to death leads to Robb Stark snapping, skipping the Twins and making a beeline for King's Landing which leads to him aligning with the Tyrells and taking the city unscathed. In the process, Arya, Sansa, Tywin, Tyrion, Jaime and Joffrey himself all end up killed. When Joffrey responds to this outcome by letting the Starks go into exile, the end result is Stannis taking King's Landing and offering Joffrey as a sacrifice to R'hllor.
• Functional Addict: Grand Maester Pycelle's addicted to Spicemilk, a very potent and addictive stimulant.
• Generation Xerox: Ironic considering who his father is actually not, but in a later loop some Stormlords actually say the following about Joffrey and his late father Robert Baratheon, especially their martial skill.
  Lord Lonmouth: More than a Stag, fucking Robert Baratheon reborn. He may look Lannister alright, but if his blood were any more Baratheon he’d be growing antlers.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: In the last loop, Joff gathers a force of workers and Maesters and doles out plans based on the things he has witnessed across his lifetimes to begin spreading industry and technology, passing them off as original ideas or Yi-Tish inventions.
• Glacial Apocalypse: This will occur if the Long Night wins: the Others will cover the world in ice and snow whilst systematically exterminating all sentient and semi-sentient life, then the Long Night will depart the world and wait for life to recover before starting the extinction event all over again.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • In chapter 6, the discovery of his mother and uncle making love in Winterfell finally makes Joffrey's fraying sanity snap. Realizing the rumors about his parentage were true and believing to have finally found the reason why the Purple kept bringing him back, he decides to jump headfirst out the window after Bran and spends the next few loops increasingly desperate to find news ways to kill himself until he slips back into catatonia for a couple more.
  • In chapter 17, Joffrey involuntarily causes this to two magic practicioners on his way to Yi-Ti: first to High Priest Benerro in the Red Temple of Volantis, when he tries to read Joffrey's destiny in the flames and only gets the events of his original life, the inconsistency of which brings him to shove his entire head in the brazier in an desperate attempt to understand; then to a warlock of the House of the Undying in Qarth, who was studying his stolen whalebone tablet, the meaning of which had him reduced to abject terror followed by cutting his own throat.
  • Melisandre goes insane after Stannis dies in chapter 50, and Joffrey keeps her alive in a Black Cell for Sansa to deal with personally. He notes she goes even crazier when she sees Brightroar or looks into the flames.
• The Good King/The High Queen: Joffrey and Sansa rise to this in the Blackworks loop, where they become Universally Beloved Leader for smallfolk with the establishment of truly egalitarian institutions as the Royal Legions and a lot of very profitable investment in the realm. The realm united is so strong it manages to withstand the rebellions of Renly, who had the largest army in Westeros, Stannis, who attacked King's Landing by surprise, and the fake Aegon, who had the backing of the Golden Company and Varys. Only Daenerys managed to truly take King's Landing, and even that cost her two dragons, a lot of her army, and showing that she's become every bit the madman her father was.
• Greed: Tywin Lannister. In the Blackworks loop, he discovers in short order that his grandson, the King, has gained the miraculous ability to summon his House's ancestral sword Brightroar, has begun using it as his weapon of choice, that he has reclaimed Blackfyre, the even older and more noble blade of the Targaryen kings, and has decided to bestow Blackfyre to the Lannisters en lieu of Brightroar. Even after all of this, to Joffrey's annoyance, he still wishes he had Brightroar himself.
• Groundhog Peggy Sue: Every time Joffrey dies, he's brought back to the day he and his family departed King's Landing for Winterfell, shortly after Jon Arryn's death.
• Handicapped Badass: Joffrey loses his right forearm and right eye in the Yi-Ti loop, but neither slow him down much in combat. He adapts to the loss well enough that when he's resurrected for the next loop, having both eyes again screws with his depth perception for a while, and he's noticeably clumsy with his right hand until he re-adapts.
  • In the final loop, two separate characters incur similar injuries: Edmure gets his hand bitten off by Rhaegal after shoving a sword in his mouth — which earns him a dragonbone prosthesis, some training to fight with a mace hand from Joffrey, and the instant respect of his previously wayward bannermen —, while Robb loses an eye to a wight's arrow when his forces come to Sansa's aid beyond the Wall — when a lord at the Great Council starts dismissing the claims of the coming of the White Walkers as madness, he rips off his eyepatch to display his empty socket, to great effect.
• Happily Married: Joffrey and Sansa end up becoming this. Go figure.
• Heel–Face Turn: The entire point of the story. After listening to Ned's words, Joffrey decides to become a better person.
• Heel Realization: While still his sadistic self, he gleefully tortures Ned Stark to death. Before he dies, though, Ned's last words freak him out enough that they repeat themselves in his head whenever he then does something evil until he eventually starts his Character Development: "There's something deeply wrong with you, Joffrey".
• Heroic BSoD: After the Yi-Ti loop, Joffrey develops very serious PTSD. While Myrcella's presence helps lessen the panic attacks, he still has a terrible episode when invited for a friendly archery competition in Winterfell, complete with a long, horrible flashback to the Dawn Legion's Last Stand.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Captain Jhos of the Dawn Legion mages, giving his own life to dissipate a supernatural sandstorm that was keeping the Legion Expedition pinned and would have slowly killed them all otherwise.
• Heroic Spirit: In the Blackworks loop, when partying with Joff, Robert suggests a melee. Joff easily wins, but for the first time in a very long time, this actually lights a spark in Robert rather than the usual pitch-black void of apathy, and he rises, grabs his hammer, demands it to become best two of three, and gives the performance of a lifetime with his son.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Robert, of all people, is just about the only person who realizes that Joffrey is suffering from PTSD, even if he doesn't know the cause of it. He specifically mentions seeing the same Thousand-Yard Stare in veterans of the battle at the Trident. Joffrey can't help but note the irony that the man who ignored him all his life is the only one who notices what's wrong with him.
  • Joffrey quickly notices that Sansa is way more than the naive, helpless maiden he knew during his original life: in the Red Wolf loop, her desperate attempt to escape, killing two guards before being cut down herself, shows him that she has more steel in her than he gave her credit for; then, over his many loops, she often surprises him with her witticisms at the most unexpected moments, and he eventually finds himself developing genuine feelings for her. Eventually, he finds out the truth about her: she's the missing half of the weapon against the Others that the Purple created him to be.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Joff believes that across his lives, the only person to hurt him more than Baelish is himself.
• Honesty Is the Best Policy: In the Final Loop, Sansa decides to go to her parents and speak clearly about the future. Informing Ned turns out to have been an excellent move, since now the Hand is well aware of the threat hanging over the realm and is entirely willing to work with and fully trust the King. Later comments also imply that several of Joff's confidants, including Tyrion, are aware of Joff and Sansa's looping history.
• Hope Bringer: It's a long and terrible journey, fraught with peril and pain. But Joff keeps walking and changing, and in doing so, truly becomes the king Westeros needs.
• How We Got Here: The first chapter opens In Medias Res and the rest of the fanfic is basically Joffrey recounting his entire journey to the prologue.
• Humanoid Abomination: By the time of the final loop, most of Joff's Silver Knights, by proximity, have gained the ability to hear what he calls the Song of Existence, life's melody raging against the silence of the Long Night, and see that the King and Queen are somehow more than human. They're still heroic and devoted to saving Westeros, but it comes across as a massive shock to anyone unaware.
• Humiliation Conga: Happens to Joff a few times. Especially because he can't die, what would be a Trauma Conga Line for others (especially events like the Mountains arc) are downgraded to this instead.
  • Happens to Renly as well when he tries to claim the Iron Throne. He gets the greatest army Westeros has ever seen destroyed through a combination of a very clever and quick enemy, logistics issues and sheer incompetence on his part, gets revealed as an inept king and to boot, he has to see all of his Rainbow Guard brutally killed by Joff, who refuses his attempts to surrender.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Joffrey is aware that he's being a hypocrite when he arranges for Daenerys' assassination in later loops, but he also knows that she simply has too many risks involved (without even getting into her dragons) for him to ally with her. Combined with the fact that he doesn't have the knowledge required to prevent her descent into madness that he witnesses in later loops, for the sake of his plans, Dany has to go.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Captain Jhos, despite resolving on his Heroic Sacrifice, cannot stab himself directly in the heart. He convinces Joffrey that this is the only way, and the latter helps him complete the deed.
• I Hate Past Me: Joff has a great moment when he loses his patience with a heavily coached and rapidly panicking Margaery Tyrell, who's begging for a Small Council seat for her family, and realizes just how shallow and easily manipulated he used to be, because people still treat him that way.
• I Lied: In the Final Loop, Joffrey tells Brienne that she has to beat him in combat to join his Silver Knights. When she fails, he tells her she didn't actually have to beat him and that none of the Silver Knights ever have.
• Immortal Apathy: Inverted big time with Joffrey Baratheon. After spending more than a century stuck as a Groundhog Peggy Sue, forced to repeatedly suffer for his blunders until he completely re-evaluated himself, he's transformed himself from the utterly monstrous, cowardly, spoiled, un-empathetic and sociopathic Enfant Terrible we know him as; into a genuinely caring, disciplined and personable young man with a lot of compassion for the smallfolk and levels of love and friendship for nearly everyone around him (sans Cersei and Jaime). To further hammer it home; when Joffrey is in the Oxcross Loop, he's fully aware that Westeros and all its inhabitants in this timeline are invariably doomed, yet he still feels compelled to help people out where he can; giving Tommen in this timeline a reassurance about how to be strong going forward, and extending royal aid to help out the starving smallfolk of King's Landing.
• Impossible Task: Joffrey dedicates multiple lives to climbing the Mountains of the Moon, the highest peak in Westeros which no man has climbed and lived to tell the tale, to prove that he can do things on his own, and that he can defy fate.
• Incoming Ham: Joffrey purposely gives off this vibe when he goes to win the Hand's Tourney as "Ser Jonnel". He even enters the final joust with his horse only going at a slow saunter just to show off. When he wins, he proceeds to crown Sansa his Queen of Love and Beauty while chewing as much of the scenery as possible with awful poetry about "true love".
• Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: Joffrey does this to a Dawn Legion quartermaster when he finds out that the fortress's supply reserves have been sold off for profit on the black market.
• Insult to Rocks: After checking Pycelle's records of the prolonged poisoning he's been subjecting Robert to, a horrified Joffrey comments to himself that even King's Landing's infamously nonexistent sewers are probably cleaner than Robert's arteries.
• In Spite of a Nail: Even with Joffrey's newfound appreciation for the Starks and desire to protect them, they almost always get imprisoned and/or killed due to the machinations of the schemers in King's Landing. There are two distinct times in Chapters 8 and 31 where Joffrey attempts to use his authority to spare Ned Stark from being executed, but fails because of his mother, small council, and idiotic soldiers killing him anyway.
  • In just about every version of events where Joffrey stays in Kings Landing, when Ned goes to the Throne Room to confront Cersei and appoint Stannis as King, the fight still breaks out, usually because of Baelish and Slynt. So far, nothing that Joffrey does before or during the encounter stops it from escalating out of control.
  • Joffrey lampshades this trope in Chapter 31 where he laments that despite him saving Bran from becoming a cripple, he was unable to stop his own soldiers from cutting down the poor boy once his mother makes a move to put him on the throne after Robert dies.
  • Robert is simply too unhealthy after all the time he's spent wasting away with wine and feasts (his blood is described as almost being sludge). Boar or not, Robert does not have long before he dies in each loop. Joffrey has long come to terms with this, going from crying by Robert's bedside to comforting his dying 'father' by telling him he can rest now.
  • Since Joffrey's loop begins after Jon Arryn's death, Stannis is already aware of Joffrey's illegitimacy and has fled King's Landing before Joffrey can do anything. As a result, any time Joffrey takes the Throne, Stannis always begins his rebellion. With Stannis' rebellion comes Renly's, and soon enough the War of the Five Kings picks up every time.
  • Whether or not Stannis resorts to the shadow demon to do the job, Renly is always the first of the Five Kings to die.
    • Renly's death is only averted in the Final Loop when Joffrey and Sansa manage to keep him loyal, redirect the Tyrells' ambitions, and nip Stannis' rebellion in the bud. In that loop only Stannis' death is fixed, even Balon stays loyal until he dies of an illness.
• Irony:
  • In early chapters, Joffrey exasperatedly mentions just wanting to pick up his closest allies, drop everything and leave for the Summer Islands, though he never does. The thing is, the Islands have a record of the role of the Purple and the Heralds who are to end the Cycle. Even if it's fragmentary, it's a lot of information Joffrey ignored to hunt for even tinier scraps in places like Yi Ti and Sothoryos. There's even a cult of all things dedicated to people who he discovers are Sansa and himself.
  • The Red Comet was named King Joffrey's Comet in the original timeline as a pure sycophantic display of flattery. Long after Joffrey starts looping and rebuilding himself into a good person, it turns out he really does have a very special supernatural connection to the Comet, specifically to its counterpart.
  • There is a great deal made in both canon and other ASOIAF fanfic about Gerion Lannister's doomed expedition to Valyria to find the Lannister ancestral sword, Brightroar. In this story, when the man appears in the Summer Isles, he scoffs at the very notion of doing something so dangerous and stupid and tells how he made up that claim to get away from Tywin and Casterly Rock to live his own life, making Joffrey's obsession with getting it back in Arc 3 kind of Hilarious in Hindsight. So imagine Gerion's surprise when his nephew Joffrey shows up out of nowhere, with Brightroar in his possession. And somehow, that's not even the most surprising turn of events to occur on that day.
  • The letter Lysa sent Catelyn was the opening move of the series. Joff only learns of it and its importance in fostering the Stark-Lannister conflict in the Final Loop.
  • Tywin's personal study in Casterly Rock is flanked by twin male and female golden statues holding arms in an arch and each wearing a precious stone at their crown. Joffrey, who has recently dumped Jaime and Cersei together in a Gilded Cage in Casterly Rock, thinks the statues have "some twisted sense of irony he wasn't sure the Old Lion registered".
  • It's darkly hilarious and ironic how the boar winds up being the cause of Robert's first and final deaths. On the other hand, in the latter, he was perfectly sober and managed to live for a few hours after being gored without losing lucidity.
• I Shall Taunt You: When the Crownlander army led by Joffrey seems to waver in a battle against the northerners, Joffrey resorts to this to provoke Robb into a fight, perhaps hoping that decapitating the northern army will swing the battle again in his favor. Among other things, he says that even Bran had put up more of a fight (Bran had been saved from being crippled, but was killed in King's Landing during the coup in that loop), but Robb does not rise to his provocations until Joffrey kills Theon.
• Jaw Drop: One loop has Ser Barristan left slack-jawed, and everyone else in a Stunned Silence, after "Ser Jonnel", tournament winner who was just about to claim the Crown Prince's betrothed as his Queen of Love and Beauty, is revealed to be the Crown Prince all along.
• Kicked Upstairs: To prevent Renly from starting his rebellion, Joff gets the idea to change his seat from Master of Laws to Master of Ambassadors, a position he's much more suited for and gives him actual power and responsibility.
• Killed Off for Real: With the most recent loop being the final one, any deaths that happen this time will stick. Out of characters of note, The Mountain, Robert, Stannis, Shireen, Melisandre, Jorah Mormont and most of Daenerys' khalasar, Pocket, Littlefinger, Varys, Aegon, his loyalists, the Golden Company, Lancel, Daenerys, her dragons, Lysa Arryn, Smalljon Umber, Brienne of Tarth, Grand Maester Pycelle, Jeor Mormont, Ned Stark, Roose and Ramsay Bolton, Damon Marbrand, Old Walder Frey, Robar Royce, Brogan, Tywin Lannister, Lyra Mormont, and Randyll Tarly are dead for real. Word of God says Euron is dead too.
• Knighting: In the final loop, during the semi-final jousts at the Hand of the King's Tourney, Gregor Clegane attacks Loras Tyrell as in canon, and Ser Jonnel Stars (Joffrey again participating in the tourney under his assumed identity) intervenes on Loras's behalf. When Joffrey kills the Mountain and has his identity revealed, King Robert knights him on the spot.
  • After the tourney, many minor nobles and men-at-arms stayed on in King's Landing to savor the changes being brought about there and enjoy the camaraderie just a little longer, becoming the "silver knights" and unofficially joining Joffrey's entourage. After they fight beside Joffrey at the Battle of Dragonstone against Stannis, Joffrey knights everyone involved and makes the Silver Knights an official Order of Chivalry.
• The Lady's Favour: Sansa gives Joff a favor to carry with him as he marches off to destroy Renly's rebellion. They kind of forget about it in the mess of the collapse of Renly's army and Stannis' invasion of King's Landing.
• The Last Dance: Robert, after years of sloth and decadence, has a final impromptu melee with Joff. Both fight incredibly well; the last of their three bouts is even more of an exhibition match. He has the most wonderful day of his reign before realizing that he's comfortable in the legacy he's leaving behind, finishing off with an immense feast and wine. Some time later, he quietly dies of a stroke after some last words with Ned and Joff.
• Laugh Themselves Sick:
  • In one loop, due to the entirety of Joffrey's joke about his mother and Lady Stark's face looking like screwed-up lemons when they get upset, Robert, the entirety of Winterfell, and even Ned Stark himself are left helpless with laughter, especially when Tyrion starts leaving lemons all over the place.
  • In another loop, Robert also gets this reaction when Joffrey disguised himself as "the Silver Knight", won every competition in his tournament, and tried to claim his betrothed Sansa from himself, right under everyone's noses.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Joffrey is forced to make one after his right arm gets mangled in the Yi-Ti loop. He is almost tempted to choose "Life", since he'll just be resurrected, and will be free of his responsibilities to boot, but in the end does not hesitate in choosing "Limb" instead, remembering the sacrifices of his comrades in the Legion.
• Lightning Bruiser: Joffrey's preferred fighting styles revolve around speed and agility, and he is frequently noted to swiftly kill several opponents single-handedly, from peasant mooks to experienced knights, with ease in the midst of intense battle. King Robert notes this during his spar with Joffrey in Chapter 45, which combined with his unorthodox choice of weapons, Dual Wielding a sword and one-handed hammer, make even a veteran of combat like him hard pressed to read his movements.
• Logical Weakness: Joffrey is an immortal time-looper, but he has a few specific weaknesses that bring him down.
  • Despite his high position, assuming he stays in Westeros, he simply isn't aware of all of the power players in Westeros or of the reach of the ones he does know about. This is why Melisandre's shadow demons are such an issue for a long time: Joffrey has no way of knowing that Melisandre even exists, so he assumes that Stannis is the sorcerer behind them. Meanwhile, he doesn't realize just how deep Littlefinger's web of spies goes, so Baelish often catches him off guard.
  • Even after many loops, he still doesn't know what everyone wants or what makes everyone tick. He figures out his mother and Pycelle quickly, but Baelish and Varys in particular are still mysteries to him because of their indirect and secret way of getting what they want. Varys is the worst; it takes Sansa removing the memories from his brain before Joffrey has literally any idea what motivates him.
  • He doesn't have a defense for being Locked Out of the Loop by his mother and Small Council. Unused to having a King that actually cares about ruling, and the fact that, until recently, Joffrey was an unstable sociopath no one wanted to rule, he has to fight to actually be aware of anything that's happening, which only compounds his many problems.
  • Joffrey does not have an eidetic memory, and even if he did, he has no way of predicting every single long term effect of his actions. He often makes mistakes simply because he forgot about a specific event he needed to prevent or change, and sometimes the decisions he makes that should be beneficial turn out to be disastrous because of the butterfly effect. Just look at the loop where Ser Barristan wasn't fired from the Kingsguard, only for no-one to be able to save Daenerys from the manticore in Astapor.
• Lovecraft Lite: The ultimate fight is against an Eldritch Abomination bent on wiping out humanity that has already successfully wiped out 31 precursor civilizations, and the only hope of humanity's survival rests on an opposing Eldritch Abomination that has yet to beat its counterpart. Ultimately, though, the tone is still one of hope and the greatness of the human spirit, rather than nihilistic despair.
• Macguffin: There are several in the earlier loops, from the Mountain of the Moon to Brightroar. These slowly disappear once Joffrey starts dedicating himself to saving Westeros.
• Made of Iron: Between the otherworldly torment of the Purple and his frequently brutal and excruciating deaths, Joff's learned to endure intense amounts of pain and still fight to the very end. At the end of Chapter 52, Joff has the Red Keep come down on him when Daenerys invades King's Landing. Even with his body and spirit in shambles, he manages to slay Drogon in trial by combat, shrugs off losing his left arm to Belwas and continues his mad dash for Daenerys on the throne. Only Viserion busting in and incinerating Joffrey saved the Mad Queen's life.
• The Magic Comes Back: Meera Reed unwittingly convinces Sansa this is happening with the return of the Red Comet, awakening old powers such as wargs, dragons and the Warlocks of Qarth.
  • Archmaester Marwyn and his co-conspirators' primary aim is to help bring this about. As this aligns with Joffrey and Sansa's interests, he becomes an ally of the protagonists.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Actually averted in regard of Robert's final death. He suffers the misfortune of running into the very same boar that caused his original demise, but as he was sober, Joffrey quickly surmises that Cersei had no hand in it this time.
• Man Behind the Man: Archmaester Marwyn, for Pycelle.
  • The Yellow Emperor of Yi-Ti seems to love playing this on himself, leaving what is implied to be an intimidating illusion sitting upon his throne while he acts the role of a majordomo of the palace.
• Manipulative Bastard: Sansa, after joining Joffrey and moving to Braavos, begins training as one.
• The Matchmaker: At one party, Sansa is shown pushing two young folk with a crush on each other together to both give them their happiness, and form bonds between their families. Later, she gossips with Meera Reed about planning a match between Sandor Clegane and Lyra Mormont, as well as teasing Meera about her own crush on her Troubled, but Cute half-brother Jon Snow.
• Memetic Badass: Joffrey's deeds as an officer of the Dawn Legion makes him one of these among the troops in-universe, much to his bemused embarrassment.
• Memetic Mutation: In-Universe. For the first task of his Legion, Olyvar Frey has to lead it across harsh terrain and outrun Cersei's wheelhouse and arrive with them in full to their destination without impeding the wheelhouse's progress. Despite that exact exercise not being repeated, "outrunning the wheelhouse" is used as a shorthand for the brutal march exercise from there on.
• Mercy Kill: Joffrey thought maybe Sansa would like to kill Melisandre herself after Ned's death. A mildly perturbed Sansa just chides him and has him kill her outright.
• Mighty Whitey: Zig-zagged in the Yi-Ti Arc. The reason why Joffrey rises so quickly in the Dawn Legion is because he gained a lot of experience from his "Groundhog Day" Loop. He's quite skilled, but only as a newbie, as there are many other commanders and generals who could easily wipe the floor with him. His rapid ascension later was due to the fact that those above him were being decimated from attacks by the White Walkers. When faced with the promotions, Joffrey tried to refuse, only to be denied because the situation had deteriorated so rapidly that the legion needed anyone with even a smidgen of experience to fill the now empty ranks. It's heavily implied that this would have been a downplayed trope, if not for the White Walkers' presence.
• Mistaken Identity: Multiple instances in Chapter 17.
  • Mistaken for an Imposter: In Volantis, Joffrey is mistaken for a Faceless Man by the priesthood of R'hllor. Later in the story, Myrcella remarks that some of the servants at King's Landing have also begun to believe this in response to Joffrey's Character Development.
  • Mistaken For Bedslave/Recognition Failure: When Joffrey comes across Daenerys and Ser Jorah in Qarth, he first mistakes the former for a Lyseni Bedslave and then as Jorah's bastard daughter from one. Needless to say, this does not go over well.
• Moment of Weakness: In chapter 30 when Joffrey learns that his confidant Nalia had helped Littlefinger spy on him (possibly unwillingly) for months, he snaps and tortures and mutilates her. Once he is cognizant he is horrified by what he had done and by the fact that he enjoyed doing it.
• Mood Whiplash: This has tendency to happen at the end of happier time loops. In one instance, Joffrey's fulfilling life as a sailor is cut short when the rest of the crew are murdered in the night by Euron Greyjoy.
  • After Joffrey wins all the matches at the Hand's Tourney under a helmet and with an alias, he goes to crown Sansa his Queen of Love and Beauty. Naturally, the nobles are enraged that a random knight is proclaiming his love to the Prince's betrothed, and the scene quickly becomes tense; Ser Barristan and Jory Cassel almost draw swords, Robert, Cersei, and Ned call for his arrest, and even Bran starts to intervene. Then Sansa reveals him to be Joffrey and Robert bursts out laughing, Barristan and Jory have no idea what to do, Ned is somehow even angrier that he'd been duped, and even Cersei can't help but chuckle at the absurdity of the whole situation.
• Moral Myopia: Joffrey loathes the whole Double Standard the Westeros nobility hold towards the smallfolk. He gave "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Lord Darry about how the man expects his own son to be spared, because he's a young boy. This was when Darry sent thousands of younger boys and older men, who all have their own family, to die out in a skirmish caused by the Lord's pride. He even refused Darry's surrender and demanded that the Darry 'die as (he) lived' in a single combat to the death with said son.
• Morality Pet: Tyrion, Myrcella, Jon, Sandor, and finally Sansa have at different points served as this for Joff. In particular, Myrcella's presence greatly helps him control his PTSD. Later on, the people Joff regards as this keeps increasing to the point that, with the exception of his mother and biological father, he ends up regarding most people around him almost as family.
• Mordor: The ruined lands that once were Old Valyria. Joffrey scoffs at the idea there's anything like palaces left standing.
• Mushroom Samba: During Joffrey and Sansa's first loop together, Joff wound up badly hurt after the Hand of the King tourney. He's kept sedated with milk of the poppy, keeping him loopy enough that Sansa can easily question him. This allows her to receive vital information to ensure she begins looping as well.
• My Beloved Smother: Cersei, as per canon. Joff provokes her, lampshading just how much she coddled him, helping create the monster that is canon Joffrey. She lashes out and slaps him; a morose Joff just comments she should have done that a long time before.
• Mysterious Purple: "The Purple" as Joffrey calls it is an Eldritch Abomination of mysterious origin and semi-vague nature that is responsible for perpetuating his and later Sansa's Groundhog Peggy Sue state. It manifests in between deaths and loop resets as a long, stretched-out moment of agony during which only purple light can be discerned.
• Myth Arc: The origins of the Purple and why Joffrey is looping all seems to lead to the destruction of The White Walkers.
• Mythology Gag: Joffrey bringing Sansa into The Purple with him by having her kneel in front of him and stabbing her through the heart with Brightroar is an almost point-by-point recreation of the infamous scene in the Azor Ahai legend in canon.
• Naginatas Are Feminine: Western variant: after joining Joffrey in his journey through the Purple and taking a level in badass, Sansa takes up the spear as her preferred weapon.
• Nervous Wreck: Littlefinger as a mysterious assailant takes on and butchers his way through his men and establishments. Joffrey mocks him for this in the Hand of the King's tourney, making him realize the Prince is the killing machine himself.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When Joffrey faces Ramsay Bolton, caught trying to rape a mute Handmaiden, Ramsay tries to claim she invited him into her tent and dismisses the testimony of the guardsman who caught him as that of a spurned lover. Joffrey calls him out on it, because he can see what he used to be in Ramsay: a selfish monster used to having his way over the others.
• Not So Stoic:
  • The famously stoic Ned Stark breaks out in guffawing laughter when the joke about his wife and Cersei's faces look like they swallowed lemons reaches its peak, when Lady Stark is handed a drink with a full lemon in it and Robert does a Spit Take.
  • In a later loop, he goads his friend Robert on in an exhibition match against his own son Joffrey (who although is betrothed to his daughter Sansa, is a little too affectionate with her for his taste).
    Ned: Robert!!! Pull yourself together! BREAK HIS SHAMELESS PAWS!!!
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Pycelle. He fakes and doubles down on his pains and aches to make himself look harmless, though he secretly regulates every medicine dispensed at the Red Keep under Tywin's orders. He also secretly takes potent stimulants, and most importantly, he has a hidden master separate from Tywin - Archmaester Marwyn.
• Offered the Crown: The sorcerer Vajul became the Yellow Emperor of Yi-Ti by popular acclaim.
• Offing the Offspring: Heavily implied in chapter 49, when Cersei is framed for murdering Tyrion, Sansa and several guards goes off to have Cersei arrested. The queen mother quickly grabbed Myrcella and Tommen and dragged them towards an open window, it was only by Meera's intervention that this became an Interrupted Suicide.
  • In the Final Loop, Joffrey brings an entire fleet against Dragonstone to crush Stannis’s army. Stannis sacrifices Shireen to the Lord of Light out of desperation (or maybe Melisandre did so without his approval; it’s not completely clear), but Joffrey wins anyway so it was All for Nothing.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • In the Red Wolf loop, Sansa tries to fight her way out of the Red Keep. She dies in the process, but she apparently took two guards down with her.
  • Ser Barristan and Ser Jaime's fight with the Mountain is not seen, but they manage to take him down without any major injuries.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • At the beginning, Joffrey only wanted to kill the person who had served him the poisoned wine resulting in his canon death, believing it was Tyrion. So he handed him that same wine, only for Tyrion to gulp it down immediately. Joffrey realizes in utter horror that no, his uncle wasn't trying to kill him, and tries to call for a Maester, but Tyrion dies anyway.
  • Joffrey's reaction when he realized the Tyrells had joined Stark's side in the Red Wolf loop.
  • He also has this when he finds out that he had been knocked out, not killed by Stannis's troops. Worse, he was about to be sacrificed to Rh'llor in a flaming pyre.
  • In the Ibben Port loop, Joffrey and the Ibbenese crew managed to kill a deformed whale. Except instead of being relieved, the entire crew sans Joffrey began to panic:
    Joffrey: What?! The whale’s dead! For the Gods' sake, what’s wrong, Art!?
    Art: N-n-not whale. Leviathan.

    Something big begins emerging from the waters.
    Art: B-B-B-baby Leviathan!

    Cue Mama Leviathan. Ibben loop ends.
  • So many in the Yi-Ti Arc - but some of the more startling is when the Dawn Legion discovered that the dead are being reanimated.
    • Others include finding out that the Sorcerer they had thought to be the one behind it, was in fact a Red Herring, if anything he's worshipping those who are responsible: The White Walkers. Joffrey finds this out as he's in enemy territory which he realized belatedly is a large tomb. And the dead are beginning to rise...
    • And yet the largest still is when Joffrey realizes that one of the wights has the symbol of House Frey on his armor, meaning that Westeros has already been overrun.
  • In the Valyrian Loop, Joffrey has this when he realized that there was a dragon still living in its ruins.
  • Robert, Cersei, and all the other spectators present react this way when the Silver Knight, who up until that point had been masked the entire tourney, is revealed to be Joffrey... who at the moment is jousting against The Mountain, and losing.
  • Chapter 52, Sansa and Joffrey upon realizing that Daenerys had decided to invade Westeros earlier than expected.
  • Chapter 58. The Purple is damaged, possibly irrevocably... and Joffrey and Sansa are dropped in the worst possible place and time: canon, just after Oxcross.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Daenerys becomes this in the Final Loop after the harrowing experience of dying, seeing the true face of the horror of the Long Night, and being resurrected. She resolves to kill everything in flames rather than allow the Walkers to twist all life.
• One-Man Army: Joff evolves into this after countless loops that have taught him the best way to hone his body and mind. In his first encounter versus the Rainbow Guard, he kills four of the seven knights by himself. In the second, he takes out one of the remaining three - armed only with his gauntleted fists... after shaking off a bunch of peasants trying to pin him down. The last two, Brienne and Loras, die when Joff engages them with a halberd and the ornamental antlers of his helmet.
  • Later, he kills Drogon in one-on-one fight and would have killed Viserion if others hadn't intervened.
• Parental Substitute: Ned Stark served as one for Joffrey at the end of the first arc, showing him care and guidance after his Villainous BSoD and instilling in him the values he would need to grow into a better man. Comes full circle in Chapter 66 when Joffrey, the now virtuous savior king of Westeros, finally works up the courage to tell Ned the truth about himself and tearfully thanks him for all he did for him in past lives, and Ned takes it in stride despite not remembering any of it.
  Joffrey: I don't care what they say. YOU'RE my father!
• Person of Holding: Joffrey somewhat counts after he finds Brightroar and it fuses itself to his soul, allowing him to summon it from nowhere and wield it in later loops.
• The Philosopher King: Vajul, the Yellow Emperor of Yi-Ti, certainly has shades of this: he gives off the impression to Joffrey and Sansa that he'd have been perfectly happy being just the benevolent sorcerous overlord of Carcosa, exploring and pondering the nature of existence and magic while letting his people do their thing. Unfortunately for him, his loyal troops just had to go and proclaim him Emperor in front of his eagerly accepting populace...
• Point of No Return: The Oxcross Loop. Following the damage to the Pillars that sustain the Purple after Joff dies to a Walker's blade, he and Sansa spend the loop restoring them, even if they are aware the damage might be too extensive. As they die in that life, the Pillars fulfill their function one last time and break up from the strain, meaning that whatever happens, it's their final loop one way or the other.
• Praetorian Guard: After the lessons learned from the Yi-Ti arc and Braavos arc, Joffrey assembles one out of the lesser lords and noble bastards he knows, as per Dare to Be Badass above. Once they accept, they become his new officers of the Royal Guard.
  • As his new companion through the Purple, Sansa forms one of her own from the daughters of Northern noble houses, to join her in King's Landing and be her retinue of handmaidens within its social battlegrounds. It's not an Amazon Brigade, as not all of them know how to actually fight, but they run the gamut from the more martially-minded (like Lyra Mormont and Meera Reed) to the more social (like Wylla Manderley and Talia Forrester).
• Precursors: Planetos has had at least thirty-one different Precursor civilizations (including the Deep Ones who contact Joffrey), all of whom were cyclically exterminated by the Long Night.
• Primal Scene: How Joffrey discovered that Cersei and Jaime were lovers.
• Public Secret Message: Joffrey discovers a coded message no one has ever been able to crack. Though he knows it's meant for him, it takes him a very long time to decipher it, eventually managing to identify each symbol as referring to a specific constellation with a different number of stars as described by the First Men, but it's still nonsense. Then he decides to incorporate a mysterious riddle he found in the Ruined City of Yeen, "everyone but the purple prince steps to the right", changing each letter except those in his name one position to the right - which produces the intended message.
• Puppet King: Renly, as it turns out. He was never as charismatic or intelligent as he thought he was, and when pitted against Joff, his coalition wavers with each blow it's dealt. He has no experience resolving his army's logistics crises and his solutions backfire. All of this comes to cost him everything in the end.
• Purple Is Powerful: Each time Joffrey is reborn he experiences an endless moment of agony in which he can see only purple light. He comes to refer to the force behind the time loops as "The Purple."
• Quality vs. Quantity: The conflict between Joff and Renly in the Blackworks loop is fought along these lines. Renly's single advantage is his absurd numerical advantage; everything else is against him. He's slowly marching towards King's Landing from the Stormlands, his impractically huge army is all but depleting any resources they can seize, his footsoldiers are barely-trained peasant levies, and his commanders can barely stomach each other. Joff, on the other hand, has a strikeforce a twentieth the size of Renly's, but they're all professional warriors and trained up to his very exacting standards, his generals are very much united and rallying behind him, and he can easily replenish his supplies by preying on Renly's van. Renly's army doesn't even make it out of the Stormlands before its collapse.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • When Joffrey confronts Renly during the Battle in the Rain in the Blackworks Loop, he viciously rips into him and all the lords who called their banners for him, demanding to know how they could be so stupid and blinded by ambition to choose such a weak and pampered Puppet King to lead them. The Reach lords can do nothing but lay down their arms in surrender and avoid Joffrey's gaze, and the Stormlords are so shamed by their betrayal and mystified by Joffrey's Warrior King persona, they immediately renounce Renly and declare Joffrey the Stormking.
  • Joff delivers a brutal one to Daenerys in the Blackworks loop, focusing on how stupid she is for believing it was the birth of her dragons that sparked the return of magic, when actually it's mere spillover from the energies of the Red Comet. He punctuates it by killing Drogon, leading to a hysterical Daenerys to send her remaining soldiers and Viserion to finish him off.
  • Joffrey gives Cersei an utterly epic one that she's had a long time coming, in the Oxcross Loop:
    Joffrey: You were wrong. Some truths can't change. All of our actions have consequences, cause and effect. You forgot that, or else never knew it… You… You act as if you're the only person in the world, mother. The only valid experience is yours. The only true feelings are your own.
    Cersei: Joffrey, I don't know what-
    Joffrey: That's why you failed! That's why you caused all of this! That's why you made me!
    Cersei: Joffrey-!
    Joffrey: You are a world into itself Cersei! Whatever you feel for me or Tommen or Myrcella is because the only thing you truly love is you-
    [Cersei slaps Joffrey. Beat.]
    Joffrey: You should've done that years ago.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: When Joff gets the idea of making Renly his Master of Ambassadors, he briefly toys with the thought of sending him as Ambassador to Mussovy.
• Red Baron: King Joffrey Baratheon, Stormking.
• Redemption Equals Death: Joffrey dies a lot before he starts to get the idea. A major turning point seems to be the first time he died protecting Ned Stark.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: Despite his progress to becoming a better person, Joffrey acknowledges that he still has sadistic tendencies and hates himself for it. He comes to regard his most violent and sadistic aspects as a curse hanging over him, every now and then threatening to drag him back into the monster he started as; he refers to these as the Red, at least until the Oxcross loop, in which he accepts them into himself rather than keeping them as chained and separate as possible.
• Refuge in Audacity: As Death Is Cheap, Joffrey has the benefit of doing the craziest things with the benefit of killing himself, if he gets fed-up with the situation.
  • He once gave a "Reason You Suck" Speech to Cersei and Ned before stabbing himself to death to the horror of onlookers.
  • In one loop, he promptly confessed that he was truly a bastard born of incest to Renly's troops. It was mistaken as a drunken confession but it was the only time Renly was taken aback. When Renly was assassinated by Stannis, Joffrey was aghast when the Tyrell-Baratheon forces turned and made him king despite being disgusted by the turn of events.
  • In the loops where Joffrey stayed in King's Landing, Joffrey's many, many quirks (jogging in armour, forcing Sandor to pile heavy books on his chest, etc) were Hand Waved as this. In a later loop, when he takes a literal interpretation for EVERYONE BUT THE PURPLE PRINCE STEPS TO THE RIGHT, Sandor brushes it off because it's not the weirdest thing he'd done.
  • In his first loop with Sansa, he entertains Tommen and Myrcella by singing a song while he dances with his horse. It's as ridiculous as it is lovable.
  • Joffrey's first meeting with Daenerys is this. First, he mistook her as a slave, then a bastard slave, then just a bastard to Jorah's increasing fury. After that's been cleared, Daenerys started with her speech about getting back what's hers. Joffrey promptly confesses that he doesn't care about the Iron Throne and that she can have it, then proceeds to give the Mother of Dragons all the information he has about the Five Kings, unbidden. Daenerys is so taken aback, she ended up sort-of befriended Joffrey in an attempt to gauge for more.
  • A later loop has Joffrey, in his guise as "Ser Jonnel the Silver Knight", win every competition in the tourney and then openly declare Sansa Stark, the Prince's betrothed and his recent companion through the Purple, as his Queen of Love and Beauty with a lot of scenery chewing. And when she gets tired of the joke, Sansa finally reveals his identity, kisses him senseless, and joins him on his horse while everyone else is stunned speechless.
  • Joffrey apparently managed to begin writing an opera adaptation of his adventures through the Purple called "A Speck of Purple" somewhere in the chaos of his training in Asshai. If he's to be believed, it's halfway finished and he still needs to work on the songs.
• Renaissance Man: Joffrey after several lifetimes dedicated himself to studying under the Archmaesters of the Citadel, not to mention his experience from working and traveling, too. He's now skilled in sailing, healing, history, mathematics and economics, astronomy, smithing, geology, and more.
• Retcon: The Prologue of the story is no longer canon according to Word of God and is currently being rewritten to work with the current story.
• Riddle for the Ages: Where the Purple and the Red Comet originally came from and why they exist and carry out the functions that they do. The Deep Ones can only speculate on whether the Purple was created by Recursive Precursors or by straight-up higher beings.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Robb's war against the Lannisters in the Red Wolf loop. After Joffrey horrifically mutilates Ned Stark and inadvertently gets Sansa and Arya killed, Robb skips all pretenses of honor and political discourse and storms down to King's Landing to avenge his family. Makes mincemeat of the Lannister armies until he finally reaches the capital, burns the city to ash, and beats Joffrey to death in a sequence both satisfying and terrifying.
  • Sansa has her own in Chapter 49. First Cersei has Tyrion killed in the most obvious and inept way possible, prompting Sansa to arrest her and have her allies investigate. Then Stannis sends his fleet to take King's Landing while his Shadow Baby kills Ned. Enraged, Sansa rallies the remaining Kingsguard, the Watch and even the smallfolk, and succeeds in annihilating Stannis' force and killing him personally.
  • The next chapter, an infuriated Joff strongarms the Redwyne fleet, the Riverlands army, the cowed Stormlords and Tywin's belated army into attacking every single stronghold that sided with Stannis.
• Royal Brat: Joffrey, to start with. He eventually becomes The Wise Prince after countless repeating deaths and Character Development.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: King Joffrey and Queen Sansa. Let it never be said that these two don't personally put in the work to ruling their kingdom.
• Running Gag:
  • The imaginary Tyrion giving Joffrey a score after all his puns or bad jokes.
  • Robert always assuming that Joffrey wants to leave King's Landing so he can "Make the Eight" and Cersei having to convince him to not follow.
  • Tommen being confused as to why Joffrey is suddenly being nice to him, especially after the Yi-Ti arc.
  • The people of the Red Keep, especially Sandor and Tyrion, trying to make sense of Joffrey's bewildering antics and changed behavior
• Sacrificial Lion: Stannis. As Joff's loops start after Jon Arryn's death, Stannis has already left King's Landing, convinced of the illegitimacy of Cersei's children and into the waiting arms of Melisandre. Thus, he's the only major pretender to the throne that Joffrey simply cannot charm, cow, bribe or otherwise convince to follow him. Beyond that, Joff knows he needs a great military victory to convince the martially-obsessed Westerosi lords that he's a strong king, and Stannis begins his canon rebellion like clockwork. Thus, even if Joff would like it to be otherwise, crushing Stannis is the simplest and easiest way to garner the support he needs.
  • Likewise, Daenerys. Joff decides that had he had more time or lives, the possibility of luring Daenerys to his side might have been there - except for her dragons. As far as Joffrey knows, every life she makes it to Westeros, she's left broken, her only consolation to be found in her dragons. With his newfound empathy for the smallfolk and even some of the nobility, he cannot find a way to reconcile the power Daenerys' dragons offer, her ambitions and madness, and Westeros' needs in the face of the Long Night. Reluctantly, and feeling like a hypocrite every step of the way, he orders Daenerys' kidnapping or assassination, though he's well aware there is no chance for the former to succeed.
• Screw Destiny: In one arc, Joffrey decides to prove to himself that he's capable of averting his destiny by singling out a mountain near the Eyrie so tall it is said to be impossible to climb, and spends severals loops until he finally manages to climb it to the top.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Still very much Joff's attitude to getting anything he needs from an education to a fast ship out of Westeros. Justified as he now has several lifetimes of experience that prove this works more often then not.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In one time loop, Joffrey decides the crown and throne aren't worth it and runs off to Lys with the Hound. He even decided that if things ever turn to the worse, he'll take Sandor, Sansa, Jon and Tyrion and run off to the Summer Isles.
  • The entire Yi Ti Arc began when a tired Joffrey left Westeros for the Free Cities, eventually joining the local armies and actually doing quite well... until the spreading Zombie Apocalypse tide from Westeros reaches him.
• Seen It All: After some time, Joffrey and Sansa becomes this. He even says that Stygai's last day and the eldritch horror in it are the second most disturbing thing he has ever seen.
  • And yet, the entire attitude breaks down into incoherence the moment he meets Gerion Lannister, who looks like a laughing, perverted Tywin.
• Senseless Sacrifice: When Stygai was being overrun by the Others, all of its inhabitants killed themselves in a ritual designed to disrupt/destroy the Red Comet. It didn't even make a scratch and spawned some eldritch horror instead.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: After the Yi-Ti Arc, Joffrey has clearly not taken his army's Last Stand very well; all too often, whenever he touches weapons, knives or hammers, he finds himself flashing back to the war and almost losing his mind, and it takes Myrcella to bring him out of it.
  • In one of the earlier loops, after Joffrey breaks down, Robert correctly ignores the Grandmaester's diagnosis of Joffrey and states he's seen the same traumatized Thousand-Yard Stare in soldiers after the Battle of the Trident.
  • Joffrey's also deathly afraid of hurting people he cares about and is horrified when he accidentally squeezes Sansa's hand too hard. He also views Lady as stupid for dismissing him as a threat.
• Shout-Out: Multiple ones to the Cthulhu Mythos. The Deep Ones even end up helping Joffrey from beyond the grave.
• Skewed Priorities: In the Blackworks Loop, Lord Eldon Estermont grouses internally that the Reacher lords keep squabbling and jockeying for influence with Renly as their army disintegrates around them and Joff's forces keep threatening them.
• Smash the Symbol: After killing Aegon in the final loop, Joff throws Blackfyre, the symbol of Targaryen power and their right to rule over Westeros, into the sea.
• Spanner in the Works: Sometimes Joffrey is thwarted through no fault of his own, but because he realistically cannot control everyone. Cersei and Baelish are common ones, Melisandre and her shadow demons are another serious problem since it's not until very late in the loops Joffrey or more accurately, Sansa has any defenses against her ability to quickly kill someone at a distance. Varys is another potential spanner, and unlike the others Joffrey hasn't got him figured out.
• Spit Take: When the lemons gag is taken to its logical conclusion through a whole lemon being brought to Catelyn in a glass (It Makes Sense in Context), Robert unleashes one all over the back of Ned's head. It breaks his composure and he starts laughing uncontrollably.
• Squad Nickname: In the final loop, each regiment of the Royal Guard gets one, depending of which engagement they've seen: the First Regiment, who stormed Dragonstone to nip Stannis's rebellion in the bud, became known as the Mistwalkers; the Second, who met the Golden Company at sea and sunk Aegon's forces, has been dubbed the Nightsails; the Third, who accompanied Sansa beyond the Wall and caught the first strike of the White Walkers, received the name of Winterkillers; finally, the Fourth, who took down Rhaegal after Daenerys's death in Harrenhal, is renowned as the Dragonslayers.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Unsurprisingly, Gerion Lannister is almost identical to his brother Tywin, except he laughs a lot more.
  • Apparently Joffrey's a dead ringer for Lann the Clever. Sansa definitely sees the resemblance when she sees Lann in a weirwood vision during the Summer Islands loop, though also notes that the latter has more angular, aquiline features than Joffrey.
• Superhero Sobriquets: Joffrey earns several at different parts of the story:
  • Yi-Ti Loop: The Silver Lion
  • Chapter 33: The Bloody Lion
  • Valyria Loop: The Great One, Dragonslayer
  • Blackworks Loop: Stormking
    • Sansa earns one of her own during her battle against Stannis: Magnar
• Superpower Lottery: From the Shadowbinders' point of view, Sansa is this as she has both the Gift for magic and the Blood to power her spells.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Whenever Joffrey asks permission to visit places outside of King's Landing, for research and so forth, Robert mistakenly believes that it was because his son was doing 'The Eight' - bedding a woman in each kingdom (and Riverrun).
• Surrounded by Idiots: Joffrey's positive experience with the Yi-Ti army left him used to certain standards in the military. Westerosi armies... don't quite reach that.
• Survivor Guilt: Joffrey displays this after the Yi-Ti loop, thinking that a general should have died with his men.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: Brightroar.
• Terror Hero: In Chapter 34, Joffrey starts hunting down everyone involved in Littlefinger's empire of corruption, while making some headway in unraveling the mess of conspiracies and lies in King's Landing.
• That Man Is Dead: When confronted by Myrcella under suspicions of being a Faceless Man impersonating the Prince, Joffrey breaks down and babbles a bit about his experiences, finishing by saying the Joffrey Myrcella knew died a long time before. Myrcella whispers she's thankful old Joffrey's gone, and Joffrey can only wearily agree.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: After a particularly brutal battle, Sandor calls Joffrey "Your Grace" for the first time. For some reason, it's intensely painful for Joffrey.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: The horrifying truth behind the First War for the Dawn.
• Token Minority: Joffrey in the Yi-Ti arc, being one of two known Westerosi characters serving in the Dawn Legion, the other being the second-in-command of the ship he used to sail to Yi-Ti, Chief Valyion. Also Major Yham, being a dark-skinned Summer Islander serving in the Dawn Legion as a heavy cavalry commander.
• Took a Level in Badass: The primary and most frequent crux of Joffrey's Character Development, along with Took a Level in Kindness and Dumbass No More. Joffrey starts off as the same weak, simpering coward from canon, but resolves to grow stronger after repeated deaths at the hands of his enemies. After enduring Training from Hell from multiple teachers and leading the legions of Yi-Ti against the White Walkers, he becomes a hardened and ridiculously skilled Warrior Prince well-versed in nearly every weapon under the sun with too many badass feats to list here.
  • Sansa Stark, Joffrey's betrothed, is revealed to be a Human Weapon created by the Purple just like Joffrey meant to aide him in stopping the Long Night. When she learns of this and joins him in his crusade, she demands that Joffrey train her in combat so that she won't become a liability to him. With three years of intense physical training, along with learning the ways of the Manipulative Bastards around her, she becomes Joffrey's chief confidante, smart enough to co-manage his political and economic projects and skilled enough in combat to defeat several assassins sent after her.
  • In his latest loop, Joffrey finally gets around to creating his own royal army beholden to the crown and starts recruiting the peasants of King's Landing and young lords across the kingdoms with little to no standing with the higher nobility. He subjects them all to Training from Hell in an effort to turn them all into disciplined and loyal killing machines capable of destroying armies several times larger than his own, as he does to Renly's army in Chapter 47. His first recruits include Jon Snow, Lancel Lannister, Tyrek Lannister, Willard Mooton, Renfred Rykker, and Olyvar Frey, all of whom are decent warriors in their own right, but under Joffrey's tutelage become officers capable of wrecking lords and knights with several decades worth of combat experience.
• Took a Level in Kindness: One of the most prominent and well-received points of Joffrey's Character Development, next to Took a Level in Badass and Dumbass No More. Joffrey starts off as the same cruel, sadistic, and completely unsympathetic monster from canon who treated everyone else around him like dirt and took joy in inflicting pain and suffering on others for no reason. However, he suffers a great Trauma Conga Line because of his lack of morality and poor choices and eventually undergoes a Villainous BSoD after the weight of his trauma and the reveal of his true parentage finally breaks him. After being mentored by Ned Stark and various other well-adjusted individuals from several parts of the world, Joffrey grows into a truly kind, compassionate, just, and personable young man who cares greatly for the people in his life and dedicates his time to caring for and trying to save the people of Westeros from the Zombie Apocalypse that is soon to come.
  • Most of the people who knew Joffrey best from his first life, like his siblings Tommen and Myrcella, his uncle Tyrion, and his sworn shield Sandor, often become his closest friends and confidantes across loops. It usually takes a while for them to open up to this new Joffrey given how bad of a person he was before, but the fact that they reciprocate his kindness and understanding, even when Joffrey doesn't put much effort into getting close to them, just goes to show how far he has come and how much a few gestures of genuine goodness can do.
  • Sansa also undergoes this after her first couple of loops, as the Trauma Conga Line she suffered in her first loop and spending a life developing a relationship with Joffrey in Braavos in her second loop allows her to mature and drop her Alpha Bitch personality. In her latest loop, Sansa struggles to maintain the image of the pampered and indignant little girl she was before her experiences with The Purple to ward off her family's worries and suspicions, but she stops trying when she makes Arya cry in one of their fights, feeling genuinely horrified at what she had done.
• The Tourney: Joffrey, once he's matured to the point of working out how to best save Westeros, despairs at the massive prizes involved in the Hand of the King's Tourney, and how they will drain the treasury... until he takes a second look, and realizes how nicely they would help finance his ideas.
• Training from Hell: This trope is played all over the place depending on where and with whom Joffrey is training with. With The Hound it's averted, zig-zagged with the Eastern Wind crew, straight in Ibben loop, justified with himself during the Mountains Arc, and reconstructed with the Yi-Ti Arc.
  • Sansa's training in the House of the South in Asshai.
• Training the Gift of Magic: Sansa in the Asshai loop. She convinces Joff to take her there after the Blackworks loop to explore and hone her latent potential for magic beyond her warging abilities. After seven years of Training from Hell with the Shadowbinders, she fights a blood demon in her initiation ritual and triumphs, despite sorcerers from rival sects stacking the odds heavily against her.
  • Joffrey doesn't possess an innate gift for higher magic like Sansa, so he settles for learning aeromancy in the meantime.
• Trauma Conga Line: Joffrey starts out with a sort of Humiliation Conga, but after his character growth he occasionally suffers this. This is also happens to any other character in Purple Days, be they the Lannisters, the Tyrells, Baratheons and so forth. Some deserved, some not.
• True Sight: How Sansa sees Archmaester Marwyn controlling Pycelle.
• Undying Loyalty: Joff has learned to bring this out in everyone he interacts with, which makes him a peerless military commander and politician. Likewise, Sansa, once she begins looping, is able to inspire this in everyone, from inept Kingsguards to smallfolk, forming a strong force that shatters Stannis' ambitions.
• Undying Warrior: Although Joffrey has been many professions across thousands of "Groundhog Day" Loop iterations, the appreciation he gains for the soldiery and their sense of comradery notably sticks.
• Universally Beloved Leader:
  • Joffrey is beloved in the Yi-Ti loop among the Five Forts, in the Blackworks loop, and especially in the Final Loop.
  • Edmure Tully gets this status among the Riverlords as well in the Final Loop after killing Rhaegal.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Joffrey and Sansa start feeling it towards each other after years of living together during their loop in Braavos.
  • Gets resolved by the end of chapter 42, at the expense of Sealord Ferrago's expensive dining table. By the next loop together, they can hardly keep their hands off each other.
• Unstoppable Rage: For all of his Character Development, Joff still carries a deep sadistic streak. He's in control most of the time, but there are circumstances in which he looses the monster he used to be. He's thoroughly ashamed of himself when this happens, though Sansa is learning how to help him and ease the consequences of his fury.
• Villainous BSoD: The climax of the Trauma Conga Line Joffrey suffers happens when he discovers his true parentage, which completely atomizes the last bit of his sanity. This causes him to commit suicide repeatedly, over several loops, in several gruesome ways without ever truly dying, and in the process, he realizes just what an awful person he was. Eventually, he just gives up and shuts down almost entirely, until Ned comforts him at his lowest point.
• War Is Glorious / War Is Hell: The Westerosi lords and knights almost invariably hold the former view, but the latter view has been pummeled into Joffrey by repeated experience. Hence his absolute outrage at Lord Darry during the engagement at Brindleford. He also despises Renly for espousing the first viewpoint.
  • Sansa comes to share the latter viewpoint as well, when she gets her first taste of war when Stannis invades King's Landing in Chapter 49. After she watches several of her comrades die, receives numerous wounds, and personally slays Stannis, she reflects on how foolish she was to think of war as all gallant knights and mesmerizing songs in her first life.
• Warts and All: Joff is well aware of what a horrible human being Cersei is, but can't stop loving her. That doesn't mean he isn't also fed up with her attempts at seizing power and her Stupid Evil tendencies, and soon after his coronation in the Final Loop, he has her sent back to live in a Gilded Cage in the Westerlands with Jaime.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": When living in the Summer Islands, Joff names the ornery ox he bought Stennis.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 37. The truth of the Purple, Joffrey's true role, and the Cycle and how to break it is revealed.
• Wham Line:
  • In-Universe “There’s... something... deeply wrong with you... Joffrey...” a line that haunts him and leads to his reflection and eventual growth.
  • "Not whale... Leviathan. B-b-b-b-baby leviathan."
  • "...Who told you your son was making it out of this field alive?"
  • EVERYONE BUT THE PURPLE PRINCE STEPS TO THE RIGHT
  • ‘YOU ARE PART OF AN UNFINISHED WEAPONS SYSTEM DESIGNED TO END THE PHENOMENA DESCRIBED BY HUMANITY AS ‘THE LONG NIGHT’, A RECURRING EXTINCTION EVENT THAT CLEANSES THIS PLANET’S BIOSPHERE IN PERIODIC NON REGULAR INTERVALS DETERMINED BY COMPLEX ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA. YOU ARE BUT THE LATEST ITERATION OF THIS SYSTEM, GIVEN FORM JUST BEFORE THE ONSET OF THE CYCLE’S NEXT STAGE.
• What Is This Feeling?: Joffrey has this in the earlier chapters, not understanding the feeling of guilt and sadness he has in response to his actions.
  • Later, as the loops go on, he can't seem to figure out why he is fascinated by Sansa Stark, to the point things like holding her hand make his stomach flutter, which, after holding her in his arms in one instance, he mistakes for a stomach ailment.
• What's Up, King Dude?: In the Blackworks Loop, Sansa is forced to personally intervene in a quarrel between a merchant and a client. Deconstructed in that there are lower courts that should have handled the case, and she makes it a point to protest the waste of her time quite vociferously.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Joff gives Sansa a vial of poison to kill herself with the instruction to use it immediately when the Others get too close. He keeps a vial of his own, but when the Yellow Emperor's palace is attacked, he takes too long in studying the scrolls detailing a piece of the Purple and takes the poison too late even when Sansa warns him, leading to another contact with the power of the Red Comet.
• What You Are in the Dark: As the White Walkers and their wights approach the Dawn Fortress, Joffrey faces the possibility that he will die a permanent death at their hands, and thinks for a moment about running away, then killing himself to reset the loop, with no one to remember his betrayal. He decides that doing so would mean he had not really changed from the coward he once was, and resolves to Face Death with Dignity. And boy he does he make good on that resolve, though he's successfully resurrected regardless.
• Who Are You?: In the Oxcross loop, mobbed by starving smallfolk, Joff delivers a perfect speech to demonstrate he empathizes with their misery, promises to help them with the Red Keep's supplies, and even convinces the High Septon to pitch in as well. An awed, confused Tyrion asks this of his nephew.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Daenerys is forcefully transformed into this after a botched assassination, a good look at the Eldritch Abomination behind the incoming Long Night, and being resurrected. She's left with the absolute certainty all life will die, and prefers the idea of killing everything herself in dragonflame rather than allow the Walkers to win.
• The Worf Effect: After Joffrey fully grows into The Wise Prince / The Good King, not even Tywin Lannister can intimidate, brow-beat or cow him.
• Wrong-Name Outburst: An odd example, but the spirit is there: during one of Joffrey's first plans to lose his virginity, he plans to have sex with a whore that he tells to respond to Margaery. During the deed, he then calls her Sansa without seeming to realize it.
• You Are in Command Now: One of the main reasons Joffrey ascends the ranks of the Dawn Legion, all the way up to being its supreme commander.
  • When he heard the commotion coming for him, the sorcerer Vajul thought he was getting deposed... and then he got carried out to thunderous roars of "Emperor!"
• Your Days Are Numbered: Pycelle's records show the prolonged poisoning he's subjected Robert to, which, coupled with his gluttonous and lecherous lifestyle, to Joffrey's horror, means the King is a dead man walking by the beginning of the loop.
• You're Not My Father: He doesn't go and say it, but Joff dumping Cersei and Jaime in the Westerlands and walking away makes it very clear that as far as he's concerned, their role in his story is over.

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