George R.R. Martin’s Books Prove ‘Game of Thrones’ Made a Huge Mistake With This Character

Game of Thrones is less colorful than its source material, A Song of Ice and Fire. This is true in a literal sense, except for the Night’s Watch; practically every character is described in the books as having more varied and brighter wardrobes than they ever wore on TV. But it’s also true in a larger sense. George R.R. Martin’s writing is often celebrated for its moral complexity, but it’s also broad, sweeping, and Romantic in the classical sense. He depicts a wide range of customs, worldviews, and personalities that exhibit all the extremes and contradictions of any real person in a more fantastic manner.

Even in its earliest days, Game of Thrones was more constrained in what notes it would let its characters play. The longer it went on, the more that constraint became an issue. Slowly, the color and life were leeched out of the likes of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), and Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey).

The flattening of Cersei was particularly frustrating to watch season by season. Martin is outspoken in liking gray characters, but there are still heroes and villains among them. The latter have their reasons for their misdeeds, but it’s hard to imagine anyone regarding Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton) or Ramsay Snow (Iwan Rheon) as heroes. Cersei is as much a villain as the likes of them, but being present from the beginning, she looms larger in A Song of Ice and Fire.

As a viewpoint character, we see inside her heart and mind — and what we see is fascinating, the most colorful, entertaining, and sympathetic of the series’ villains to date. Most of the traits that make Cersei so interesting were never fully incorporated into her TV counterpart, and almost none were left by the time the character met her fate in the finale.

Cersei’s Backstory Is Darker in the Original Books

The Cersei played by Lena Headey is clearly derived from the one in the pages of A Song of Ice and Fire. She’s still of the House Lannister, daughter of Tywin (Charles Dance), incestuous twin of Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and older and unloving sister of Tyrion (Peter Dinklage). The story still begins with Cersei as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms through her arranged marriage to Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy). The outside world assumes that Cersei’s three children are Robert’s, but all are bastards born of her sexual relationship with Jaime, and Cersei is one of many in the Red Keep conspiring against her husband. When Ned Stark (Sean Bean) uncovers the truth about her incest, she arranges Robert’s death, arrests Ned, and stages a coup to place her oldest son Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) on the throne with herself as regent.

On the page and the screen, Cersei’s marriage is loveless and violent. She’s openly contemptuous of Robert, shaming and manipulating him at one point into killing an innocent direwolf to satisfy her vindictiveness. A resentful Robert indulges in his appetites for food, women, and especially drink, and by the time of A Game of Thrones, he has hit her on several occasions. The Robert of the books is ashamed and frightened of what marriage and “kinging” have made of him (a shame he does his best to ignore). He’s frightened of what Cersei and Joffrey might do were they to gain power. The Robert of the show is a less troubled and more piggish brute. Left unmentioned in the show are Cersei’s threats to kill his bastard daughter if she ever comes to court, and rumors that she had two twins that Robert fathered at Casterly Rock killed. Once Robert is dead, Cersei orders the slaughter of all his baseborn children in King’s Landing.

While angry over Robert’s bastards, the Cersei of the books takes pains not to have any children by him. Game of Thrones invents a legitimate baby who died in infancy, a fact Cersei uses to her advantage but can also discuss sincerely with Robert. In A Song of Ice and Fire, pride and resentment won’t allow Cersei to go even that far. The one time she becomes pregnant, she arranges for an abortion and afterward finds ways to avoid insemination by Robert when they sleep together. Other pieces of backstory unused by the show concern the depth of Cersei’s hatred for Tyrion. Like her father, Cersei blames her little brother for their mother’s death.

But an additional grievance comes from the prophecy of the woods witch, Maggy the Frog. The show retains a flashback wherein Maggy (Jodhi May) predicts Cersei’s marriage and children, the deaths of all her offspring, and her dethronement by a “younger and more beautiful” queen. But the show cuts Cersei killing the friend who goes with her, the only witness to the prophecy. And it cuts the final prediction Maggy gives, that when everything has been taken from her, Cersei will be strangled by the valonqar – High Valyrian for “little brother.” Though Cersei precedes Jaime in birth by mere moments, making both her brothers younger by technicality, Cersei is convinced that Tyrion is the brother to fear — a conviction that becomes an obsession by the fourth book, A Feast for Crows.

George R. R. Martin’s Cersei Is a More Volatile and Compelling Character

One might argue that these adjustments to Cersei’s backstory are neutral or even necessary trims. Game of Thrones had time constraints that A Song of Ice and Fire does not. The valonqar prophecy, which book fans have long speculated will turn out to be Jaime, didn’t fit into how he and Cersei ultimately die, or the overall diminishment of prophecy and magic in the show compared to the novels. The loss of the valonqar story was one of the worst casualties of Game of Thrones, paring back the magic. But it’s true enough that most of this background material represented a clean lift, and that the Cersei of Season 1 corresponds fairly well to the Cersei of the first book. The real trouble comes when Robert is dead and Cersei begins wielding and contending for power.

Martin’s Cersei is as Trumpian a villain as you’re likely to find, far more so than her son Joffrey, who was sometimes compared to The Donald. She’s a complete narcissist: entitled, self-absorbed, boastful, and self-deluded about her talents and capacity to rule. The most basic flattery convinces her to make unwise appointments and actions. Envy, impatience, greed, and anger all cloud her already impulsive judgment. Her ruthless streak shatters potentially useful alliances and spills innocent blood, on account of paranoia or simple slights. And her moods are compared by Jaime to wildfire; the passions of the moment send her into fits of glee or torrents of rage.

All this is apparent in the first three books, but A Feast for Crows makes Cersei into a viewpoint character and lets readers see just how deep her narcissism runs. Jaime was made a viewpoint character in the previous book and revealed doubts, guilts, feelings, and his own sense of honor that made him — the man who threw a child out a window — seem a sympathetic and even piteous human being. Cersei’s chapters show her to be coo-coo for cocoa puffs. It’s glaringly obvious how deluded and self-defeating she is, but the immersion into her warped mind is so complete that you can fall into her paranoid, egocentric line of thinking. It’s a fascinating disconnect, making Cersei’s some of the most electrifying chapters of the latest two books to read.

Those chapters also reinforce a harsh truth about Cersei’s relationship with Jaime that earlier books introduced. If you set aside the fact that they’re an incestuous couple, then Jaime comes off as a devoted lover. Whatever his other faults, he never strays with other women and constantly strives to please Cersei. She, on the other hand, regularly turns to sex as a tool of persuasion. She carries on multiple affairs, including one with her cousin Lancel, and was eager to wed Rhaegar Targaryen as a young girl. Her love for Jaime is a love for an extension of herself; when he loses his usefulness to her as a knight and begins to question her judgment, the relationship quickly sours, and as of A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book, Jaime is completely disillusioned with his twin.

Cersei’s love for her children isn’t quite that transactional in Martin’s writing. Even her enemies judge her sincerely devoted to them, though a dangerously unfit mother on account of her… well, everything. But even with them, there is that element of extension. Joffrey and his brother Tommen are tools through which Cersei can wield the power of the Iron Throne, a power she is denied on account of her sex. Westerosi misogyny is a barrier for Cersei throughout the books, but she turns to it as an excuse for any challenge she faces (while also displaying a great deal of misogyny herself to other women). Men like her uncle, Kevan Lannister, don’t doubt her fitness to be regent because she’s a woman, at least not entirely; they doubt her because she’s so clearly unfit for the job.

‘Game of Thrones’ Flattened Cersei’s Character Completely

Image via HBO 

This is the stuff that sets Cersei apart from the likes of Roose and Ramsay, a cold schemer and a violent psychopath respectively. It’s what makes her such a volatile and destructive, yet still dimensional, villain. There’s schadenfreude aplenty to be had in seeing her dig her own hole in A Feast for Crows, which makes her moment of sympathy during the walk of shame all the more impactful. It’s also the stuff that Game of Thrones never knew what to do with. From the second season on, there were awkward attempts to make Cersei a more loving mother and a more sympathetic gray character that always seemed to collapse in on themselves. The murder of Robert’s children is outsourced to Joffrey, who becomes much more of a sinister tyrant than the spoiled bully of the books. The show’s Cersei is fully aware of how demented her son is, deeply troubled by his violence and her lack of control over him – and yet she mourns him just as she did in the book.

Her love and education for Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) are less insane, but that love seems to vanish the second he’s dead. She and Tyrion have more heart-to-hearts throughout the series, only for her to go back to hatred. Forget her manipulation and betrayal of Jaime; Game of Thrones has an uncomfortable reworking of a sex scene and a strange amount of sympathy for their incestuous love affair to impart instead. And all those swings of passion, those fits of narcissistic joy, rage, and paranoia that make Cersei’s book chapters so alive? That aspect of the character is diluted from the start, but it was nonexistent in the last few seasons. TV’s Cersei becomes a stone-faced whisperer by the end. Her expression hardly varies, her voice is low and icy, and her vanity and weaponized sexuality are cast aside.

That is a much flatter character than the one Martin wrote. But the problem is made worse by the fact that it happened to so many of the show’s women. Daenerys, Arya, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) – they were all rendered ice queens in the end. Such monotony is the death of the kind of color A Song of Ice and Fire injects into its personalities. With Cersei made the last villain standing, one whose defeat is inexplicably given more emphasis than the great battle to save all humanity against a horde of ice demons, such a dull antagonist is one more nail in the series finale’s coffin.

Game of Thrones is available to stream on Max in the U.S.