Jaime Lannister
The Kingslayer: golden, arrogant, and the finest sword in the Seven Kingdoms, sworn to the Kingsguard at seventeen after cutting down the king he was sworn to protect. Cersei's twin.
A soul of House Lannister, born at Casterly Rock, sworn to The Kingsguard.
The fuller tale
Season One
The realm's shorthand for a broken oath, and comfortable being it, because the truth is worse company. He cuts down Ned Stark's guard in the street over a slight and puts a sword through Ned's leg, then loses an entire army in the dark of the Whispering Wood to a boy of sixteen and spends the rest of the year in a pen.
Season Two
A year in a cage at Riverrun, chained, filthy and still the wittiest man in any room he is dragged into. He kills a cousin trying to escape, is nearly hanged for it, and is finally sent south by Catelyn Stark in the middle of the night on a mother's bargain nobody sanctioned.
Season Three
On the road with Brienne of Tarth, an enormous humourless woman who will not be provoked and will not stop being honest at him. He loses his sword hand to a sellsword's whim and with it every single thing he has ever been. In a bathhouse at Harrenhal, half-dead, he tells her the truth about the Mad King and the wildfire and finds out what it is like to be believed.
Season Four
Home, one-handed, useless in the practice yard, and less and less able to recognise the woman he has organised his life around. He gives Brienne a Valyrian sword and a job, which is the first order he has ever given that was entirely his own.
Season Five
Dorne, on a plan of his own making, executed badly, to bring home a daughter he is not allowed to call his daughter ÔÇö and she dies on the boat with his arms around her, having just told him she knew.
Season Six
The Riverlands and a siege he takes without a battle, by walking into the castle and promising the Blackfish something so unforgivable that everybody believes him. He is very good at this and it is beginning to cost him something to be good at it.
Season Seven
Highgarden, where Olenna Tyrell drinks the poison and then tells him what she did to his son. Then the Loot Train, where he sees for the first time what a dragon actually does to an army, and afterwards a truce he believes in and a sister who does not. He rides north alone in the snow.
Season Eight
He knights Brienne of Tarth by firelight the night before a battle everyone expects to lose, survives the Long Night, and then rides south again ÔÇö to die in the dark under a collapsing castle with his sister, which is either the failure of his whole arc or the point of it, depending on the day you ask.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died beneath the Red Keep (S8┬ÀE5)
He rode north an oathbreaker and fought the Long Night a knight, then went home to the sister he could never leave. The Red Keep's cellars came down on them both; he died holding Cersei, the only person who never had to earn it.
The show's Jaime dies where his story started keeping its secret: under the Red Keep, holding Cersei. Having left Brienne at Winterfell and ridden south, he is captured by Daenerys's forces, released by Tyrion in a farewell that reverses their season-four escape, and slips into the falling city to bring Cersei out through the dragon-skull cellars. Euron Greyjoy, washed ashore, forces a duel on the beach and runs him through twice; Jaime kills him and climbs on. He finds Cersei in the map room, walks her down into the vaults as Drogon dismantles the castle above them, and when the way out proves buried, he gives her the only protection left ÔÇö his arms and his certainty that nothing else matters. The Red Keep's foundations come down on the twins together, and Tyrion, finding their bodies in the rubble, weeps for all three of them.
In the published books Jaime is alive, nowhere near King's Landing, and last seen riding into a trap: Brienne, gaunt and scarred, has come to his camp claiming the Hound holds Sansa Stark, and he goes with her ÔÇö toward, readers strongly suspect, the vengeful thing that used to be Catelyn Stark. Whatever the books intend for him, they have not yet brought him back to Cersei's side, and many readers believe they never will.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 3 chapters that name them
Bran II
Bran climbs the broken tower and finds the queen and her twin entwined; Jaime pushes him from the window ÔÇö ÔÇ£the things I do for love.ÔÇØ
Eddard IX
Ned traces Robert's bastards through the city; outside a brothel Jaime Lannister's spears close in ÔÇö Jory dies, and Ned's leg is shattered.
Catelyn X
In the Whispering Wood Robb springs his trap on Jaime Lannister; the Kingslayer is taken, and the price is paid in Karstark sons.A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 9 chapters of their own, and 1 more that name them
A Feast for Crows 7 chapters of their own
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter of their own
Where the page and the screen part
Through the third book, page and screen walk in step; after it, they part company sharply. Book Jaime, back in King's Landing with his golden replacement hand, begins actively pulling away from Cersei ÔÇö repelled by what he finds she became in his absence, refusing her summons, and finally burning her desperate letter from prison unanswered, one of the novels' most debated gestures. His fourth- and fifth-book arc is a slow tour of the Riverlands settling sieges with words instead of swords, staffed with characters the show never cast ÔÇö his cousin and squires, his aunt Genna, the ghosts of Casterly Rock ÔÇö and it ends on a cliffhanger the show never used: a woman he trusts appearing at his camp with a story about the Hound and Sansa Stark, leading him off the map. The show, needing him beside Cersei for its endgame, quietly reversed his direction of travel; whether the books will do the same is among the biggest open questions of the unfinished series.
Smaller divergences pile up around the big one. The books give him white-cloak politics as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, a weirwood dream that reads as prophecy, and a running interior monologue as sardonic as Tyrion's; the show gives him invented excursions ÔÇö the Dorne adventure, the loot train battle's charge at a dragon ÔÇö and a redemption told in deeds instead of thoughts. Both versions agree completely about the bath at Harrenhal, and about Brienne being the person in front of whom he cannot lie.
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.