The first dramatic act of evil carried out on screen in Game of Thrones is when Jaime Lannister, at the end of the pilot, pushes young Bran Stark out of the window of a tall tower. The man has just pushed a young boy to his presumed death and actual life-changing injury. He’s evil, right? But of course, as the series goes on, the audience realizes that Jaime is more complicated than that. He pushed Bran out of the window because Bran caught him and his sister Cersei having sex; that much, we already know when it happens. But we later find out that Cersei’s three children, who are supposedly the children of King Robert Baratheon and the heirs to the throne of Westeros, are actually Jaime’s children. He is not just protecting his own dirty secret; he is protecting his children from Robert’s rage if he ever finds out the truth.
Another act of Jaime’s that seems to set him up as a villain is the great crime that has hung over him for his entire life, his killing of King Aerys II Targaryen in the war in which Robert Baratheon took the throne, years before the start of the show. All of Westeros hates him for committing the unforgivable act of killing the King he had sworn to protect. But in season 3, Jaime reveals to Brienne of Tarth the reason for this murder; Aerys was about to burn the whole of King’s Landing, and everyone in it, to the ground. Jaime was saving half a million lives by killing one, and no one knows it but himself (and Brienne). Although he is notorious as an oathbreaker, his actual motivation was the desire to do what knights are supposed to do and protect the innocent.
As the series goes on, it becomes clear that Jaime’s one overriding motivation in nearly everything he does is love, with his secondary motivation being a desire to be heroic and to protect people. We should have known from the first, really, but on first viewing his line “the things we do for love” sounds like a throwaway quip, a heartless dismissal of his attempted murder of a small boy. It is not – it is the entire key to his character.
Jaime protects Brienne from no motivation other than a desire not to see her get hurt, and goes back to rescue her when he realizes she will likely be killed (in the TV series motivated entirely by affection for her, and not by a weirwood dream as in the books). He finally abandons Cersei at the end of season 7 when he realizes she is not going to help to fight against the Night King and his army, and he goes back to her after the Battle of Winterfell because he realizes she herself is now in danger from Daenerys, and he still loves her, however cruel she is.
There are a few callous acts of Jaime’s that are harder to explain or excuse this way. He kills his own cousin trying to escape from the Starks in season two, which, as a kinslaying, is another unforgivable crime in the Seven Kingdoms. In episode 1 of season 4, he tells Cersei that he did it to get back to her, which could just about put it under the heading of “killing for love”, but it’s rather excessive. He stabs poor Jory Cassel through the eye while arresting Ned Stark in season 1 episode 5, which might be excused as an act of violence he considered necessary to carry out his duty and is done primarily in the hope of rescuing his brother from Catelyn Stark, but he is a bit too enthusiastic about it. Overall, though, unlike his son Joffrey, Jaime does not carry out acts of evil or violence for the sake of it. He does it to protect the people he loves.
Daemon’s motivations are more complicated and harder to define than Jaime’s, but there are similarities. Daemon is introduced as Master of Laws and Commander of the City Watch in King’s Landing. His methods are brutal and it seems that he is as dangerous and unsuitable to lead as Otto Hightower suggests, as we see his Gold Cloaks ransacking the city and carrying out brutal punishments without trial; castrating rapists, executing murderers and chopping off the hands of thieves. Daemon does, however, have a reason for this action – he claims it was necessary to keep criminal activity to a minimum during the tourney Viserys has arranged, and to bolster the reputation of the Watch. Although brutal, it is not an attack on the innocent, at least not in theory (it is probably best not to think about how many of Daemon’s victims might have been wrongly accused!).
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