Let’s be honest: the Lioness of Casterly Rock is not everyone’s favorite person, and for a good reason. She’s a sly, petty and bitter borderline alcoholic, manipulative and selfish, power-hungry in the worst sense of the word, and not even that gifted in playing the game of thrones as she wants to believe, given that most of her moves have turned out to be spectacularly short-sighted. She ain’t no role model, and she certainly isn’t the kind of person you’d like to go out for a coffee with. And yet, I find her one of the most complex and interesting women in G.R.R. Martin’s writing – Daenaerys and Arya be damned.

See, Cersei’s as multilayered as few characters in genre fiction. While she may be a total ass more often than not – and I’ll never ever forgive her for ordering the death of Sansa’s direwolf Lady – there is also something quite admirable in her stubbornness and pride, in how she refuses to yield and be walked upon no matter how hard life tries to break her. She genuinely loves her children and she’s ready to fight to the bitter end for their sake. Her relationship with Jaime is fascinating – whether you decide to see it as a taboo love story, which is how it may look like in the TV show, or a weird form of narcissism taken to the extreme, which is how the books tend to interpret her sleeping with her own twin. She’s a woman fighting for power in the cruel world of men, using all the means at her disposal, even though it often boils down to the cynical advice she gave to Sansa. There’s something deeply human and relatable in how she desperately clings to her beauty, even though the years have started to take their toll – being in my mid-thirties myself, some of her monologues have struck quite close to home. And finally, I absolutely love how Lena Heady has portrayed her in the TV show – I even prefer her Cersei to the book version, as she implies that Lady Lannister turned into the ultimate bitch not only out of natural born malice, but as a result of years of frustration, disappointments and abuse.

So it was a wonderful challenge to try to capture all those complexities with my cosplay - her trademark Resting Bitch Face included - ESPECIALLY with my cospartner Endymion by my side as Jaime, and later on when VaxSux joined the family as Joffrey.

And as for all the Cersei hate, well, no one can word it better that the Führer himself: