GoT S3: the cowardly lion
So I am fascinated and so pleased with what Martin, D&D, and Dance are doing with Tywin Lannister. Only, I don't think I've seen my take on him posted elsewhere, which is as good an excuse as any to indulge in scathing hatred, so. Consider yourselves warned/intrigued. Spoilers through aired episodes of GoT; plot twists that haven't happened yet are spoiler-cut but there are allusions to some backstory that I don't think has been discussed yet on-screen.
Tywin reminds me of no one so much as Miss Trunchbull from Matilda, who knew “[n]ever [to] do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable" - he is highly dramatic, and certainly creates an impression, but not a good one. I assumed that my read on the character as a whole was colored by my distaste for his treatment of his children, particularly Tyrion (the phrase "gibbering incoherent rage" would not be unfairly dramatic); viewers with a different set of berserk buttons may be able to set it aside and buy into the character's projected persona. Either reaction, I think, misses what is most interesting and most useful about the character: that he is a study in why and how someone can go so far in constructing a larger-than-life persona, and the truly terrible impact it has on the people too close or too far to see it is a facade.
I know it's like shooting fish in a chamber pot, but I do want to start off with the obvious: by Tywin's own standard of success, he is a failure.
TYWIN: Your mother's dead. Before long I'll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children, all of us dead, all of us rotting underground. It's the family name that lives on. It's all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor... but family. You understand? (quotefully.com)
All that really counts, he says, is to make sure the Lannister family continues on into glory. That is to say: not only to produce physical heirs, but create an environment conducive to the procreation of future heirs, which means managing not to fuck the heirs-existent up so badly that they seem posed to burn themselves and their offspring up in a blaze of dysfunction. YOU HAD ONE JOB, ASSHOLE!
Not even a job! It was an un-job. All he had to do was refrain from terrorizing just three people in the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD. It's not like he had to be Father of the Year, because fostering is always an option. (In fact, I'd guess that it developed part as a way to build alliances, but also because most great houses probably realized that they couldn't quite separate business from family and so they sent their kids out to get formal training elsewhere.) He didn't even have to set up a reciprocal arrangement with other families, because there are so many other Lannisters! Cersei is a force of nature, even though she's a woman grasping at straws in a world where hard power reigns; think of what she could've become with a little guidance from Genna. Jaime clearly needed to be forcibly separated from Cersei and might not even have joined the Kingsguard if that relationship hadn't been allowed to become as unhealthy as it did (heir crisis solved!). And maybe none of the other Lannisters would've wanted him, though I doubt it, but even so Tyrion would've thrived in Oldtown.
My point is that Tywin had options, and not even least-bad choices, but options which were to everyone's benefit and would've required significantly less effort from him. Distant fathering, my ass. He WANTED those three kids under his thumb so he could terrorize them out of ever thinking of him the way he thought of Tytos. But that's the thing, isn't it? Anyone whose self-esteem has proven to be this dependent on regular access to tiny breathing punching bags is inescapably, incurably weak, no matter how many pregnant women he has whacked. And I think on some level Tywin knows that, and so he was harsher and crueler on the kids in order to hide that weakness, but the more he indulged, the more keenly he felt that vulnerability, and the more he doubled down to hide it.
So, okay. He had ONE JOB and fucked it up. But, you could argue, obviously one should not accept the worldview of this jackass even to judge the jackass himself: this is a world where public and private mix in all kinds of ways they maybe shouldn't. So let's take a look at Tywin's political career.
Tywin is an extraordinarily skilled political operative; I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. That said, I think he would be absolutely galled to notice that his true talent lies in acting upon the interests of anyone but himself. This isn't particularly surprising; it's a grand-scale extrapolation of the maxim that the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. Ultimately, Tywin is an administrator, not a head of state, and he spends his life chafing against that fact.
He is most famous for the years of political summer when he served as the Mad King's hand. Things went well not because Tywin was in charge, but because they were delegated to him appropriately. His career fell apart when he started to conflate the two things, and decided that he was actually in charge and wanted it acknowledged. That wasn't some ~master plan when he finally fell out with the Mad King. He was full of himself and overplayed his hand when he nominated Cersei for future queen, and he flounced back to Casterly Rock to lick his wounds.
1.5 civil wars later, I'd also argue that the Red Wedding was a seriously short-sighted strategy. Like his treatment of his kids, it's a simultaneously dramatic and abhorrent gesture, and so we look at it and think our problem with it must be entirely emotional. But something can be unsound both morally and strategically. I'm hoping to get more into this in my S3 post, but the key thing here is that the hospitality rites aren't some random cultural/religious taboo. They exist because Westeros is a society where people occasionally travel, and if those travelers know that they can stop somewhere and be safe they have significantly less incentive not to slaughter whole villages every time they want a bed and a brew. If you make it that obvious that it's kill or be killed even in zones generally recognized as being outside the theater of war, you're going to have a lot more killing, and most of it's not going to go down on your say-so. The Red Wedding may have hastened the (near-inevitable) end of 20% of the kings involved in this war, but it was a serious blow to one of the few support beams keeping some aspects of life in the country stable. It’s a lot like using a nuke for pest control - just because there’ll be nobody left alive to point out it didn’t get all the cockroaches, doesn’t make it a good idea. Even assuming the tactics pay off and the Lannister faction retains the Iron Throne (which is far from guaranteed), Westeros will be that much harder to rule.
Hubristic, reckess, selfish and self-deluded - traits that are often, and fairly, used to characterize Cersei, but that apple didn't fall half as far as the tree'd like to think.
But that's when he's acting on his own steam, which, as noted, isn't his strong suit. Tywin's real genius lies in administration. And again, I don't devalue the skill it took to get where he did. But even then, Tywin is a massive study in the privilege of being unaware of one's own privilege. Tywin is BOOTSTRAPS!! guy. He's the kind of person who has enough privileges - gender, class, race, family connections, gifted physically and cognitively - that he can absolutely refuse to acknowledge he has any at all. Because his life wasn't entirely easy - people didn't quail before his father quite as much as he'd have liked, after all! - he decides that he's done it ALL ON HIS OWN and therefore is justified in shoving everyone else around him down as hard as possible. (Private life keeps right on creeping in here, as convenient as it'd be to separate.)
Tywin is a bureaucrat, who both needs and wants to put on a show of being something more. And whether or not it works depends on your perspective. When we hear tales of the impressiveness of the great Tywin Lannister, they are nearly always through the eyes of children or people who knew him as children. Tywin's magnificence - rather than political competence - as the Mad King's Hand is established by Stannis recollecting that he and young Robert assumed Tywin was the king on their first visit to court. A couple of naive children thought that a grown-ass man sitting on a throne was the king, such an uncannily stately figure did he cut! LOL. By contrast, characters who first encounter Tywin as adults see him for what he is: a grasping, unscrupulous scuzzbag with an outrageous amount of money. Even Robb Stark, hardly the world’s greatest thinker, can tell that the blunt-force brutality used by Tywin's forces reveals him as “a mad dog without a strategic thought in his head.”
Similarly, when we see Tywin acting as Hand of the King, as a person running a kingdom, those scenes nearly always revolve around him bullying his own children, or his sniping at Joffrey. Joffrey! Talk about a pissing match with a drunk. Joff is the king in name only; he is a teenager incapable of even faking sanity. And Tywin relishes even petty victories over the mad boy-king; he's even threatened enough by Joff to make the public snub of moving the Small Council's meetings. And when Joffrey catches on, Tywin doesn't seize the moment and try to drag Joff to some maturity as a fit leader, because if the child develops even a little intellectual independence, then Tywin himself has to compete for power.
Not only is he overly interested in preserving power for himself - not for the Lannisters, but for HIMSELF - but he is so invested in preserving his self-image as the ONLY one with ANY sense around here, he is such a MARTYR to the foolishness of everyone around him, that he makes tactically unsound decisions because of his need to bolster his vanity by discrediting his descendants.
(source)
This is an extraneous scene, other than the way the narrative makes a point to show (a) Joffrey making a point that we KNOW is valid and (b) Tywin rejecting it and strutting about his ability to do so. Similarly, Cersei CORRECTLY points out that "the Tyrells are a problem," and gets a misogynist one-two punch for her troubles: that it's because she's a Bad Mommy, or at least it would be if it were happening which it's not because she's actually being silly and blowing things out of proportion due to her feminine jealousy of Margaery. That's definitely part of what spurred her to scrutinize them a little more closely, but at the same time, her conclusions are indisputable. Not only does Tywin ignore her warning, but he reassures himself of his dominance by attempting to force her into a sham marriage. Unlike the Stark match, which at least does make a lot of sense strategically, this is even more of an insult to Cersei than it looks like. The Most Valuable Uterus bonding the Lannisters' futures to the Tyrell's is always going to be Margaery's, and so a match between Cersei and Loras would render Cersei redundant, worthless. Cersei makes an astute political observation, and Tywin punishes her for his failure to make it himself with his usual YOU ARE NOTHING overkill.
This isn't just short-sightedness about Joff or Cersei specifically. Tywin is waging a campaign to undermine the future generations of Lannisters. If he were really worried about the future of their lineage, he wouldn't be doing everything he could to exclude and infantilize Joffrey. Joff does need to be briefed on meetings, and not just as Tywin sees fit; he needs to sit in sometimes and learn the ins and outs of king-craft, not even so he doesn't have so much time on his hands to murder random women, but because Tywin should be planning for the actuarial likelihood that Joff will outlive him by, oh, decades? and so should probably be exposed to the decision-making process at some point before then. And in the meantime, if Cersei is going to pick up as much of the burden as Queen Regent as possible, she needs to actually have some authority and not have the primary influence on her decision-making process be the knowledge that she's going to be undermined at every turn.
[Book 5 spoilers]BOOK SPOILERS: ADwD Cersei did not come out of nowhere! Tywin DELIBERATELY centralized himself and his ability to undermine her in her thought processes, so after the chaos of the Purple Wedding she begins to swing wildly between recklessness and paranoia: "Father can't/wouldn't stop me from doing X, so I'll do X!" and "SOMEONE can and will stop me from doing ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, so it's gotta be full steam ahead on X just to get it done!" And this is why I find wholesale dismissal of Cersei's potential based on her later behavior to be so unendingly frustrating? "Cersei acts and thinks like someone who was abused her whole life, therefore her first and worst abuser was clearly correct in his evaluation of her" does not sit well with me. END BOOK SPOILERS
But that's the real thing, is that Tywin simply refuses to accept that he will die. His lecture to Jamie in his first scene in s2 was totally his protesting too much. Tywin wants the glory of taking over the kingdom in his own lifetime; the scorched-earth campaigns he loves to wage show that he has little interest in leaving future Lannisters a Westeros that can cover them in glory, or even sustain itself. There is no future, there is no world, there is only Tywin Lannister - and how desperately, pathetically insecure does a person have to be to drag an entire kingdom into that black hole of psychic need?
I've left Tywin's disgusting treatment of Tyrion to the end, because as I mentioned at the beginning, it is so terrible that I think it serves as a distraction whatever your view on either character is. But I can’t leave it out, either, because one absolutely cannot divorce Tywin's treatment of Tyrion from his guiding political worldview, that a campaign of terror by the powerful against the powerless is not a bug but a feature; indeed, that voracious sadism may actually be his driving motivation. Furthermore, the force he felt the need to bear against a helpless child brings all his overcompensation in the less-personal political arena into focus. Like. Once you OUTSOURCE CHILD RAPE, you have renounced all current and future swag rights. (Regardless of Tysha's age, the whole scenario was set up as sexual torture of Tyrion, who was 13.) Fittingly, it is to Tyrion that Tywin reveals the astounding extent of his narcissistic worldview:
TYWIN: I would be consumed by maggots before mocking the family name and making you the heir to Casterly Rock.
Actually, genius, that's exactly how it works, for everyone. You die, your kid gets your shit.
[Book 3 spoilers]I came across a fantastic theory on Westeros.org that at the time of his death Tywin was already dying, having been poisoned by the Red Viper. The evidence for it is pretty convincing, while the argument against it seems basically to be "what would be the narrative point of having Tywin die if he was already dying?" And I think that is precisely the point of it. Tywin's poisonous outlook led to his attempt to hide and deny any evidence of human need and vulnerability, and it just cannot be done; he and his family were so insular and closed-off, they were rotting from the inside out. It is dirty and ugly, as abuse always is, no matter how normalized it comes to feel. The reason Tywin resents Tyrion so much is that Tyrion's visible difference punctures the facade. The twins, Tywin's acknowledged children, were on a crash and burn course no matter how much he refused to see it; Tyrion is the real deal.
The real reason I'm sold on the Widow's Blood theory is that Martin has taken great pains to create a world like ours, where death is universally unfair. So what to do with a character like Tywin, who is just begging for some poetic justice? Kill him twice. The actual killing blow is a murder like any other; it's the death that doesn't kill him which is so debasing and grotesque that it, narratively speaking, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. You win or you die, and child abusers? Losers.
He just is so gloriously, consistently pathetic. I love it.
[EDIT 12/27/13: For my own reference, a perspective on Tywin that is very close to my own. The one thing in that post I'd disagree with is that show-Tywin's lecture to Jaime in their first scene together, where Tywin tells Jaime not to care so much what people think, is a departure from book-Tywin's characterization. I think Tywin is someone who wants very badly to believe himself to be above the opinion of others - because he damn well knows that having to fuss about appearances is a signifier of lower status - and I think it's totally consistent with his characterization in the book that he'd project his insecurity onto Jaime. Tywin is as spectacularly self-deluded as anyone in the series, IMO a good deal more than most. Of course, there are viewers whose takeaway is that Tywin does sincerely feel this way and he's just offering Jaime some helpful advice, but I hardly see people being easily taken in by powerful, self-assured abusers as a problem stemming from D&D's adaptation.]
Tywin reminds me of no one so much as Miss Trunchbull from Matilda, who knew “[n]ever [to] do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable" - he is highly dramatic, and certainly creates an impression, but not a good one. I assumed that my read on the character as a whole was colored by my distaste for his treatment of his children, particularly Tyrion (the phrase "gibbering incoherent rage" would not be unfairly dramatic); viewers with a different set of berserk buttons may be able to set it aside and buy into the character's projected persona. Either reaction, I think, misses what is most interesting and most useful about the character: that he is a study in why and how someone can go so far in constructing a larger-than-life persona, and the truly terrible impact it has on the people too close or too far to see it is a facade.
I know it's like shooting fish in a chamber pot, but I do want to start off with the obvious: by Tywin's own standard of success, he is a failure.
TYWIN: Your mother's dead. Before long I'll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children, all of us dead, all of us rotting underground. It's the family name that lives on. It's all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor... but family. You understand? (quotefully.com)
All that really counts, he says, is to make sure the Lannister family continues on into glory. That is to say: not only to produce physical heirs, but create an environment conducive to the procreation of future heirs, which means managing not to fuck the heirs-existent up so badly that they seem posed to burn themselves and their offspring up in a blaze of dysfunction. YOU HAD ONE JOB, ASSHOLE!
Not even a job! It was an un-job. All he had to do was refrain from terrorizing just three people in the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD. It's not like he had to be Father of the Year, because fostering is always an option. (In fact, I'd guess that it developed part as a way to build alliances, but also because most great houses probably realized that they couldn't quite separate business from family and so they sent their kids out to get formal training elsewhere.) He didn't even have to set up a reciprocal arrangement with other families, because there are so many other Lannisters! Cersei is a force of nature, even though she's a woman grasping at straws in a world where hard power reigns; think of what she could've become with a little guidance from Genna. Jaime clearly needed to be forcibly separated from Cersei and might not even have joined the Kingsguard if that relationship hadn't been allowed to become as unhealthy as it did (heir crisis solved!). And maybe none of the other Lannisters would've wanted him, though I doubt it, but even so Tyrion would've thrived in Oldtown.
My point is that Tywin had options, and not even least-bad choices, but options which were to everyone's benefit and would've required significantly less effort from him. Distant fathering, my ass. He WANTED those three kids under his thumb so he could terrorize them out of ever thinking of him the way he thought of Tytos. But that's the thing, isn't it? Anyone whose self-esteem has proven to be this dependent on regular access to tiny breathing punching bags is inescapably, incurably weak, no matter how many pregnant women he has whacked. And I think on some level Tywin knows that, and so he was harsher and crueler on the kids in order to hide that weakness, but the more he indulged, the more keenly he felt that vulnerability, and the more he doubled down to hide it.
So, okay. He had ONE JOB and fucked it up. But, you could argue, obviously one should not accept the worldview of this jackass even to judge the jackass himself: this is a world where public and private mix in all kinds of ways they maybe shouldn't. So let's take a look at Tywin's political career.
Tywin is an extraordinarily skilled political operative; I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. That said, I think he would be absolutely galled to notice that his true talent lies in acting upon the interests of anyone but himself. This isn't particularly surprising; it's a grand-scale extrapolation of the maxim that the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. Ultimately, Tywin is an administrator, not a head of state, and he spends his life chafing against that fact.
He is most famous for the years of political summer when he served as the Mad King's hand. Things went well not because Tywin was in charge, but because they were delegated to him appropriately. His career fell apart when he started to conflate the two things, and decided that he was actually in charge and wanted it acknowledged. That wasn't some ~master plan when he finally fell out with the Mad King. He was full of himself and overplayed his hand when he nominated Cersei for future queen, and he flounced back to Casterly Rock to lick his wounds.
1.5 civil wars later, I'd also argue that the Red Wedding was a seriously short-sighted strategy. Like his treatment of his kids, it's a simultaneously dramatic and abhorrent gesture, and so we look at it and think our problem with it must be entirely emotional. But something can be unsound both morally and strategically. I'm hoping to get more into this in my S3 post, but the key thing here is that the hospitality rites aren't some random cultural/religious taboo. They exist because Westeros is a society where people occasionally travel, and if those travelers know that they can stop somewhere and be safe they have significantly less incentive not to slaughter whole villages every time they want a bed and a brew. If you make it that obvious that it's kill or be killed even in zones generally recognized as being outside the theater of war, you're going to have a lot more killing, and most of it's not going to go down on your say-so. The Red Wedding may have hastened the (near-inevitable) end of 20% of the kings involved in this war, but it was a serious blow to one of the few support beams keeping some aspects of life in the country stable. It’s a lot like using a nuke for pest control - just because there’ll be nobody left alive to point out it didn’t get all the cockroaches, doesn’t make it a good idea. Even assuming the tactics pay off and the Lannister faction retains the Iron Throne (which is far from guaranteed), Westeros will be that much harder to rule.
Hubristic, reckess, selfish and self-deluded - traits that are often, and fairly, used to characterize Cersei, but that apple didn't fall half as far as the tree'd like to think.
But that's when he's acting on his own steam, which, as noted, isn't his strong suit. Tywin's real genius lies in administration. And again, I don't devalue the skill it took to get where he did. But even then, Tywin is a massive study in the privilege of being unaware of one's own privilege. Tywin is BOOTSTRAPS!! guy. He's the kind of person who has enough privileges - gender, class, race, family connections, gifted physically and cognitively - that he can absolutely refuse to acknowledge he has any at all. Because his life wasn't entirely easy - people didn't quail before his father quite as much as he'd have liked, after all! - he decides that he's done it ALL ON HIS OWN and therefore is justified in shoving everyone else around him down as hard as possible. (Private life keeps right on creeping in here, as convenient as it'd be to separate.)
Tywin is a bureaucrat, who both needs and wants to put on a show of being something more. And whether or not it works depends on your perspective. When we hear tales of the impressiveness of the great Tywin Lannister, they are nearly always through the eyes of children or people who knew him as children. Tywin's magnificence - rather than political competence - as the Mad King's Hand is established by Stannis recollecting that he and young Robert assumed Tywin was the king on their first visit to court. A couple of naive children thought that a grown-ass man sitting on a throne was the king, such an uncannily stately figure did he cut! LOL. By contrast, characters who first encounter Tywin as adults see him for what he is: a grasping, unscrupulous scuzzbag with an outrageous amount of money. Even Robb Stark, hardly the world’s greatest thinker, can tell that the blunt-force brutality used by Tywin's forces reveals him as “a mad dog without a strategic thought in his head.”
Similarly, when we see Tywin acting as Hand of the King, as a person running a kingdom, those scenes nearly always revolve around him bullying his own children, or his sniping at Joffrey. Joffrey! Talk about a pissing match with a drunk. Joff is the king in name only; he is a teenager incapable of even faking sanity. And Tywin relishes even petty victories over the mad boy-king; he's even threatened enough by Joff to make the public snub of moving the Small Council's meetings. And when Joffrey catches on, Tywin doesn't seize the moment and try to drag Joff to some maturity as a fit leader, because if the child develops even a little intellectual independence, then Tywin himself has to compete for power.
Not only is he overly interested in preserving power for himself - not for the Lannisters, but for HIMSELF - but he is so invested in preserving his self-image as the ONLY one with ANY sense around here, he is such a MARTYR to the foolishness of everyone around him, that he makes tactically unsound decisions because of his need to bolster his vanity by discrediting his descendants.
(source)
This is an extraneous scene, other than the way the narrative makes a point to show (a) Joffrey making a point that we KNOW is valid and (b) Tywin rejecting it and strutting about his ability to do so. Similarly, Cersei CORRECTLY points out that "the Tyrells are a problem," and gets a misogynist one-two punch for her troubles: that it's because she's a Bad Mommy, or at least it would be if it were happening which it's not because she's actually being silly and blowing things out of proportion due to her feminine jealousy of Margaery. That's definitely part of what spurred her to scrutinize them a little more closely, but at the same time, her conclusions are indisputable. Not only does Tywin ignore her warning, but he reassures himself of his dominance by attempting to force her into a sham marriage. Unlike the Stark match, which at least does make a lot of sense strategically, this is even more of an insult to Cersei than it looks like. The Most Valuable Uterus bonding the Lannisters' futures to the Tyrell's is always going to be Margaery's, and so a match between Cersei and Loras would render Cersei redundant, worthless. Cersei makes an astute political observation, and Tywin punishes her for his failure to make it himself with his usual YOU ARE NOTHING overkill.
This isn't just short-sightedness about Joff or Cersei specifically. Tywin is waging a campaign to undermine the future generations of Lannisters. If he were really worried about the future of their lineage, he wouldn't be doing everything he could to exclude and infantilize Joffrey. Joff does need to be briefed on meetings, and not just as Tywin sees fit; he needs to sit in sometimes and learn the ins and outs of king-craft, not even so he doesn't have so much time on his hands to murder random women, but because Tywin should be planning for the actuarial likelihood that Joff will outlive him by, oh, decades? and so should probably be exposed to the decision-making process at some point before then. And in the meantime, if Cersei is going to pick up as much of the burden as Queen Regent as possible, she needs to actually have some authority and not have the primary influence on her decision-making process be the knowledge that she's going to be undermined at every turn.
[Book 5 spoilers]BOOK SPOILERS: ADwD Cersei did not come out of nowhere! Tywin DELIBERATELY centralized himself and his ability to undermine her in her thought processes, so after the chaos of the Purple Wedding she begins to swing wildly between recklessness and paranoia: "Father can't/wouldn't stop me from doing X, so I'll do X!" and "SOMEONE can and will stop me from doing ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, so it's gotta be full steam ahead on X just to get it done!" And this is why I find wholesale dismissal of Cersei's potential based on her later behavior to be so unendingly frustrating? "Cersei acts and thinks like someone who was abused her whole life, therefore her first and worst abuser was clearly correct in his evaluation of her" does not sit well with me. END BOOK SPOILERS
But that's the real thing, is that Tywin simply refuses to accept that he will die. His lecture to Jamie in his first scene in s2 was totally his protesting too much. Tywin wants the glory of taking over the kingdom in his own lifetime; the scorched-earth campaigns he loves to wage show that he has little interest in leaving future Lannisters a Westeros that can cover them in glory, or even sustain itself. There is no future, there is no world, there is only Tywin Lannister - and how desperately, pathetically insecure does a person have to be to drag an entire kingdom into that black hole of psychic need?
I've left Tywin's disgusting treatment of Tyrion to the end, because as I mentioned at the beginning, it is so terrible that I think it serves as a distraction whatever your view on either character is. But I can’t leave it out, either, because one absolutely cannot divorce Tywin's treatment of Tyrion from his guiding political worldview, that a campaign of terror by the powerful against the powerless is not a bug but a feature; indeed, that voracious sadism may actually be his driving motivation. Furthermore, the force he felt the need to bear against a helpless child brings all his overcompensation in the less-personal political arena into focus. Like. Once you OUTSOURCE CHILD RAPE, you have renounced all current and future swag rights. (Regardless of Tysha's age, the whole scenario was set up as sexual torture of Tyrion, who was 13.) Fittingly, it is to Tyrion that Tywin reveals the astounding extent of his narcissistic worldview:
TYWIN: I would be consumed by maggots before mocking the family name and making you the heir to Casterly Rock.
Actually, genius, that's exactly how it works, for everyone. You die, your kid gets your shit.
[Book 3 spoilers]I came across a fantastic theory on Westeros.org that at the time of his death Tywin was already dying, having been poisoned by the Red Viper. The evidence for it is pretty convincing, while the argument against it seems basically to be "what would be the narrative point of having Tywin die if he was already dying?" And I think that is precisely the point of it. Tywin's poisonous outlook led to his attempt to hide and deny any evidence of human need and vulnerability, and it just cannot be done; he and his family were so insular and closed-off, they were rotting from the inside out. It is dirty and ugly, as abuse always is, no matter how normalized it comes to feel. The reason Tywin resents Tyrion so much is that Tyrion's visible difference punctures the facade. The twins, Tywin's acknowledged children, were on a crash and burn course no matter how much he refused to see it; Tyrion is the real deal.
The real reason I'm sold on the Widow's Blood theory is that Martin has taken great pains to create a world like ours, where death is universally unfair. So what to do with a character like Tywin, who is just begging for some poetic justice? Kill him twice. The actual killing blow is a murder like any other; it's the death that doesn't kill him which is so debasing and grotesque that it, narratively speaking, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. You win or you die, and child abusers? Losers.
He just is so gloriously, consistently pathetic. I love it.
[EDIT 12/27/13: For my own reference, a perspective on Tywin that is very close to my own. The one thing in that post I'd disagree with is that show-Tywin's lecture to Jaime in their first scene together, where Tywin tells Jaime not to care so much what people think, is a departure from book-Tywin's characterization. I think Tywin is someone who wants very badly to believe himself to be above the opinion of others - because he damn well knows that having to fuss about appearances is a signifier of lower status - and I think it's totally consistent with his characterization in the book that he'd project his insecurity onto Jaime. Tywin is as spectacularly self-deluded as anyone in the series, IMO a good deal more than most. Of course, there are viewers whose takeaway is that Tywin does sincerely feel this way and he's just offering Jaime some helpful advice, but I hardly see people being easily taken in by powerful, self-assured abusers as a problem stemming from D&D's adaptation.]