Cersei Lannister was told by a fortune teller that all three of her children would die. She spent her entire adult life trying to prevent it and ended up creating the conditions that made it inevitable. That is not irony. That is the structure of Greek tragedy, transplanted to Westeros and given a wine goblet. Cersei is the most hated character in Game of Thrones. She is also the one who loved the hardest.

She Was Raised to Be a Weapon Someone Else Would Wield

Tywin Lannister raised Cersei to be brilliant, ruthless, and politically astute, and then married her off to Robert Baratheon, a man who called her by another woman's name on their wedding night. Cersei was taught to think like a ruler and then told her only value was as a wife and a mother. George R.R. Martin has said in interviews that Cersei's bitterness comes from this specific wound: she has all of Tywin's intelligence and none of his freedom. If she had been born male, she would have been the most powerful person in Westeros. Instead, she got Robert. Literary scholar Carolyne Larrington has written that Martin uses Cersei to interrogate how patriarchal systems create their own antagonists. Cersei is not evil because she was born cruel. She is cruel because cruelty was the only tool the system left her.

The Walk of Shame Broke Something That Was Already Cracking

When the Faith Militant strips Cersei and marches her naked through the streets of King's Landing, the crowd throws filth and screams at her. This scene is supposed to be justice. It is also a public sexual humiliation of a woman by a religious institution, and the show forces you to feel sympathy for someone you have spent five seasons hating. That is the point. Cersei was already dangerous before the walk. Afterward, she becomes apocalyptic. She blows up the Sept of Baelor, killing hundreds, because the institution that humiliated her is inside it. The collateral damage is irrelevant to her. The Sept took her dignity. She takes everything the Sept represents.

She Burned the World for Her Children and Lost Them Anyway

Every alliance Cersei forms, every enemy she creates, every act of political violence she commits is ultimately in service of one goal: keeping her children alive. She fails. Joffrey is poisoned. Myrcella is poisoned. Tommen jumps from a window. The prophecy completes itself, and Cersei is left with nothing but power and rage, which turn out to be the same thing. Cersei is on HoloDream. She does not want your sympathy. She wants you to understand that she was right about everyone.