ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED

I’m on the third Cersei chapter in AFFC, the one with Tommen’s wedding (wow, that sounded like a Friends episode), and something I’d forgotten hit me like a Mack truck. Without going into too much detail, someone I’m very close to in real life once suffered a death in their immediate family, the end of a decades-long relationship, and an overwhelming amount of work-related stress all at once. This sent them into a years-long spiral of increasingly vindictive and destructive behavior that slowly took on paranoid elements and culminated in a break from reality that required hospitalization to heal. This was what got me through the Cersei chapters the first time around, and it’s what will get me through this time as well: Any time I’m tempted to think she’s too over-the-top a character, simultaneously too fixated on imaginary threats and angered by imaginary slights and oblivious to the real ones all around her to be believable or even tolerable, I remember that once, in real life, I knew her.