George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books are chock full of merciless bad guys. Many of the characters in these books are meant to be morally grey and resist easy categorization into “hero” or “villain” camps. That being said, there are still plenty of examples of characters that consistently do heinous things. Here are the 10 most evil characters from the Song of Ice and Fire books.
10. Tyrion Lannister
This name may surprise some people because Tyrion is not portrayed as a bad guy at all on the Game of Thrones TV show. But his book counterpart is a completely different character. Even though Martin described Tyrion as his favorite character to write, he also once straight up referred to him as “the villain of course.”
Among the worst deeds committed by the Imp is the fact that he sexually assaults two different women. Back when he was a teenager, Tyrion falls in love with a common woman named Tysha. When his father Tywin finds out that his son is in a relationship with a low-born girl, he has his guards rape her and then forces Tyrion to do the same. Although there are extenuating circumstances in this case, Tyrion still committed the act.
Much later in A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion is drinking away his sorrows in a brothel in Volantis. He drunkenly forces himself onto a prostitute who clearly did not want to continue.
Aside from his crimes against women, Tyrion also directly causes a war. In A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion meets Aegon Targaryen and Jon Connington, who are trying to make their way to Daenerys Targaryen in order to join forces with her. However, Tyrion successfully convinces the pair to invade Westeros simply because Tyrion thought it’d be fun to mess with their plans.
There are plenty of other heinous actrs to speak of, but perhaps the worst is when Tyrion straight-up murders Shae and his father Tywin. Tywin probably deserved his fate, but Shae did not in my opinion. In the show, Shae grabs a knife and tries to attack Tyrion which makes a case that Tyrion killed her in self defense. But in A Storm of Swords, Shae does not fight back and Tyrion murders her in cold blood. Martin says that this is “probably the blackest deed that he’s ever done.”