King Robert Baratheon’s meal while traveling up the Kingsroad
No.78 of the Food of Westeros series
Regarding Joffrey Baratheon.
To begin, I haven’t really made my thoughts on Joffrey incredible clear as I’m lazy when it comes to explaining the runnings of my mind.
Children are a product of two things: their upbringing, and their disposition. These two can work together, or against one another. For example, a child can overcome a tough upbringing via their motivation to be a better caregiver. Or, on the other hand, a child with a good upbringing (which is a very gray area, I understand) can still turn out to be a rotten apple.
As we know, not all that glitters is gold, and not all those who wander are lost.
Joffrey is a product of both — and a failure in both regards. The interbreeding of similar species (such as, let’s say for Darwin’s sake, the Passenger Pidgeon) creates offspring that have heightened features or mutations. Mutations are not a bad thing, they happen all the time in evolution. Mutation is what helps us evolve. However, there are also circumstances that lead to the archaic term ‘genetic monstrosities’. Genetic monstrosities during the Naturalist era were only physical, for the obvious reason that many paths in science were unexplored (and indeed impossible to explore). These ‘genetic monstrosities’, I do believe, can be more than physical.
The simple example of having one chromosome where you shouldn’t, is a ‘genetic monstrosity’. Now before you jump on me: genetic monstrosity is not a strictly bad thing. Just as mutations are not inherently bad. But evolution doesn’t always get things right and sometimes nature fucks up.
Jaime and Cersei are mentally dissimilar, but are closer than the average sets of siblings. Twins share more DNA than is common between non-twins. The breeding of this DNA can (and it is here where my knowledge is somewhat less) lead to a greater chance of heightened mutation. A sort of stream-lining, if you will. It is more encouraged to interbreed different species of the same genera to produce stronger and fitter offspring.
So Joffrey is a product of natural selection, and got the bad end of things from the get-go genetically.
Now, let’s talk about his upbringing. So many of you raised good points so I have revised my theory to include his parentage. With an absentee false-father who lacked any respect for women, and a mother who harbours ill against her gender and wished she were born a man, Joffrey certainly didn’t have the best parentage. The dynamic of having his father disrespect his mother, and then in turn have his mother coddle him, it is easy to see Joffrey growing a bit of a complex.
Cersei definitely took a vested interest in Joffrey, more so than her other children, and wished to shape him to be a king after her own fashion. However, she was not one to ignore her other children (and if I’m wrong here please provide some text to prove me wrong!). In fact she’s often quoted thinking that “All I do is for my children.”
One could also argue that Tommen and Myrcella should be equally as troubled if their mother failed to show any proper affection and their father failed to show much respect. They too, as we have discovered, got the bad end of things genetically.
That Joffrey turned out as such an extreme character is important. He’s not a little off-balance, he is very much off balance. This, I do believe, shows that he is more than a product of his upbringing. He was genetically dispositioned to madness. “But how can you say a child is inherently evil?” I’m not arguing for inherent evil so much as I am for genetic predisposition.
9 months ago with 6 notes
