History Characters / ASongOfIceAndFireTywinLannister

* PetTheDog: Towards Ilyn Payne, the loyal former captain of his guard. He was upset that Aerys' cut out his tongue so after the rebellion he arranged for Ilyn to become the King's Justice to make up for it. Likewise, when Tywin took Ice, Ned Stark's valyrian great sword, from Ilyn, he gave him a beautifully decorated sword as a replacement.

* {{Foil}}:
** To Walder Frey.
*** Tywin is just as much of a petty and treacherous schemer as Lord Frey, probably even more so, and they're both widely hated throughout Westeros. However, the difference between them is that Tywin has enough power and prestige to demand respect from those around him no matter how dishonorable his actions are.
*** They are both notorious fence sitters. Walder Frey only sided with the rebellion once it was clear they would win, something that people mock him for to this very day. Tywin did the same thing when he sacked King's Landing in Robert's name at the end of the war and only Ned Stark and House Martell were willing to call him out on it.
*** Walder Frey is a DirtyOldMan who has dozens of wives and mistresses and countless offspring. Tywin married once and had three kids. When Joanna died, he refused to remarry and makes it his children's responsibility to produce heirs. [[spoiler:Also, while Walder Frey wears his debauchery on his sleeves, Tywin keeps his use of whores secret to avoid public scrutiny.]]
*** Both of them have very low opinions of their children, but they'll be damned if anyone else disrespects them. Also, both of them to are desperate to get their children married into Great Houses. Walder Frey struggles to find appropriate matches for his children because no one wants to marry into his family, Tywin struggles to get his kids married because they fight against it every step of the way.
** He is also one to Eddard Stark:
*** While Tywin's main aim is ensuring his family's and nobility's supremacy and rules the Westerlands through fear, Eddard is driven by good government, doing the best he can for his people.
*** Tywin's only use for his children is how well they will fit in his plans, ignores them when what they say doesn't fit with his thoughts and hates Tyrion for something that is not his fault. Eddard loves his children equally, is willing to fulfill their wishes (up to a point), doesn't force them into unwanted marriages and hears them out if they have a problem.
*** Tywin is never happy with the level of power he has, and seeks to increase it whenever he can. Eddard was perfectly content with his role as Lord of Winterfell and became the Hand only out of worry for his friend and wanting to find out what happened to Jon Arryn.
*** Tywin is TheUnfettered, willing to do anything if it will give him victory, up to and including DisproportionateRetribution on whoever he perceives as an enemy. Eddard is TheFettered, willing to go against his best friend's orders when he orders Daenerys' assassination.
*** Tywin had Rhaegar's children murdered to eliminate an obstacle to Robert's accesion to the throne. Eddard sought to protect Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen from being killed when he decided to support Stannis.
*** Eddard died in public, under the light of day, without fear, his last act helping his daughters, and is mourned across the North, the Riverlands and the Vale. [[spoiler:Tywin dies alone, enclosed in the privy, scared out of his mind, his last act cursing his son, and people celebrate his passing.]]
*** [[spoiler:After Tywin's death, his children proceed to bring down his entire legacy, and multiple conspiracies spring out in an attempt to end House Lannister's hold on power. After Eddard's death, his children struggle to maintain his legacy, and conspiracies form to restore House Stark to power - up to being willing to fight '''in the middle of winter''' for the chance of rescuing one of his daughters.]]
** Both Tyrion and Tywin are intelligent, capable men with a keen sense of strategy and a tight grasp on how to properly play the game of thrones. But Tywin's refusal to openly show any kind of perceived weakness stands in stark contrast to Tyrion's willingness to bear his flaws on his sleeve. Tywin's ruthlessness and unpleasant personality is also often juxtaposed with that of the more noble Tyrion.
** He's also one to Otto Hightower. Both were ruthlessly ambitious men determined to see a grandson of theirs on the Iron Throne, with their only daughter married to the King. Both were Hands of the King but were stripped of that position when their relationship with the monarch they served turned sour (Viserys I fired Otto as Hand for overreaching himself by consistently urging Viserys to make Aegon his heir rather than Rhaenyra, while Aerys II turned on Tywin for his constant badgering the former for a royal union between Cersei and Rhaegar), but both would later serve as Hand of the King to their grandson. Both saw their efforts to prevent an unstable political situation from degenerating into CivilWar destroyed when one of their grandchildren (Joffrey and Aemond) impulsively killed the loved one of a rival (Eddard Stark and Lucerys Velaryon), prompting the opposing faction to declare the murder [[ThisIsUnforgivable an unforgivable war crime]] and retaliate. Finally, both died in humiliating positions of weakness (Otto was stripped of his titles and [[OffWithHisHead executed]] for [[RewardedAsATraitorDeserves treason]] when King's Landing fell to Rhaenyra, while Tywin was murdered in the privy by [[TheDogBitesBack the dwarf son Tywin had abused all his life]]. Unlike Tywin, who had the military acumen to back up his political and diplomatic skills, Otto was primarily a politician and scholar, which ended up causing him to lose favour with Aegon II.

* AdultFear: One of the reasons he lists for his alacrity in sacking King's Landing at the end of Robert's Rebellion; Tywin feared that Aerys, facing certain defeat at this point, would kill Jaime as a final act to [[EvilIsPetty spite Tywin]].

* AbusiveParents: Tywin has never forgiven Tyrion for Joanna's death. When Tywin found out Tyrion wedded a common girl, he commanded Jaime to say that Tysha was a prostitute, whom Jaime had hired for to take Tyrion's virginity. Because the “whore” had presumed to marry a Lannister, Tywin had his guards rape Tysha for a silver each and then made Tyrion go last for a gold coin, stating that a Lannister was worth more. He also doesn't believe his children should decide who they marry, keeping the right of marriage selection to himself, even if it causes great distress in his children.

* SelfFulfillingProphecy: When Tyrion was born, Aerys' toadies and other critics of Tywin called the dwarf baby and the loss of his wife as a lesson from the gods to teaching Tywin humility. Tyrion was even called ''Tywin's Bane''. Years of self-loathing, downright evil abuse later, [[spoiler:Tyrion indeed becomes his father's bane when he brutally kills him]].

* ActuallyThatsMyAssistant: Stannis Baratheon recalls a time when he and his brother Robert visited King’s Landing. While there, they viewed a man on the Iron Throne, agreeing that the King was as noble as the dragons. Years later, their father told them that the man that impressed them so much was actually Tywin, because King Aerys had cut himself on the Iron Throne that day and Tywin had stood in for him.

* ShoutOut: His backstory of becoming a great leader to rise above the reputation of his weak and lazy father, hating laughter and levity because it reminds him of said father, and becoming an abusive parent in an attempt to not repeat his mistakes is reminiscent of Okonkwo in ''Literature/ThingsFallApart''.

* FatalFlaw: Tywin's biggest flaw is that he was unable to see past first impressions and basically being blind to CharacterDevelopment. [[spoiler:In his mind, Tyrion was still just a hedonistic dwarf whose birth lead to his wife's death, rather than the brilliant politician who saved a city.]] He also FailedASpotCheck when he underestimated how [[AxCrazy horrible]] [[RapePillageAndBurn Gregor]] [[TheBrute Clegane]] was, such as during the Sack of King's Landing. The flip-side of this is that he's also unable to see the faults in his favorite son, Jaime.

** And following on with his blindness to Character Development, he didn't plan for possibilities like Jaime ''not'' inheriting Casterly Rock or Cersei running the crown regency, much less train her accordingly, the lack of which almost certainly influenced her actions in ''A Feast for Crows'' and ''A Dance with Dragons''.
** He's also determined to stamp out any human weakness in himself -- such as love, empathy and the need for approval. The result is a BigScrewedUpFamily whose children are well on the way to destroying everything he's built over the years.
** His refusal to believe [[spoiler:that his twins had an incestuous relationship that yielded illegitimate offspring would have meant that otherwise the Lannisters should have been as preoccupied with Jon Arryn's death as the Starks were, letting the family be blamed for a crime they didn't commit and allowing this escalating beyond control. His lack of acknowledging this fact and taking it as seriously as he should only serves as fuel to the rumors against his family, tarnishing his legacy forever.]]
** His obsession with being a ControlFreak over the actions of his children, aimed at ensuring the future of House Lannister, have led to House Lannister to crumble, with one of his sons joining a faction intent on destroying it.

* DesecratingTheDead: [[spoiler:Very possibly. After his death, the silent sisters should have performed the standard procedure by making his body presentable for his funeral, yet his rotting corpse gives off a stink so vile that his grandson runs vomiting from the sept. Come to think about it, the list of people who would want to see the great Lord Tywin Lannister suffer indignity in death ''is'' pretty high...]]

* DesecratingTheDead: [[spoiler:Very possibly. After his death, the silent sisters should have performed the standard procedure by making his body presentable for his funeral, yet his rotting corpse gives off a stink so vile that his grandson runs vomiting from the sept. Come to think about it, the list of people who would want to see Tywin suffer indignity in death ''is'' pretty high...]]

* GreenAndMean: A DeathGlare from Tywin's cold green eyes is enough to quiet most people.

** His sister Genna adores him for being the only person to object to her marriage to Emmon Frey when he was a child, pointing out that the marriage was beneath her status. As an adult, however, he has no problem in trying to force his children in to unhappy marriages and he doesn't hesitate to impose demeaning demands on others, regardless of their social rank, if it will benefit him. For example, the spontaneous marriage he enforces on Sansa and Tyrion is much worse than the marriage arrangement his father forced on Genna.

* DisproportionateRetribution: PlayedWith but often {{Justified}}. It's a bit of an ongoing theme with him.

* He's also one to Otto Hightower. Both were ruthlessly ambitious men determined to see a grandson of theirs on the Iron Throne, with their only daughter married to the King. Both were Hands of the King but were stripped of that position when their relationship with the monarch they served turned sour (Viserys I fired Otto as Hand for overreaching himself by consistently urging Viserys to make Aegon, rather than Rhaenyra his heir, while Aerys II turned on Tywin for his constant urging the former for a royal union between Cersei and Rhaegar). Both saw their efforts to prevent an unstable political situation from degenerating into CivilWar destroyed when one of their grandchildren (Joffrey and Aemond) impulsively killed the loved one of a rival (Eddard Stark and Lucerys Velaryon), prompting the opposing faction to declare the murder [[ThisIsUnforgivable an unforgivable war crime]] and retaliate. Finally, both died in humiliating positions of weakness (Otto was stripped of his titles and [[OffWithHisHead executed]] for [[RewardedAsATraitorDeserves treason]] when King's Landing fell to Rhaenyra, while Tywin was murdered in the privy by [[TheDogBitesBack the dwarf son Tywin had abused all his life]].

** His obsession with being a ControlFreak over the actions of his children, aimed at ensuring the future of House Lannister, have led to House Lannister to crumble, with one of his sons joining a faction aimed at destroying it.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: He was already the lord of Casterly Rock in all but name before his father died. Notably, during the Reyne-Tarbeck rebellion, Tytos ordered Tywin to stand down, but Tywin was such an accomplished warrior that all the vassals disobeyed Tytos's order and followed Tywin to war.
* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler: He is killed by Tyrion at the end of ''A Storm of Swords''. Tywin had it coming in general, the ''specific'' thing that sent Tyrion after him? Orchestrating the gang-rape of Tyrion's first wife, just because she was a commoner.]]

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: He wanted his son to be a great warrior and his daughter to be a queen -- it came true, but the son became a warrior so great that he got accepted into the Kingsguard, meaning that ''all'' he would ever be would be a warrior (Kingsguards cannot marry or inherit lands), and the daughter's queenship [[GodSaveUsFromTheQueen caused a string of disasters.]] He desired to see a king with a Lannister blood on the Iron Throne -- and he did, with the king (unknowingly to Tywin) having even more Lannister blood than Grandpa would have wished, being the child of the two "model" Lannister children to boot... and TheCaligula, undermining every sensible thing his more competent relatives tried to do. And lastly, Tywin longed for a son who would be a suitable heir and a man as competent as politician as Tywin himself -- and stubbornly tried to push Jaime into this role, refusing to notice how well his other, hated son, Tyrion, fit in it. It resulted in Tyrion performing the ultimate act of Tywin's "true" son: shooting his father with a crossbow.

* BrokenAce: Tywin's drive to make his family the greatest in the land is motivated by fears of his father's failings.

* BurningTheShips: Tywin's sack of King's Landing was deliberately done to evoke this. Tywin was aware that the rebels saw him as a fence-sitter (which he was) during Robert's Rebellion and that they would never be certain if they could trust him or depend on him. So Tywin felt that he had to betray the Targaryens and their enemies in such a way that House Lannister would never make peace with the dragons again, convincing the rebels that House Lannister wouldn't even turn back to the Targaryens even if they wanted to.

** His handling the Tarbecks and the Reynes (see "TheVillainSucksSong" below). It led to their destruction, it also lead to the Westerlands houses being extremely loyal to their overlord. No bannerman even thinks about defying Tywin.

* DoNotTauntCthulhu: When Tywin returned to Westeros as a battle-hardened veteran of the War of the Ninepenny Kings, having made it his mission to restore House Lannister to it's proper place, and issued commands that his bannermen were to pay up their debts to Casterly Rock or give over a hostage if they couldn't, most of the nobility of the Westerlands got the message the free ride they'd been enjoying under Tytos was over, that the heir to the Rock wasn't a pushover like his father or a man to cross and quickly fell back into line.

** He expresses disgust at what his men did to the Targaryen children, even when he gave the order; while he did order the children's deaths, he did not expect the two men butchering the kids almost beyond recognition. To be fair, he is almost as concerned with the way it made him look, as this event and the sack of King's Landing gained the Lannisters the scorn of House Stark, House Martell and the people of King's Landing.

* PragmaticVillainy: So pragmatic that how "villainous" he is is one of the [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation most debated questions in the fandom]]. He acts as a very competent Hand to both crazy kings he served under, though he is quite ruthless. His pragmatism shows following the Red Wedding, when he offers pardons to the Northern and Riverlands houses who bend the knee, whereas Joffrey wants all rebellious houses exterminated.

* PsychologicalProjection: Shows a great talent at this. He married for love and yet demands his children enter into loveless unions to suit family ambitions. He hates his son Tyrion for frequenting prostitutes [[spoiler:which is something he is equally guilty of]], accuses Joffrey and Tyrion and others of military incompetence when he only won because of pure luck, counsels mercy and restraint in Joffrey when his response to a slight is to unleash Gregory Clegane on the Riverlands smallfolk.
* PyrrhicVictory: While he managed to gain victory for the Lannisters in the War of the Five Kings with his victory at the battle of the Blackwater and him orchestrating the Red Wedding which decapitated the northern-rivermen opposition, Tywin's success is short-lived as his long and cruel abuse of Tyrion causes his son to finally snap and to [[spoiler:murder him in his privy.]] His neglect of his children, refusal to see the incest affair between Cersei and Jaime and the fact that he never trained them to rule cause them to tear apart his work as soon as he's gone with Cersei proving to be a disastrous ruler undermining the alliance with the Tyrells and Lannister's power, while Jaime turns his back on her. His overuse of violence, atrocities and DisproportionateRetribution also earn him and his family and allies the mortal and long-lasting hatred of the northerners, riverlanders and dornish who are only waiting the right moment to take revenge on house Lannister and its allies.

* CovertPervert: Possibly the greatest example in the series.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: He was already the lord of Casterly Rock in all but name long before his father died. Notably, during the Reyne-Tarbeck rebellion, Tytos ordered Tywin to stand down, but Tywin was such an accomplished warrior by that point that all the vassals disobeyed Tytos's order and followed Tywin to war.

** Tywin's victory of the War of the Five Kings ultimately comes down an amazing strokes of good fortune. The decisive factors [[spoiler:for his victory over the Starks and the Baratheons]] come from Tyrion Lannister sending Littlefinger to form an alliance with the Tyrells after recieving word of Renly's death as well as his innovative and competent siege prepearations and defense of King's Landing. However, even then that would not have been enough as Tywin had ridden west taking Robb Stark's bait of leaving the Riverlands by returning home. Had it not been for Edmure Tully's engagement which Tywin lost, he would have been too far to receive word of Stannis' attack and the Tyrells change of alliances. This created the conditions for his timely intervention at Blackwater, grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat.

** He was approximately eighteen or so, when he put an end to the Tarbecks and the Reynes.
* YoungSoldier: Tywin fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings and dealt with the rebellion of the Reynes and Tarbecks in his late teens.

* DoNotTauntCthulhu: When Tywin returned to Westeros as a battle-hardened veteran of the War of the Ninepenny Kings, having made it his mission to restore House Lannister to its proper place, and issued commands that his bannermen were to pay up their debts to Casterly Rock or give over a hostage if they couldn't, most of the nobility of the Westerlands got the message the free ride they'd been enjoying under Tytos was over, that the heir to the Rock wasn't a pushover like his father or a man to cross and quickly fell back into line.

*** Walder Frey is a DirtyOldMan who has dozens of wives and mistresses and countless offspring. Tywin married once and had three kids. When Joanna died he refused to remarry and makes it his children's responsibility to produce heirs. [[spoiler:Also, while Walder Frey wears his debauchery on his sleeves, Tywin keeps his use of whores secret to avoid public scrutiny.]]

* DoNotTauntCthulhu: When Tywin returned a battle-hardened veteran of the War of the Ninepenny Kings, having made it his mission to restore House Lannister to its proper place, and issued commands that his bannermen were to pay up their debts to Casterly Rock or give over a hostage if they couldn't, most of the nobility of the Westerlands got the message the free ride they'd been enjoying under Tytos was over, that the heir to the Rock wasn't a pushover like his father or a man to cross and quickly fell back into line.