Tommen Baratheon

The younger prince, a gentle, plump little boy who loves his kittens and his sister far more than any thought of crowns.

The fuller tale

Tommen is what Joffrey would have been if the same blood had landed in a gentle vessel. The youngest of Cersei's three, plump and mild and eager to be good, he spends his early boyhood as the court's afterthought — a boy who loves his kittens, cries when his sister is shipped to Dorne, and flinches at his brother's games. The books make the contrast explicit through everyone who meets both princes: where Joffrey tortured cats, Tommen names his — Ser Pounce among them — and knights them. Nothing in his upbringing prepares him to rule anything, which is exactly the problem, because the sept bell tolls for Joffrey and the crown descends on the one head in the family with no appetite for it.

His reign is a tug-of-war conducted over a boy's shoulders. The show ages him into adolescence so that his marriage to Margaery Tyrell can be real, and his brief happiness with her — a queen who is kind to him, listens to him, and is of course also managing him expertly — is the only unclouded stretch of his life. Around him, his mother and his wife fight a proxy war for his signature; the High Sparrow, once Cersei arms the Faith, simply takes possession of the board. Tommen's tragedy is that he keeps trying to do the kingly thing and discovering that every path is owned: when the Faith seizes Margaery, he agonizes, is counseled to patience, and does nothing; when it seizes his mother, the same. His eventual alliance with the High Sparrow — crown and Faith united, announced from the throne while Jaime watches in disbelief — is not conversion so much as capture, a lonely boy handed a father figure with an agenda.

The books keep him smaller and safer, for now: a scant eight years old, signing blank warrants his mother rules through, sealing documents with his kittens on his lap, occasionally showing a flash of the decent king he might make — he objects, once, to what is done in his name, and is coldly overruled. Both tellings use him for the same argument. Westeros keeps insisting that legitimacy flows through blood, and Tommen is blood's rebuttal: the sweetest child the dynasty ever produced, and the crown destroys him not through his vices but through his virtues — obedience, trust, and love for everyone the game devours.

The page and the screen

The versions diverge on age and therefore on everything. Book Tommen is a small child — his marriage to Margaery is ceremonial, his kingship a rubber stamp, his story so far a hostage's — while the show's aged-up Tommen is old enough to love his queen, defy his mother, and be genuinely complicit in his own manipulation, which gives his arc a moral weight the books reserve for later. The show also hands him decisions the books haven't reached: the crown-Faith alliance and the abolition of trial by combat are television inventions, the latter aimed like a weapon at Cersei's one escape route. As of the published novels his story is all potential energy: a boy king on a poisoned throne, with Maggy's prophecy — gold their crowns, gold their shrouds — hanging over all three of Cersei's children and two installments still unwritten.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Died when the sept burned (S6·E10)

The gentle boy king watched the Great Sept — and his queen inside it — vanish in green fire from his window. He set down his crown, and stepped quietly out into the air. The last of Cersei's children, as the prophecy promised.

The show gives him the quietest death in a season of loud ones. On the morning of Cersei's trial, Tommen waits at his window for the bells — and instead watches the Great Sept of Baelor, with Margaery and the High Sparrow and half his court inside, erupt in a bloom of green fire across the city. He says nothing. An attendant announces him; he sets the crown carefully on its stand, looks a long moment at the smoke where his wife was, and steps out of the window without drama or sound. Cersei, who burned the sept to save herself from trial, has fulfilled the prophecy's third shroud with her own hands — and her instruction for his body, that he be burned and his ashes interred in the sept's ruins, is as close as the show lets her come to admitting it. In the published books Tommen is alive: still eight, still king, still signing what he is told to sign, with readers left to dread how the novels intend to collect on the same prophecy.