Joanna Lannister
Tywin's beloved wife and cousin, the one person said to have ruled the great lord himself; she died bringing his youngest son into the world.
A soul of House Lannister, born at Casterly Rock.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
Died before the story ÔÇö before this story begins.
Her death precedes the tale in both tellings and is disputed in neither: she died in childbed at Casterly Rock in 273 AC, delivering the malformed son the maesters did not expect to live. The infant survived; the mother did not. Aerys's recorded condolence ÔÇö that the gods had taken Joanna to teach Tywin humility ÔÇö is credited in the books with finishing whatever remained of the friendship between king and Hand, and the household's grief was institutionalized by its lord: from that day the Rock ran colder. Every version of the family's story, on page and screen alike, treats her death as its true beginning ÔÇö the wound Tyrion is blamed for, the love Tywin buried, and the vacancy Cersei spent a lifetime trying to inherit.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
On screen Joanna is a name ÔÇö invoked by Tywin at his most human, by Cersei at her most wounded, by Oberyn Martell recalling the Lannister visit to Casterly Rock that the books stage in his memory too ÔÇö and never a face; the show cast no one and filmed nothing of her. The books hold considerably more: her friendship and rivalry at Rhaella's court, the persistent and pointedly unresolved rumors about Aerys's obsession with her, and through them one of the fandom's most durable theories about Tyrion's parentage ÔÇö which the novels neither confirm nor extinguish. Where the show uses her simply as the hole in Tywin's chest, the books use her as that and as a live question about whose story the saga is actually telling.