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kingsguard) wrote2020-08-15 02:01 am
▷ APPLICATION.
| ✖ PLAYER:
Name: Jaime Lannister. Gender & Sex: Male.
August 5th, Leo ( non-canon ).
Convenient associations with lions and gold aside, Leo's the best possible fit for Jaime. While not in actuality royal, Jaime carries himself with the kind of confidence that can be described as regal, and was actually said to be "what a king should look like" in his initial appearance in the books. He's also impossibly arrogant and smug, willful and proud enough to remain defiant even while being chained up to a post in a wooden cage wallowing in his own filth for a few months. Jaime is intensely self-absorbed, caring very little for anything that happens to anyone outside of himself and his family, and was cold-hearted enough to shove a ten-year-old boy out of the window with absolutely no hesitation -- a fall that Jaime actually expected him to die from -- because he'd deemed it necessary in a split-second decision. While the kid didn't die, Jaime doesn't even seem to remotely regret crippling him for life, treating it instead with the same casual, almost careless kind of apathy with which he treats everything else.
Tattoo: A large Leo symbol, as a full back tattoo. Suitability: N/A.
Jaime is a remarkable swordsman ( he says there are only three people in all the Seven Kingdoms capable of defeating him, though that might just be his ego talking ), but aside from that, has no canon powers. As such I'd like to give him the power of fire manipulation from his zodiac sign -- of all the preapproved powers, it best suits his aggressive personality.
Personality:
There is nothing here but arrogance and pride, and the empty courage of a madman. I am wasting my breath with this one. If there was ever a spark of honor in him, it is long dead. CATELYN VII, A CLASH OF KINGS.
Jaime may have believed in honor, once.
But that was almost two decades ago, when Jaime Lannister was fifteen, a young man knighted on the battlefield, and the youngest ever to be given the honor of serving in the Kingsguard. He never cared much for knighthood, even when he was a boy and listening to stories and songs, but what boy doesn't dream a little, and what boy wouldn't be a little bit in awe when he'd somehow managed to catch the eye of a knight as great as Ser Arthur Dayne? The problems were there, though, even at the beginning -- he'd taken the oath not out of any real desire to give his life to his king, but out of love, for the sake of his sister Cersei and staying by her side while she was married to the prince. But King Aerys thought Cersei unworthy of his son, and Jaime was left alone with his sworn brothers and his vows.
If that wasn't enough to have Jaime resenting the very man he was sworn to lay down his life to protect, well, Jaime learned very quickly that he hadn't been chosen for the Kingsguard for his bravery or his strength or anything of the sort. He'd been chosen for his name of Lannister, for his status as his father's firstborn son, and Aerys had intended to deprive his father of his heir.
After that, well, everything started to fall apart. It didn't take him very long to learn how hollow honor could be, how he can swear a thousand oaths that he cannot possibly keep and never mean a single one of them. He was still fifteen, and he stood guard while watching the king at the worst of his madness, stood guard while watching him hang men above a fire to cook them in their armor, stood guard outside the king's bedchamber and listened as he assaulted his wife. And any time he asked, the answer was always the same. You swore an oath. To guard the king, and keep his secrets.
So he did. Until the rebellion came, and Jaime was seventeen, alone in the throne room with Aerys with a sword in his hand, with the usurper coming for the king's head. It may have had a lot to do with Aerys' secret plot to turn the entire city into his own personal funeral pyre, to burn the castle rather than give it over to someone else. It may have involved some of the resentment he'd built up for Aerys over the years. It may have involved a genuine desire to see Aerys dead, to pay for his crimes or for his slights to his family, and that doing it himself would be more satisfying then watching Robert come to kill a mad old man. It may have been that it he was just seventeen, and rash. But whatever the reasons, Jaime killed the Mad King himself, something he would consider his finest act -- and that he still considers his finest act, at the age of thirty-three.
The realm hated him for it.
They named him an oathbreaker, named him the Kingslayer, and well, Jaime decided that the realm be damned. Jaime wasn't exactly some kind of idealistic doe-eyed kid who got the real world beaten into him until he came out bitter and awful the other end, but what was once nothing other than a little cynicism, carelessness and taking honor for granted has been affirmed throughout all his experiences in his life and has morphed into full-blown endless apathy. It's very difficult to insult Jaime Lannister in any kind of meaningful way, not only because Jaime's heard them all whispered behind his back and spat at his feet, but because he simply doesn't care. He's proud and arrogant, and rather than even attempt to deny the act that made him so reviled in everyone's eyes, he embraced it, and in many ways made it his own.
It's not so much that he enjoys being called Kingslayer -- he hates it as much as anyone would think. But since the realm has named him as a man without honor, especially with how disillusioned he already is about the whole idea, Jaime does not pretend to be any kind of an honorable man. He does exactly what he deems as necessary. It's not so much that he's somehow unaware of the moral implications of shoving a ten-year-old boy out the window for being the wrong place at the wrong time, or anything like that. He doesn't pretend that what he does is right or even particularly justifiable. He just does it because he knows he needs to, in the end, and why bother to pretend to hesitate at doing such terrible things when the realm's already so fixated on his apparent fall from grace?
Much of that attitude is a bit of a defense mechanism, something that developed in an instinctive response to all the hostility that came towards him following Aerys' death. He always had a problem with humility in his youth, since he knew just exactly how talented he was as a swordsman, and didn't really see the point in trying to be humble about it -- but that's turned into a simple arrogance, now. Something in his demeanor tends to give off the impression that he constantly looks down on others, as much as they constantly look down on him. He seems careless and unconcerned with anything that doesn't directly concern himself or his family, and doesn't appear to ever take anything seriously, making light on even the most important issues and treating his duties and responsibilities as a member of the Kingsguard as nothing especially important.
While Jaime can be well-mannered enough if the situation demands for it and if he feels like it, he tends to be much more direct in his day-to-day speech. He actually happens to be very given towards brutal, direct honesty, a tactic that's a little out of place among his siblings who pride themselves in their ability to lie and manipulate the people around them. Clever little implications and indirect insults might work better for people who have some inclination towards the plots and schemes that come with court life, but Jaime never cared much for any of that in his youth, cares even less now, and his frank and often honest observations are often just as cutting as any of Cersei or Tyrion's jabs. He doesn't really see the point in being too obtuse about things. It's not like people are being terribly subtle, when they refer to him as Kingslayer.
Because of this and his propensity for warfare, people tend to overlook that while Jaime isn't a schemer like his siblings, he's still perfectly smart, just as quick-witted, and fully capable of making plots -- when he puts his mind to it. He just has no interest in it, no personal stake in the game of thrones everyone else seems to be so caught up in. He's also much more perceptive than he people give him credit for, being a good judge of character ( though not without blind spots ), and while he's not the type to sit and make elaborate plans that will unfold over months and years Jaime is still in his own way calculative. His actions considered and deliberate, even if they give the distinct impression of being the complete opposite.
For all his faults, Jaime does not wholly consist of the arrogant Kingslayer that he so often portrays himself to be. While he will not hesitate to do something if he finds it necessary, regardless of any moral implications, he is not by nature cruel. His renowned fearlessness does stem a little from arrogance and recklessness, but Jaime has always understood the dangers he puts himself into, and his bravery is genuine. While he doesn't seem to care about his oaths and his vows and seems to have accepted himself as a man without honor, some part of him does feel conflicted about the things he has done. He's extremely reluctant to recognize this in himself, but he does struggle constantly with all the conflicting expectations he's given by everyone from his sister to his father to the king, with all the vows and oaths he's sworn and can't even begin to try and keep track of. He does think about his actions and his speech and what they imply about him as a person. He has a realistic, practical outlook on life, and reflects on himself and the world around him with a kind of grim, jaded humor.
And still, with all of his cynicism, some part of Jaime manages to remain idealistic, and oddly romantic. While he'd never use any of those words to describe himself, even in the privacy of his own reflections, Jaime is quite aware that much of what he does is motivated by love.
Despite being a raging douche and an absolutely terrible person, Jaime loves his family. He loves ( as well as respects and fears ) his lord father, loves his brother, and is in love with his twin sister. He doesn't have much real ambition on his own, instead mostly acting on behalf of his sister and his family, and he trusts them completely to the point of believing that no one in his family, especially not Tyrion or Cersei, would ever lie to him. Being born a Lannister, into a family of people he knows full well to be liars and schemers, this is nothing short of naive. Yet it's something he holds true to heart, and it's what makes his faith in his family one of Jaime's greatest weaknesses -- Cersei most of all.
While his relationship with Cersei has many aspects to it, including being terribly unhealthy and in many ways self-destructive, it is at its core driven by a genuine love, their relationship passionate, consensual, and very much real. Even though the consequences of revealing their affair would be disastrous, Jaime's shown on numerous occasions to be quite comfortable with the idea of declaring their love and facing whatever consequences may come of it. Cersei is understandably more reluctant, what with her having actual desire for power and ambitions in the court, and it's for her sake that Jaime keeps his silence.
Having love as a motivation doesn't make Jaime a good person, and he knows it. He knows that many of his actions are morally detestable, and he doesn't pretend that his reasons justify them morally or make him a better person. Yet in the end Jaime does do things for his own reasons, in his own way making what he believes to be the right decision -- and most wouldn't agree with him, but well, he doesn't care. He still stands by killing the Mad King as his finest act, and the realm can condemn it for him all they like, can talk about how he has no honor, is no longer a true knight and has no place on the Kingsguard.
Jaime doesn't deny any of that, but they will never make him regret it. |
