Genna Lannister

Tywin's sharp-tongued sister, married off to a Frey, and one of the few who ever dared speak plainly to the Lord of Casterly Rock (book).

The fuller tale

Genna is the Lannister the show never cast and the books cannot do without: Tywin's sister, a fat, shrewd, gloriously unimpressed great lady who says the things about the family that everyone else only thinks. Married off at seven to Emmon Frey — a match young Tywin protested to their father's face, the first recorded instance of anyone in that generation defying Tytos — she has spent a lifetime being technically a Frey and actually the most Lannister person alive, running her husband with the brisk efficiency of a woman who long ago measured him and filed the number away. The books introduce her properly at the siege of Riverrun, where she has arrived to see her husband installed in a castle everyone understands she will govern.

Her function in the saga is to tell Jaime the truth. In the fourth book's Riverlands chapters she becomes his most valuable interlocutor — auditing the family's prospects without sentiment, reminiscing about the brothers as boys, and delivering the assessment that lands on Jaime like a verdict: he is a fine knight, but Tyrion, whatever else he is, is Tywin's true son. She means it as cold analysis, not cruelty, which is why it cannot be argued with. In a family built on performance and terror, Genna performs nothing and fears no one — she boxed the ears of far more dangerous men than her nephews when they were small, and both of them still straighten slightly when she enters a room.

The page and the screen

She is a book-only presence; the show never so much as names her. Her narrative duties on television are quietly redistributed — the family truth-telling goes partly to Olenna Tyrell, who inherits the role of the old woman no Lannister can intimidate, and partly to Tywin himself, whose lectures absorb the family-history function of her reminiscences. What cannot be redistributed simply vanishes: the Frey marriage that makes a Lannister complicit in the Twins, the Riverrun scenes with Jaime, and the only character in either telling who ever says aloud, to a Lannister's face, which brother was really Tywin's heir. In the published books she is alive and holding Riverrun's keys.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.