Tywin Lannister

How it ends for them

On the screen. Shot on his privy by Tyrion (S4┬ÀE10)

The great lion died on the privy in the Tower of the Hand, shot twice with a crossbow by the dwarf son he'd sentenced to death. He went insisting to the end that Tyrion was no son of his. A Lannister's debt, paid in full.

On the page. A crossbow bolt on the privy (ASOS, ch. 78)

Tyrion climbed the privy tower on his escape and found his father where all men are mortal. Two quarrels from a crossbow answered a lifetime of contempt ÔÇö and Tywin Lannister, in the end, did not shit gold.

He dies on a privy, which the entire realm agrees is the joke he spent his life making impossible. In the show, Jaime frees Tyrion from the black cells on the eve of his execution; Tyrion, instead of fleeing, climbs to the Tower of the Hand, finds Shae in his father's bed and strangles her, then takes the crossbow from the wall and finds Tywin in the privy chamber. Tywin tries to command him, then to bargain, and finally spits that Tyrion is no son of his; the first quarrel is for calling Shae a whore, the second for a lifetime. He dies mid-sentence, still certain the crossbow will not fire.

The books stage the same scene with a crueler key turned in the lock. On the climb out, Jaime confesses the truth about Tysha ÔÇö she was no hired woman, just a crofter's daughter who loved a boy ÔÇö and Tyrion goes up the ladder with that in his ears. He asks his father where whores go; Tywin says the word one time too many. A single bolt takes him in the bowels, and the epilogue of his life is the funeral in the Great Sept, where the corpse of the most feared man in Westeros putrefies so spectacularly that mourners flee the smell, and the body seems, in the candlelight, to be smiling. In both tellings the realm's order dies with him ÔÇö everything Cersei inherits, she breaks.