Cersei Lannister: your Game of Thrones character result

Cersei Lannister is the result for answers that reach for control, keep their weight out of sight and put a small circle of people ahead of everything else. This page covers who she is in the show, scene by scene, which answers on the character quiz count toward her, where she parts ways with Sansa and Daenerys, and what the match does and doesn't say about you.

Who Cersei is in the show

When the series opens, Cersei is queen of the Seven Kingdoms and wife to King Robert Baratheon. HBO's own character page calls her "fiercely protective of her three children" and notes "an unusually tight connection to her twin brother, Jaime" (HBO Max). She is Tywin Lannister's daughter and Tyrion's sister, and all three of her children are Jaime's, which Robert does not know (Wikipedia's article on the character). Lena Headey plays her.

Her story moves in three stages: a secret she protects, the children she loses, and the crown she takes after the last of them dies. The scenes below are the ones the rest of this page leans on.

Seasons 1 and 2: the secret

• "Winter Is Coming" (season 1, episode 1). Bran climbs an abandoned tower and finds Cersei and Jaime together, and Jaime shoves him out of the window to keep the affair hidden. The series starts from the secret she spends the next several seasons protecting.
• "You Win or You Die" (season 1, episode 7). Ned Stark tells Cersei he knows Jaime fathered her children and urges her to leave the capital with them before he tells Robert. Her answer gives the episode its title: "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground" (quoted in Ellen B. Wright's review for Reactor). After Robert's death, Ned presents the king's will to the court; Cersei tears it up and orders Ser Barristan Selmy to seize him, and the City Watch kills Ned's men. The warning was the honorable choice, and the scene at court shows what it cost him.
• "The North Remembers" (season 2, episode 1). Littlefinger hints that he knows her secret about Jaime and reminds her that knowledge is power. Cersei has her guards put knives to his neck and orders them to slit his throat, then says she has changed her mind and calls them off. Only then does she answer him: "Power is power." Scott R. Garceau's 2012 column in Philstar and Paul Levinson's 2012 review both describe the scene, and Wikipedia's episode article calls it a debate "about the nature of power."
• "Blackwater" (season 2, episode 9). While Stannis attacks King's Landing, Cersei waits out the battle drinking and mocking Sansa's innocence. Grand Maester Pycelle has given her a poison to use if Stannis takes the city. She leaves with Tommen, sits with him on the Iron Throne telling him a story, and is about to give him the poison when Tywin arrives to say they have won.

Seasons 4 and 5: losing what she protects

• "The Lion and the Rose" (season 4, episode 2). Joffrey dies at his own wedding feast. As he dies he points at Tyrion, and a grief-stricken Cersei orders Tyrion arrested for poisoning the king. She has the wrong person: after drinking poison herself, Olenna Tyrell tells Jaime that she murdered Joffrey ("The Queen's Justice", season 7, episode 3), and Jaime passes that on to Cersei ("Eastwatch", season 7, episode 5).
• "The Wars to Come" (season 5, episode 1). In the show's first flashback, a young Cersei asks a fortune teller, Maggy the Frog, whether she will marry Prince Rhaegar Targaryen. She is told she will marry the king, not the prince, that she will have three children with golden crowns and golden shrouds, meaning all three will die, and that a younger, more beautiful queen will cast her down. By this point in the story, the first of the three is already dead.
• "Sons of the Harpy" (season 5, episode 4). Cersei authorizes the High Sparrow to revive the Faith Militant, the armed wing of the Faith of the Seven. In the same episode it arrests Loras Tyrell.
• "The Gift" (season 5, episode 7). She makes a halfhearted case to the High Sparrow for Margaery and Loras's release, and to her shock he has her imprisoned too.
• "Mother's Mercy" (season 5, episode 10). Cersei confesses to adultery with Lancel but denies that her children are Jaime's. She is then made to walk naked from the Great Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep while the crowd jeers, and is met at the end by Qyburn and Gregor Clegane, the Mountain, brought back as something undead. In the same episode Myrcella dies in Jaime's arms, poisoned by Ellaria Sand.

Seasons 6 to 8: the crown

• "The Winds of Winter" (season 6, episode 10). On the day of Loras's trial, Cersei fails to appear at the Great Sept, and a cache of wildfire she arranged goes off beneath it (Wikipedia's article on the character). The blast kills Margaery, Loras and Mace Tyrell, Kevan and Lancel Lannister, and the High Sparrow. Septa Unella is tortured by the Mountain on Cersei's orders. Tommen watches the explosion from the Red Keep and then jumps from a window, and with her last child dead, Cersei is crowned Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. All three children in Maggy's prophecy are now dead: Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen.
• "The Queen's Justice" (season 7, episode 3). Euron Greyjoy presents Ellaria and her daughter Tyene to Cersei as a gift. Cersei kisses Tyene with the same poison Ellaria used to kill Myrcella and leaves Ellaria in the dungeons to watch her daughter die.
• "Eastwatch" (season 7, episode 5). She tells Jaime she is pregnant and that she will publicly acknowledge him as the father. The secret from the first episode is now something she means to say out loud.
• "The Dragon and the Wolf" (season 7, episode 7). At the Dragonpit, Jon and the Hound show her a captured wight. She offers help on the condition that Jon stays neutral between her and Daenerys, and withdraws it when he says he has already sworn himself to Daenerys. Tyrion goes to her alone, and she returns to agree to send her army north. Afterward she tells Jaime that she lied: Euron has gone to Essos to bring back the Golden Company, which she means to use against whoever wins the war against the dead. When Jaime is disgusted, she threatens to have the Mountain kill him, then relents, and he rides north alone.
• "The Bells" (season 8, episode 5). Cersei has let civilians take refuge in the Red Keep, meaning to use them as human shields (Wikipedia's article on the character). The bells ring in surrender, Daenerys burns the city anyway, and Cersei and Qyburn try to escape. Gregor kills Qyburn, Cersei flees, and Jaime finds her, but rubble blocks their way out. He comforts her as the Red Keep collapses on them both.

What the Cersei answers have in common

Every question on the quiz offers one answer for each of the eight characters, so Cersei has an answer on every question. Read side by side, her answers share a few habits.

Control, taken early and held

On taking command of people who don't trust you yet, the Cersei answer is "Establish dominance early, because power is a story and the first chapter matters most." In a room where everyone is performing, she would "Control the room completely, because you wrote the rules of this particular game." With three of her people arguing, she would "Intervene decisively. Prolonged conflict serves no one." And on the last night before everything changes, she is "In complete control, planning, preparing and leaving nothing to chance."

Less on the surface than underneath

Several answers are about what other people get to see. Unwelcome advice gets the look of consideration while she dismisses it privately, "because your course is already set." A disastrous decision stays hidden: "You don't let people see the weight of it. Weakness is information your enemies use." Told she has no idea how the real world works, she smiles, "because it's useful when people believe that about you." And what people misread about her, in her answer, is that they take "the hardness" for "the whole story."

Leverage over what other people want

Her negotiating style is "Strategic, knowing the other side's weak points before you sit down." People follow her because "Loyalty to you is in their best interest, because you reward it and punish its absence." Her supernatural advantage would be "Perfect knowledge of every power structure and how each player within it can be moved," and she has survived because she "made sure the people who could hurt you had more to gain from you alive." Offered what she wants at the price of her principles, she answers "Counter. There's always another angle."

Love as the exception

The thread that ties the others together is love. She shows it "By placing them above calculation, as the exception to every rule you live by." The song about her life would be about "The price of love in a world that mistakes it for weakness." She would want a child to learn "That the people you love are worth protecting, and that requires being formidable," and her legacy would be "The empire of loyalty you constructed around the people you loved." Even what keeps her up at night is about love: "Whether loving what you love has made you someone you wouldn't have wanted to become."

Where the quiz's Cersei is kinder than the show's

Taken together, these answers describe Cersei roughly the way she might describe herself, and a few of them sit awkwardly against the show. On protecting someone vulnerable who can offer nothing back, her answer says "cruelty to the defenseless is beneath you," yet the show has her leave Ellaria to watch her daughter die and use the civilians sheltering in the Red Keep as human shields. The quiz's Cersei maps weak points and power structures before she moves; the show's has her guards put knives to Littlefinger's neck first and tells him afterward that power is power. Her answer to unwelcome advice, which only looks like listening, is closer to the show: at the Dragonpit she agrees to send her army north, then tells Jaime she lied. The answers keep her intelligence and her loyalty to her own and leave out most of her cruelty, which is worth remembering before reading a Cersei result as a verdict on anyone.

Cersei, Sansa and Daenerys: where the answers part

Reading the eight options on each question side by side, the two characters whose answers sit closest to Cersei's are Sansa, on the questions about strategy, and Daenerys, on the questions about power and command. That is a reading of the wording, not a figure the quiz computes. If your result showed either of them close behind Cersei, this is where the answers differ.

Sansa: both plan, but Sansa waits

Sansa's answers gather information and hold on to it. She would "Watch carefully to learn who has real influence and who is dangerous, then work the room quietly," bargain by letting the other side talk until she understands "the board," and treat an insult as data: "Absorb it. Even insults contain information." On the last night before a change, she goes "over every variable, what could go wrong and what you haven't thought of yet." Cersei's answers prepare too, but then they act. She knows the weak points "before you sit down," and she ends an argument rather than brokering it. Where Sansa would "offer a solution each one can live with" and would negotiate a moral compromise down to "less than they ask," Cersei intervenes and takes the deal. Their worries differ as well. Sansa lies awake over "the thing sitting in your blind spot"; Cersei, over what love has made of her.

The show puts the two in the same room during the Battle of the Blackwater, where Cersei spends the battle drinking and mocking Sansa's innocence ("Blackwater", season 2, episode 9). Seasons later, Sansa is the one who warns Jon not to underestimate Cersei ("Dragonstone", season 7, episode 1).

Daenerys: both command, but Daenerys points at a future

Daenerys's answers reach for authority too. She would "Command with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt" and, in a room of performers, "Outperform all of them without appearing to try." The difference is what the power is for. Daenerys's answers point at a cause: people follow her because "They believe in the future you're pointing at," and what keeps her up is "Whether the world you're trying to build is actually possible." Cersei's point at a small circle, "the people you love" and "the people you loved." Both would accept a legend that costs one serious moral compromise, but Daenerys gives a reason ("the legend you build will do more good than the compromise does harm") and Cersei gives none, only that she will live with it. Daenerys survives by making herself "too powerful to destroy"; Cersei, by making sure her enemies have more to gain from keeping her alive.

In the show the two queens meet at the Dragonpit, where Cersei's price for helping against the dead is that Jon stay neutral between them, and where she promises to send her army north, a promise she later tells Jaime was a lie ("The Dragon and the Wolf", season 7, episode 7).

A third character comes close on the questions about love and doubt: Jaime, whose answers show love "By doing something that costs you something real" and whose worry is "Whether you are, at bottom, the person everyone assumed you were." In the show he is the one who dies with her ("The Bells", season 8, episode 5).

Reading a Cersei result

The quiz gives one point per answer, with no weights, and names the character your answers pointed to most often, with the count for all eight beside it. So a Cersei result can mean two different things. If Cersei won clearly, your answers kept choosing control, privacy and a small circle across the quiz. If she won narrowly, with Sansa or Daenerys close behind, your answers sat between them, and the comparison above is the more useful part of this page. A tie is shown as a tie: the result names every character that shares the top count. The "How this quiz works" section on the quiz page shows how often random answers would end in a tie.

What it means to answer like Cersei

On these questions, a Cersei answer picks acting over waiting, privacy over display, and a few people over a cause. Outside Westeros, smaller versions of those choices are ordinary: doing the homework before a negotiation, keeping a setback to yourself until there is a plan, putting your own people first. The show follows the same choices to the point where they stop protecting anyone. Jaime, disgusted when she tells him her promise to send her army north was a lie, rides north alone ("The Dragon and the Wolf"), and the crown comes to her only after her last child is dead ("The Winds of Winter").

None of that is a forecast. The result is a summary of the answers picked today, matched to a fictional character, and it says nothing about anyone beyond those answers. If it doesn't fit, the counts on the result show which character came second, and the note under each question on the quiz page says why each answer points where it does.

For more on how Cersei leads and where that style breaks, see Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion and Cersei: Four Leadership Styles and Where Each One Breaks.