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The Royal Incest That Inspired the Writing of ‘Game of Thrones’
In the last season of Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister broke free from the sexual and psychological grip of his twin sister, Queen Cersei, only to return to her side when she faced the most serious military threat to her rule.
“Cersei is hateful, and so am I,” he told Brienne of Tarth, his distraught lover, as he rode away — to his death, it turned out.
From the first episode of the the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, this brother-sister love affair shocked audiences. A child, Bran Stark, heard a couple’s voices during one of his climbs up the outer walls of Winterfell. The “man” was Jaime Lannister, and the “woman” his sister, Cersei Lannister, married to the King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon. What Bran saw was brother and sister making love, and for that, Jamie tried to silence the boy through murder, for Cersei’s children were not fathered by the king. This was a secret the twins felt they must kill to conceal.
In the following seasons of Game of Thrones, the forbidden love between Cersei and Jaimie raged stronger than ever. When threatening his enemy, Lord Edmure Tully, Jaimie said:
“I love Cersei. You can laugh at that if you want; you can sneer, it doesn’t matter. She needs me. And to get back to her, I have to take Riverrun. I’ll send for your baby boy, and I’ll launch him into Riverrun with a catapult. Because you don’t matter to me, Lord Edmure. Your son doesn’t matter to me. The people in the castle don’t matter to me. Only Cersei. And if I have to slaughter every Tully who ever lived to get back to her, that’s what I’ll do.”
There is no denying that Game of Thrones was submerged in incest, and not just the Lannisters. Whether it was a dynastic predilection, a forbidden love affair, or a source of horrific abuse, incestuous couplings served as both world-building foundation and crucial plot devices in the books and the series. While Game of Thrones is a fantasy, filled with dragons and…
