10 Game of Thrones dads who give Father’s Day a bad name

Tywin Lannister

Tywin is yet another father with a serious priority problem. True, he values his children…but only insofar as they can further the Lannister legacy. He never cared about them as people. He didn’t even realize Jaime and Cersei were sleeping together even though he was better positioned than anyone else to know the truth of their affair. Cersei puts it best in “The Children”:

"You don’t know, do you? You never believed it. How is that possible? What am I saying? Of course it’s possible. How can someone so consumed by the idea of his family have any conception what his actual family was doing? We were right there in front of you and you didn’t see us. One look in the past 20 years, one real look at your own children and you would have known."

But that was Tywin. Whether his children were in a tremendously unhealthy relationship didn’t matter so long as it didn’t generate bad publicity for the family.

This cold neglect damaged all of Tywin’s children. Jaime, lacking guidance during the darkest moments of his life, embraced his violent, caviler Kingslayer persona. Cersei, wanting to do her father proud, doubled down on his brutality, eventually blowing up a church full of people and thinking it justified because it helped her move up the ladder. And Tyrion, whom Tywin had long hated for being a dwarf, grappled with self-loathing for years until finally he killed his own father after Tywin sentenced him to death for a crime he didn’t commit.

Tywin’s crappy parenting doesn’t excuse Tyrion’s murderous act, but in the long run, something along those lines was inevitable. Tywin treated his children terribly, and some of that cruelty was bound to come back on him. For all the plaudits Tywin gets for being a keen strategist, a cunning military leader and an able ruler, his sorry performance as a father is a huge black mark on his resume, and the one that eventually did him in.