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* Have the flat to myself for the weekend since K is attending a theology thing. Today I've taken advantage of that alone time by going for a walk then do 90 minutes of cardio boxing with my Kinect fitness game. LOL. It feels so silly, but not much different from a class at the gym to be honest. I sweat and pant so I suppose it's all good
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Also, Brienne making out with Tywin and wanting to tie the knot with him sounds like a wacky scenario happening in Sunnydale under the influence of the Spell/Demon of the Week...
As for your thoughts on Jaime/Cersei, I just want to go YES. THIS. On the meta level, I rather dislike how GRRM handles their respective arcs. I'm more or less resigned to the fact the Cersei won't survive the books, but I fervently hope that Jaime won't be the valonqar - because I'd like some of the male characters not to abuse/rape/kill a woman.
However, I still can't ship the two in defiance of their character arcs since their relationship feels so messed up to me, long before their major fallout. And quite a few of the Jaime/Cersei folks seem to regard their love as, I don't know, twisted, but great and unconditional and epic while it mostly makes me feel sorry for both of them. If I go along with the whole mirror/reflection symbolism, I never bought the "one soul in two bodies" spiel. Their grand romance is more like the ultimate narcissism to me-.
Jaime regards Cersei as a way to live out his whole chivalry/knight/courtly love complex, in a warped sort of way, without caring what she wants (both freedom and power), and Cersei sees Jaime as the substitute for what she is unjustly denied without caring what makes him tick (youthful idealism turned dark and sour). The incest is actually the less problematic part of their affair, and I just can't ship two such massively self-delusional people. I mean, as problematic as Jaime/Brienne is and despite the fact that she is, you know, far too nice a person for him, I have at least the impression that they respect and sort of understand each other. /Um, tl;dr - Sorry.
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And YES to everything you say about Jaime/Cersei.
I would buy the "one soul in two bodies"/Wuthering Heights thing if they were, you know, similar as human beings. But they are rather different and the more GRRM writes about their childhood, the more different they appear. (In WH, Heathcliff wasn't obsessed with Cathy because of her Evil Womanly Manipulation either, as far as I recall, but then again Emily Brontë was a vastly better writer than GRRM.)
Cersei seeing Jaime as her male self, her way of having what she is denied - now that I could have loved if it had been done right. What sours the whole gender thing for me is how she strives for his male gender whereas he grows to despise her female one. She's a fickle, unfaithful, manipulative woman-person who has fallen from his warped idealised version of her and now he no longer wants her. There's nothing in that I can like.
I think I will hate GRRM if he makes Jaime the valonquar, because like you say, we need Jaime on team Does No Approve of Violence Against Women. It's a small team for sure.
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Oh, indeed. I've seen the claim of "but Jaime and Cersei are exactly the same person!" pretty often, and I never quite know how to dispute that without seeming to fall into the "but he's just a good man led astray by the seductive siren call of evil Cersei and her evil vagina" - something which I've also seen pretty often, although by a completely different crowd of fans, and which I most certainly don't believe. (I mean, Jaime chose to act like a screw-up while indulging in his narcissist romantic fantasy. He did it for what he thought was love of her, but he is still responsible for his actions. Full stop.) But, as you say, the twins may look alike, but they have fairly different personalities in some ways - not in all, but definitely in some.
What sours the whole gender thing for me is how she strives for his male gender whereas he grows to despise her female one. She's a fickle, unfaithful, manipulative woman-person who has fallen from his warped idealised version of her and now he no longer wants her.
Well, in some fashion, Jaime's disdain for Cersei is the logical outcome from putting her on a pedestal for so long. He didn't love her so much as the person he wanted her to be, for his sake, and nobody can live up to that, so his perspective on Cersei after their reunion in ASOS is just as biased and flawed and unreliable as before, just in a diametrically opposite way. I'm simply not sure if GRRM actually sees it the same way, or if he honestly wants us to believe that Cersei is merely that scheming, unreliable femme fatale.
...we need Jaime on team Does No Approve of Violence Against Women. It's a small team for sure.
Alas, yes. An RL friend of mine and I were once very, very bored, so we invented the "Eligible Bachelors of Westeros" game. First, you cross off everyone who dies before the books. Then every guy who dies during the series. Then you eliminate everyone who beats, sexually assaults or kills a woman. After that, we were left with about Jon, Sam, Loras, and Jaime, and started arguing about who gets to call dibs on Sam, whether Jon's natural talent for cunnilingus who make up for his excessive whining or whether being Loras's beard would be nicer, if Jaime's crazy would be worth a one-night stand, and where we could sign up to become septas instead (since we're pretty much too straight to shack up with the Westerosi bachelorettes). And then we decided that we need to get a life.
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