Joffrey Baratheon
Crown prince and heir to the Iron Throne, a golden boy of twelve with a cruel streak his mother indulges and his father ignores.
The fuller tale
Joffrey was raised to believe two incompatible things at once: that he was Robert Baratheon's heir, entitled to the deference of a warrior-king's son, and that he need never actually become anything to deserve it. The first was a lie — he is Jaime and Cersei's child, with no drop of Baratheon in him — and the second was his mother's most catastrophic gift. Robert, sensing something wrong in the boy without ever guessing what, alternated between ignoring him and the occasional backhand; Cersei answered every cruelty with an excuse and every excuse with a crown. What emerged at twelve was golden-haired, plausible at a distance, and rotten in a way the story reveals by increments: the smirk on the kingsroad, the demand for a butcher's boy's punishment, the wolf-skin he wanted before he ever wore a crown.
His reign begins with the saga's foundational shock. Handed a scripted mercy — Ned Stark's confession bought his daughters' safety, and every adult on the platform understood the deal — Joffrey, thirteen years old and king for a fortnight, improvises. He calls for Ser Ilyn and takes Ned's head because he can, discovering in one stroke the only pleasure that will ever really interest him: the gap between what everyone expects power to do and what it actually can. The war that follows is, in a real sense, his authorship. Robb Stark marches because of that platform; the realm bleeds for four years because a boy wanted to see a sword come down.
As king he is a study in cruelty without competence. He has Sansa beaten by his Kingsguard for her brother's victories, shows her her father's head on a spike, and — in the show — ends Ros with a crossbow in his chambers for nothing but the novelty; when the starving city riots, his answer is to demand everyone's death, and when the Blackwater burns, he leaves the walls the moment his mother calls. The men who actually run his kingdom learn to work around him the way engineers work around weather. Tywin's arrival reduces him to a spectator at his own court — one grandfatherly interview about kings who thought they need not listen is enough to put him visibly back in his box — and Margaery Tyrell manages him with the practiced ease of a falconer, letting him show her his crossbow and telling him he must be so brave.
The strange achievement of Joffrey is that the story makes him monstrous without ever making him mysterious. He is not the product of prophecy or dark gods; he is what happens when unlimited license meets a small, frightened sadist, indulged by one parent and abandoned by the other — the argument, made flesh, for why the realm's habit of handing absolute power to whoever a queen gives birth to is the actual villain of the piece. Jack Gleeson's performance made him the most efficiently hated character on television, all pursed lips and delighted spite, and the books' Joffrey is the same creature seen from below: every point-of-view character who deals with him leaves the room having quietly revised their plans around the fact that the king is a monster and may not be manageable at all.
His wedding is the court's masterpiece of collective motive. By the morning of his marriage to Margaery Tyrell, the list of people with excellent reasons to want Joffrey dead includes most of the guest list — which is precisely the cover the actual plotters counted on. The feast is his character in miniature: he mocks the war dead with a dwarf pantomime, empties wine on his uncle's head, and makes Tyrion his cupbearer to savor the humiliation, spending his last hour alive demonstrating to a hall full of witnesses exactly why no one present will grieve.
The page and the screen
Book and show Joffrey are the same boy at different volumes. The novels age him down — twelve at his accession, dead at thirteen — and keep more of Robert's shadow on him: the story of Joffrey cutting open a pregnant cat to see the kittens, and Robert striking him for it, does the books' explaining, while the show trusts Gleeson's face. Television also gives him inventions the page never staged, most notoriously the crossbow murder of Ros and the on-screen beatings of Sansa, where the books keep his cruelty largely delegated — he has the Kingsguard do it, which the novels present as its own kind of cowardice. One book detail the show dropped entirely: it is heavily implied Joffrey, not any adult schemer, sent the catspaw with the Valyrian dagger to finish Bran Stark, having overheard Robert say the boy would be better off dead — meaning the entire War of the Five Kings traces back to Joffrey twice.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Melisandre leeches king's blood from Gendry over three names: Robb Stark. Balon Greyjoy. Joffrey Baratheon. (S3·E8)
- Three leeches fat with king's blood go into the fire: the usurper Robb Stark, the usurper Balon Greyjoy, the usurper Joffrey Baratheon. (ASOS 37)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Poisoned at his wedding (S4·E2)
The books: The Strangler in his wedding wine (ASOS, ch. 61)
The boy king was poisoned with the Strangler at his own wedding feast, purpling and clawing in his mother's arms. The Queen of Thorns and Littlefinger had arranged it between them; Tyrion was handed the blame and Sansa the escape.
He dies at his own wedding feast, in front of everyone, and both tellings agree on nearly every detail. The poison is the Strangler, a rare crystal that closes the throat; it reaches his wine in the chaos of the feast, and the boy king goes from mockery to clawing, purpling asphyxiation in the space of a song, dying in Cersei's arms while she screams for help that cannot come. His last act in both versions is to point at Tyrion, who had handled his cup — and Cersei's grief becomes an arrest warrant on the spot. The plotters, revealed to viewers and readers only afterward, are Olenna Tyrell, who would not let her granddaughter marry that, and Petyr Baelish, who supplied the poison in a hair-net of black amethysts and needed the chaos: the murder is a joint venture between the realm's two best players, and the realm's worst king never sees either hand. In the books the mechanism is identical, with the added cruelty that Tyrion later cannot stop turning it over — the pie, the cup, the moment — while dying convicted of it. Joffrey's death purchases nothing good for anyone: it sends Sansa into Littlefinger's keeping, Tyrion to a show trial, and the crown onto the head of a little brother who never wanted it.