While I agree that Jaime has a whole lot more blame than much of the fandom gives him, isn’t it a bit unfair to lump him in with his father and sister on some of the regards? For example, when you criticized him for bloodlessly lifting the Riverrun siege because his family was the one who did the Red Wedding in the first place, what could Jaime do? He didn’t order the Riverlands to be taken from the Tullys, or involved in the Red Wedding at all. He did the best he could in a bad situation.

To quote Terry Pratchett:

poorquentyn:

Let’s talk about “the best he could in a bad situation,” because I think this is the source of a lot of the disagreement about Jaime. I am a loud and proud believer in the virtues of incrementalist politics and making clear-eyed use of corrupt institutions and people to further noble ends. But even I acknowledge that there’s a tipping point where it stops being worth it, where you’re no longer making the best of a bad situation so much as normalizing an unacceptable one. 

That is what I consider the regime that Jaime helped Cersei put in place: an unacceptable situation. I believe that it demands resistance. I believe it to be such a destabilizing force, from the coup itself to Joffrey’s reign to the Mountain’s raids to Tywin’s labor camp at Harrenhal to the Red Wedding, that trying to make it better just misses the point. It needs to be removed; it is the problem. 

My issue with casting what Jaime’s doing as “bloodlessly lifting the Riverrun siege” is that it completely ignores this context. Did Jaime, personally, do all the things that make the Lannister regime unacceptable? No. But Jaime is not just an individual. He is a political and military actor, part of a larger machine. I wouldn’t consider a lawyer for the mob to be as reprehensible as the boss…but the former is still working for the mob. And like a mob lawyer, Jaime’s job in AFFC is to make the Red Wedding look nice and respectable, pretend everything’s business as usual. But it’s not, as the Tully men inform him in no uncertain terms. At some point, there is no legitimate way to represent and employ illegitimate power. It leads not to social stability but breakdown–why should anyone trust the Lannisters and Freys to observe norms, ever again? 

Everyone, of course, has their own definition of when amelioration stops being a social good and outright resistance is justified. But for me, the Lannister regime crossed that line long ago. 

“History was full of the bones of good men who’d followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.“