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.
The fuller tale
Jaime Lannister was the finest sword of his generation and the realm made sure that was the least interesting thing about him. Knighted at fifteen after distinguishing himself against the Kingswood Brotherhood, he was raised to the Kingsguard at sixteen — the youngest knight ever to wear the white cloak, an honor he accepted mostly to stay near Cersei, and which Aerys bestowed mostly to steal Tywin's heir. The joke of his life is that its most famous act was also its best: at seventeen, with his father's army sacking the city and the Mad King commanding his pyromancers to burn King's Landing and half a million people in it, Jaime opened Aerys's throat on the steps of the Iron Throne. He saved a city and was branded forever — Kingslayer, oathbreaker, the man without honor — and because explaining would have sounded like begging, he let the realm believe the worst and practiced his smirk.
The story meets him at the bottom of his arc on purpose. The golden knight of the first season is an assured, drawling villain who duels Ned Stark in the street and — in the tale's founding crime — pushes seven-year-old Bran Stark from a tower window to keep the twins' secret, with a line that becomes his epitaph-in-waiting: the things I do for love. Captured by Robb Stark in the Whispering Wood, he spends a year chained to a post, and the story begins the long, patient work of taking everything away from him to see what is underneath.
What is underneath gets its answer on the road with Brienne of Tarth. Freed by Catelyn Stark to be traded for her daughters, marched across a ruined countryside by an enormous, humorless woman who believes every vow he has ever broken, Jaime loses the only self he has ever been when Locke's men hack off his sword hand. The golden knight was the hand; what survives has to be someone else. The bathhouse scene at Harrenhal — where, feverish and half-drowned, he finally tells someone the truth about the day he killed his king, and faints into Brienne's arms saying his name is Jaime — is the saga's single finest piece of character repair. He goes back for her when the bear pit closes, having no reason to except the new one growing in him.
The seasons that follow are the experiment: can the realm's most famous oathbreaker become the man he was knighted to be at fifteen? He sends Brienne after the Stark girls carrying a Valyrian sword he names Oathkeeper — the blade forged from Ned Stark's own greatsword, turned to the protection of Ned Stark's daughters, which is Jaime's idea of an apology to a dead man. He frees Tyrion against Cersei's fury. He takes Riverrun without a drop of blood by threatening a great deal of it, talks the realm through two sieges, and stands in the war council at Winterfell as the only Lannister who rode north when the dead came — knighting Brienne by firelight the night before the battle, in a scene the whole series had been quietly saving up for.
But the experiment has a control variable, and her name is Cersei. Everything Jaime rebuilds exists alongside the oldest fact of his life: he and his twin came into the world together and he has never truly believed he can leave it any other way. The show frames his final choice as an addict's honesty — he tells Brienne, brutally, that he is not the good man she thinks, lists his crimes without flinching, and rides south. Viewers have argued ever since about whether this is the destruction of his arc or its completion; the books' Jaime, notably, is written by a man who observed that we can love people who are bad for us long after we know better. The Kingslayer's whole story is a debate between the hand he lost and the woman he couldn't, and the tale lets the debate stand.
The page and the screen
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 — 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 — his cousin and squires, his aunt Genna, the ghosts of Casterly Rock — 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 — the Dorne adventure, the loot train battle's charge at a dragon — 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.
In the show, season by season
Season Two. In A Man Without Honor — A man without honor, by his own accounting.
Season Three. In Dark Wings, Dark Words — Fought a woman to a standstill; chained beside her by nightfall. In Walk of Punishment — Saved Brienne with a lie; paid for it with a hand. In Kissed by Fire — "By what right does the wolf judge the lion?" In The Bear and the Maiden Fair — One-handed, unarmored, between a bear and a maiden fair.
Season Four. In Two Swords — A golden hand and no place that fits the man attached to it. In Oathkeeper — Keeps one oath by proxy: the Stark girls.
Season Five. In The House of Black and White — A secret mission to Dorne, with Bronn as the entire army. In Sons of the Harpy — In Dorne with one hand and one friend, for his 'niece'. In Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken — A rescue that arrests itself in the Water Gardens.
Season Six. In The Broken Man — Parleys with the Blackfish and loses on style points. In No One — Took the unbreakable castle with a threat and a rowboat.
Season Seven. In The Spoils of War — One spear, one dragon, one lake — saved by Bronn's tackle. In The Dragon and the Wolf — Rode away from her at last, one glove over a golden hand.
Season Eight. In Winterfell — One knight against the army he promised and didn't bring. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — Does the one knighting that ever mattered to him. In The Last of the Starks — Rides south in the night: "She's hateful. And so am I."
In the books
A Storm of Swords. In Wolves at the Crossing — A rowboat, a wench, and the longest conversation of his life. In Dracarys — "My sword hand. I was that hand." In The Bear, the Wall, the Bath — "The things I do for love" starts to mean something else.
A Feast for Crows. In The Crows Gather — Commands the Kingsguard with one hand and dwindling patience for his sister. In The Quill and the Quiet Isle — Takes the Tully seat with a threat he prays he'll never keep. In The Walk of the Lion — "Put the letter in the fire." Four words that end a lifetime.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Jaime Lannister meets Ned in the street: Jory dies with a dagger through the eye, Ned's leg is spear-struck. (S1·E5)
- Robb feints at the Green Fork and falls on Jaime Lannister in the Whispering Wood: the Kingslayer in chains. (S1·E9)
- Ned traces Robert's bastards through the city; outside a brothel Jaime Lannister's spears close in — Jory dies, and Ned's leg is shattered. (AGOT 36)
- In the Whispering Wood Robb springs his trap on Jaime Lannister; the Kingslayer is taken, and the price is paid in Karstark sons. (AGOT 64)
- Down the river in a skiff: Jaime Lannister, freed by a mother's treason, rows past a burned land trading insults with the huge wench sworn to deliver him. (ASOS 2)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Died beneath the Red Keep (S8·E5)
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 — 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 — 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.