Cersei Lannister
Queen to King Robert and daughter of Tywin: proud, clever, and coldly protective of her three golden children. She loves her twin Jaime best of anyone alive.
A soul of House Lannister, born at Casterly Rock.
The fuller tale
Season One
Tywin Lannister's firstborn and his equal in will, and none of it counts because she is a daughter. Sold to Robert Baratheon to seal a rebellion, she has spent a marriage being compared to a dead girl. When a small boy climbs a tower and sees what he should not, she has him thrown out of the window, and then arranges a boar hunt, and then puts her son on the throne.
Season Two
She loses Joffrey by degrees, and the city with him. Every instrument she reaches for ÔÇö the Faith, the gold cloaks, her own brother ÔÇö turns in her hand, and by the night of the Blackwater she is sitting in a room with her youngest child and a bottle, waiting for the gates to fall.
Season Three
Her father marries her off a second time, to a boy from Highgarden who does not want her either, and she discovers that being the most powerful woman in the realm and being a piece on the board are the same condition.
Season Four
Joffrey dies in her arms at his own wedding feast. She names Tyrion for it before the cup has finished falling and spends the rest of the year building a courtroom around that accusation, and gets everything she asked for out of it, and none of it is any use.
Season Five
She arms the Faith Militant to break the Tyrells and is arrested by the men she armed. The walk from the Great Sept to the Red Keep is the exact humiliation she has organised her whole life to avoid, and she comes out the other side of it with nothing left to lose and a maester with no chain.
Season Six
She answers the whole of it in one morning with a cache of wildfire under the Great Sept ÔÇö the Faith, the Tyrells, her own trial and several hundred other people at once. Then her last living child steps out of a window, and she is crowned in an empty hall in black, having defeated everybody including every reason she wanted to win.
Season Seven
Plays the last war coldly and very nearly brilliantly: destroys the Greyjoy fleet and Dorne in a night, takes Highgarden's gold to pay the Iron Bank, buys the Golden Company, and agrees to a truce she has no intention of keeping so that her enemies will bleed each other white in the north.
Season Eight
It almost works. She stands at a window with a cup and watches the dragon come, and dies in the dark under the Red Keep in the arms of the one person who never needed her to be anything other than herself.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died beneath the Red Keep (S8┬ÀE5)
The last light of House Lannister's queen went out beneath the Red Keep, in Jaime's arms, as the map room's ceiling gave way. No trial, no wildfire, no prophecy's valonqar ÔÇö just the castle her family ruled falling on their heads.
In the show she dies beneath the castle her family ruled, in the arms of the person she began beside. As Daenerys burns King's Landing, Cersei's defenses ÔÇö scorpions, Golden Company, iron fleet ÔÇö are erased in minutes, and the queen who never retreats is finally walked down from the map room by Qyburn's ruin and her own trembling. Jaime, wounded from his duel with Euron, reaches her in the lower vaults as the Red Keep comes down; the passage out is choked with rubble, and there is nowhere left to go. Her last words are not defiance but a plea ÔÇö she does not want to die, not like this ÔÇö and Jaime turns her face to his: nothing else matters, only us. The ceiling falls. Tyrion finds them in the ruin by daylight, uncovered brick by brick, together.
In the published books Cersei is alive. Her walk of atonement has happened; her fall has not. She waits in the Red Keep for a trial by combat in which her champion is Ser Robert Strong ÔÇö an eight-foot knight who never speaks, never eats and never removes his helm ÔÇö while the valonqar clause of Maggy's prophecy hangs unfulfilled. Whether the little brother destined for her throat is Tyrion, Jaime, or someone else's younger sibling entirely remains the books' most argued open question; the show discarded the clause and answered with falling stone instead.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 2 chapters that name them
A Clash of Kings 6 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 2 chapters that name them
A Feast for Crows 10 chapters of their own, and 2 more that name them
A Dance with Dragons 2 chapters of their own, and 1 more that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The published books hand Cersei something the show never does: the inside of her head. From the fourth novel she is a point-of-view narrator, and the effect is devastating in a way no actress could fully translate ÔÇö book Cersei is a cauldron of paranoia, self-congratulation and misread rooms, convinced she is Tywin with teats while appointing flatterers, drinking through council meetings and interpreting every event through Maggy's prophecy. That prophecy is also completer on the page: beyond the three golden shrouds, the valonqar ÔÇö High Valyrian for little brother ÔÇö will wrap his hands about her throat, a clause the show quietly cut, and the reason book Cersei's hatred of Tyrion has the flavor of terror. The show, needing a competent final antagonist, streamlines her into something colder and far more effective; book readers often note that show Cersei from season five onward is really a different, sharper woman wearing the same wounds.
The novels leave her mid-story: walked, shorn and humiliated, restored to the Red Keep with her trial before the Faith still ahead of her and a silent giant in white armor sworn to champion her cause. Several of her show deeds belong to other book characters or haven't happened ÔÇö the books' sept still stands as of the fifth novel ÔÇö so her last published state is a queen regent circling her enemies, prophecy in her ears, with everything still to play for.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.