Sean Bean would make the perfect Jaime Lannister

[rusty_halo]

* South Park is awesome.

* Veronica Mars is boring.

* queenofthorns was right; young Sean Bean would make the perfect Jaime Lannister.

I say this because I just watched the latest from Netflix, Inspector Morse 24: Absolute Conviction. This is an episode of an English detective series from 1992, guest-starring Sean Bean.

He's only in it for about 10 minutes, but between this and Sharpe, I'm thoroughly convinced that he's the ideal Jaime Lannister. His character in this is a semi-bad guy: cold, arrogant, and mocking, but with a simmering anger underneath, and apparently some genuine love for his wife. You could *so* totally see him as Jaime in all those classic moments: coldly ordering Ned's men killed, flashing his cruel smirk, while underneath he is terribly worried about Tyrion and bitter towards Ned; telling Cat that he tossed her kid off a tower, indifference and mockery masking his self-loathing; threatening to send Edmure's newborn baby back to him with a trebuchet.

And, of course, with Sharpe we see Sean Bean playing a character who is a warrior, whose first reaction to any problem is to solve it with violence, and who has an idealistic/romantic core. So he could also play the impetuous warrior side of Jaime and the decent side of Jaime, disillusioned idealist that he is.

Oh yeah, and he's stunningly beautiful, with golden hair, green eyes, and high cheekbones.

See, it didn't quite work for me before, probably because I was thinking of older Sean Bean, who is too rugged to fit that "mirror image of his twin, the beautiful queen," thing that Jaime has going. But younger Sean Bean? Perfect.

Speaking of Jaime, there's a nice discussion of his character development here on the ASOIAF forum.

* I also watched Lady Chatterly (thanks to Sean Bean I've watched more British television in the past two months than I've ever seen in my life). It reminded me that I despise love stories. On the plus side, Sean Bean is very beautiful and occasionally naked in it. And I did like the end; the characters actually had the guts to do what I would've done, which was to say "fuck you" to society and to run away (to Canada!) together. On a metaphorical level, it was more about the irrelevance of the class system, so that was cool.

Comments

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

I think Young Sean Bean (especially circa “Stormy Monday”) really fits that reputation of Young Jaime’s as incredibly beautiful. (I see the older, more worn-down Bean as being Jaime, circa AFFC – he’s described as thin and with his face lined and with some gray in the gold of his hair – and I think he’s still beautiful but in a different way!)

I like that adaptation of “Lady Chatterley” not solely because of the Beanie nekkidness, but because you’re right, the class-conflict is made very clear (Lady Chatterley’s shame is that her lover is the gamekeeper, not that she HAS a lover who made her pregnant, which after all, her husband even urged her to do, AND Mellors’ own milieu hate him for thinking he’s better than they are, or however they perceive it!) I also like that Mellors has a kind of angry bitterness to him (I like my Bean angry and bitter) later on, when he realizes that love isn’t enough. (Except it is, which makes my romantic heart happy!) Also, Ken Russell really toned down a lot of the D.H. Lawrence-ness of it all!

I liked the ONE person's arguments on the Westeros forum, but a lot of people there just annoy me by repeating, over and over again, "Jaime will never change" when it's so obvious that HE HAS. Argh!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Funny, it's hard to picture older Jaime. I think every artistic depiction I've seen is of Jaime in his evil glory, whereas in the books, he has much more screen time as one-handed, changed Jaime.

I liked the ONE person's arguments on the Westeros forum, but a lot of people there just annoy me by repeating, over and over again, "Jaime will never change" when it's so obvious that HE HAS. Argh!

I have to say, it's gotten a lot better since AFfC, though. Jaime, being the most obvious hero of that book, seems to have won a lot of people over, or at least softened their POVs.

Yeah, there's always those stubborn "No one ever changes! They're all exactly as they were presented in their first appearance in the first book!" people. But they're easy to ignore. At least the "if you like Jaime, you're a serial killer lover" type comments are dying down.

I actually enjoy that forum more for the threads that pick apart the books and find all the little subtle bits of foreshadowing and interesting clues and all the fun stuff that Martin weaves in that makes the books so incredibly re-readable. After Spike fandom, I'm pretty bored by the moral arguments. (Which is also why Veronica Mars fandom is boring me. I'm in it for Logan, and if I can argue in favor of a murderous vampire and an incestuous child-crippler, I hardly think "but he's rich and arrogant!" is a worthy reason to condemn a character!)

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

I think every artistic depiction I've seen is of Jaime in his evil glory, whereas in the books, he has much more screen time as one-handed, changed Jaime.

I think that's because a lot of the illustrations are for those games so it's not about what happened in the books. Or something. But the Jaime *I* love so much is the one we first get to know in the dungeons of Riverrun and I'd imagine he's looking a bit shopworn by then :P (And *then* he loses his hand!!)

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Well, true.

Didn't Brienne say something like "He looked half a corpse, half a god"?

I think I love every version of Jaime. Every stage of his development makes perfect sense to me.

I suppose my favorite Jaime is SoS Jaime, on the way back to King's Landing. He finally sees how awful he's become, and after a brief bit of wallowing in despair, he makes the decision to change and follows through on it. And rescues Brienne from the bear pit. And never loses his sense of humor; "Good, I only rescue maidens." ;)

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

I too love Jaime in (almost) all of his incarnations (I find it hard to love him when he's throwing Bran out the window, even though I'm still ashamed that I kind of find the twincest hot there... ahem!)

I just love him the MOST with Brienne, and both the bathtub scene (SWOON!) and the bearpit probably rank as my two favorite scenes in the entire series.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the bathtub scene is AWESOME. *sigh*

Yeah, I don't even mind him throwing Bran out the window. It's fiction; it's not like a real kid is getting crippled. It's a fascinating moment for Jaime; he clearly doesn't enjoy it, since he speaks to Cersei with loathing. It's also quite logical: the life of some kid he doesn't know for the lives of himself, his lover, and their three children. Makes sense in a cruel way.

Did I ever tell you my mom's reaction when she read the books? She had no problem whatsoever with Jaime, and when I said (playing devil's advocate) "Yes, but he threw a seven year old kid out a window," her answer was "So? That wasn't so bad." But then she had a huge problem with him telling Tyrion the truth about Tysha. Which I guess doesn't really show much, except that my mom is weird. (She also refers to the dragons as "dinosaurs"; I don't think she's ever read fantasy before I gave her this!)