That all you got?
I'd say that Tywin is following Machiavelli to his detriment, rather than acknowledging it for the satire it is like the Tyrells are. House Lannister runs on fear, which now that Cersei has taken over has resulted in all of the Lannister allies saying "Wait, your dad was a shithead, why the fuck are we listening to you?" and turning on them.
The Tyrells on the other hand have a huge number of loyal vassals and know how to get on people's good side.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
That guy with the face
The Tyrells also provide a ton of food, which is more valuable than gold in the current war climate.
Which kind of goes to show, Tywin knew the value of gold. Gold may be wealth, but gold is not survival. Cersei doesn't, and thinks gold is king. The Tyrells knew the value of gold too, and have been using House Lannister as long as they were a good ally, but now that Tywin is gone, Jaime is redoubling his efforts to be a good Kingsguard, Tyrion is overseas, and Cersei is a world-class idiot, they have no reason to support them, and can take control.
But Cersei's stupidity is throwing spanner after spanner into the works.
Edited by Rytex on Sep 6th 2018 at 8:43:58 AM
Qui odoratus est qui fecit.
Not really - while The Prince states that if you can't be loved, you should at least be feared, it also states that you should by all means avoid to be hated.
Tywin failed at that last point - people not just fear him, they utterly despise him and, by extension, his house.
So as soon as Tywin died, the daggers started coming out and people are converging on the Lannisters like vultures on a corpse.
Satire or not, "avoid being hated" is good advice in general.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 6th 2018 at 5:12:25 PM
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.
Remind me (as in a genuine question): how much of the Reach went Stannis after Renly's death, as opposed to doing whatever the Tyrell's wanted?
Destroyer of Worlds
Machiavelli says that one should avoid being hated above all.
Besides, GRRM believes the Prince isn't satire and says that it has influenced ASOIAF. He even went on a documentary about Machiavelli.
Considering the "habits" of Gregor Clegane and Ramsay Bolton, do you think they have any children? Or have even had consensual sex?
That guy with the face
Nope. Maybe the show!Ramsay, who had a groupie before she got pushed off the battlements of Winterfell, but defo not the book!Ramsay, and neither Mountain.
Qui odoratus est qui fecit.
That all you got?
Any bastard child of a Clegane or Bolton would likely be killed on birth.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Clegane I can vaguely see having bastards because he doesn't seem high-functioning enough to go out of his way to stop pregnant women from having his kids or killing them at birth, but Ramsay I feel probably keeps a tight grip on that (particularly given he himself is borne of rape).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
It's honestly disturbing that Ramsay and Gregor are so monstrous that I can't even envision them having consensual relations at any point, even if its them losing their virginity, or allowing any children from that to live/the woman to survive. When Martin wants to make a CM, he makes a goddamn CM!
Speaking of such, I'm curious how Craster had the first generation of daughters. I don't imagine any woman staying with him...unless it was his mother, which might go to explain why he marries his kin in the first place
Knowing him it was probably his sister or some equally fucked up thing.
Given that Craster's Keep is the literal only safe harbor in one of the direst territories beyond the wall, I'm guessing Craster must have just poached some poor girls who were alone in the forest dying of hunger for whatever reason and offered them food and shelter in exchange of joining him in unholy matrimony.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
I'm going with "it was his mother" because he wouldn't need to go find any women and it explains why he's so fucked up in the first place. There's a lot of Fridge Horror in what he did to the daughters that were infertile or disfigured because of the inbreeding, and yes I know it's disgusting but George RR Martin started it! He started it with introducing some of the most sexually depraved characters in fiction outside of the Marquis De Sade!
I can imagine the look of horror on Craster's father's face if he ever lived long to enough that he ended up staying in his place with other members of the Night's Watchers, realized Craster was his son and went "oh fuck that's mine". Whoever his father is
Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Sep 17th 2018 at 8:00:56 PM
That guy with the face
He might have gotten offed for ignoring his vows, assuming Mormont or whoever the Lord Commander at the time was, would be a stickler for the rules.
Qui odoratus est qui fecit.
Yeah. It is disturbing to think about, especially because Craster as an older guy and has been both "marrying" for a long time and for a long time had a status as an important ally who was "too important to kill".
It makes me wonder if early in his life, his father was kind of close to him and his mother, notwithstanding his vows, and while not joining the Watch himself, Craster early on much have done something to gain trust (probably killing Wildings that posed a threat I'd guess). But then equally early, was probably doing disturbing things. My guess is that rather than incest with his mother, it probably started with him "stealing" a wife from Moletown and at the time this was brushed off as his Wilding nature. Over time, he accumulated more wives and here would have been rumors of Parental Incest, but I could see how it wouldn't fully register until it was too late.
Destroyer of Worlds
Race for the Iron Throne made a pretty good article about The Accursed Kings and ASOIAF
.
Some obvious parallels like GRRM channeling Philip the Fair with Tywin and Queen Isabella with Cersei but also that GRRM is using history fiction to steer him when it comes to realism hence all the underage marriages and scandalous cheating.
Here's a piece from that:
Isabella had ascended the throne at sixteen; she had come a long way in six years.” (The Iron King, Chapter 1)
/////
I would argue that Druon’s writing had something of an outsized influence on George R.R Martin, because as a Romantic writer GRRM was already predisposed to be interested in the shocking, the novel and the extreme:
////
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever, somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle Earth.” (The Faces of Fantasy)
/////
Moreover, this phenomena is not limited to the age of marriage, but influences all kinds of aspects of Martin’s narrative.
Edited by MadSkillz on Sep 17th 2018 at 7:34:02 AM
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Not to mention by the time it actually registered, he was already too vital to the Night's Watch for the to want to do anything about it.
Considering how smug the little twat acts, he clearly knows it too.
Also, just checked the page for Queen's Thief, and I think it could do with a better description.
Edited by HailMuffins on Sep 18th 2018 at 7:25:43 AM
Serial Procrastinator
To go back to the previous page for a moment I think the critical point that separates Tywin and Cersei's ruling style is that Cersei made enemies far faster than she got rid of them. I'm not quite confident in saying that Tywin was feared more than he was hated (if nothing else, there was a Dornish plot going on, albeit one that has proven quite abortive; simply Oberyn's intervention in Tyrion's trial could have potentially been a pretty rough PR coup had it worked) and he's certainly had his fair share of lucky breaks in the series, but the only people he really alienated unnecessarily were his children.
You could argue that Tywin's left his house in bad order (and as I've already mentioned I think he's overrated as either a strategist or a tactician), but the three biggest external threats to House Lannister are each an Outside-Context Problem - the White Walkers, Dany, and Aegon. When a middling person managed to get his hands on power and take it away from Cersei, that being Kevan, he nearly managed to right the ship by himself.
Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Sep 19th 2018 at 5:31:39 PM
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
The thing about Tywin is that he's far more of an entrepeneur than he is a strategist, tactician or strategist. He an abundance of resources and knew where to apply them.
And from what I remember, most of the blame from the fragike position is from Cercei being, well, more or less braindead.
Basically Book Tywin pretends to be (but is not) Show-Tywin.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
That all you got?
Indeed. Show-Tywin is at least somewhat better than Book Tywin, but he's still a thug and a jackass.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Serial Procrastinator
Basically, Tywin was an excellent (if amoral) politician but a subpar military man.
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
Pretty much, while I would argue that Cersei was bad at both.
It's like Littlefinger said:"she wants power, but has no idea what to do with it once she has it."
Makes for quite the contrast with some of the series other rulers like Stannis and Dany, who have very clear ideas what to do with their positions.
Serial Procrastinator
I'd argue Dany's not actually that clear on her goals and that's what ends up undermining her rule of Mereen. - or rather, she makes real progress and it's her lack of confidence because she's not clear on her goal that undermines what she's achieved.
Edited by Sigilbreaker26 on Sep 19th 2018 at 12:15:21 PM
"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"
@Kostya-
I've been binging The Queen's Thief series and along the way have noted various parallels to ASOIAF, which I don't think are necessarily at all deliberate. Among other things, one book has something that reads like a better plotted version of the Battle of the Bastards on the show, and the book was written before GOT existed.
Anyway, one of the books basically has exactly that. The protagonist is Made a Slave and is in the household of an enemy family who lost track of him and doesn't realize he's there. His family and household accept an invitation to the enemy's household for a banquet, knowing there's a likelihood of being attacked, but needing allies. After the protagonist gets wind of a plot to kill his family/household at the dinner table, he warns them beforehand, and they attack first. Which amusingly technically means they were the ones who broke Sacred Hospitality.
The book kind of has a theme of everyone breaking Sacred Hospitality. Like later on, there's a series of double-crosses which starts with the protagonist bringing a weapon to a holy ground where they are banned.
Edited by Hodor2 on Sep 5th 2018 at 6:11:52 AM