Cersei update #8 (Patreon)

Here are some of the puzzle pieces I'm fitting together at the moment – Cersei's relationship with power, the influence of her father Tywin, and her frustration with her gender.

One of Cersei's core conflicts, imho, is that she desires a very overt, direct kind of power – she dreams of sitting the Iron Throne "high above them all". She "wants to rule", to be feared and respected – but women in Westeros are generally not allowed to hold this kind of direct power. Women like Olenna have a great deal of power through subtle influence and schemes, but Cersei's not interested in subtly ruling from the shadows, she wants people to know that she's in charge. This attitude towards power and pride seems to be shaped by her father Tywin – she thinks of herself as the inheritor of his legacy, and consciously imitates his leadership style – and Tywin, of course, was brutal, wiping out whole families in his pursuit of uncontested power. Cersei goes to great lengths to imitate her monster of a father, but only gets all the more frustrated when people "exclude [her] from power on account of her sex". She's basically a giant angry ball of frustration and resentment and daddy issues, fuelled by wine, with a growing interest in wildfire... A perfect recipe for spectacular disaster.

PS: Tywin's philosophy on power, by the way, seems driven by daddy issues of his own – he was frustrated by the weakness of his father Tytos. Like Tyrion says, "It all goes back and back … to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads."