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Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Defended Jaime & Brienne's "Misunderstood" Season 8 Arc

HBO

Game of Thrones may have ended nearly a month ago, but everyone is still trying to dissect every detail in the show's final season. The final six episodes have received their fair share of backlash from fans online, ranging from critiques of Daenerys Targeryen's murderous turn to confusion over the person who finally wound up being king. One of the scenes that caused a lot of uproar was Jaime Lannister's final moments with Brienne of Tarth. But the actor behind Jaime does not think the scene deserved the hate it got. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doesn't think GoT fans understood Jaime and Brienne's ending scene.

In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the final season, Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth finally hook up in the fourth episode of Season 8 only for Jaime to sneak out of her bedroom and prepare to leave her behind in Winterfell. Before he could ride off back to Cersei, Brienne confronted him in the night, begging him not to go. But after listing all of the terrible things he has done out of his love for Cersei, Jaime finally rides off to be with his sister/lover, leaving Brienne crying in the middle of Winterfell.

Fans were quick to criticize the scene, many arguing that it threw all of Jaime and Brienne's character development out the window: Despite growing into a good man, Jaime ends up returning to his old ways, and despite constantly showing steely valor and becoming the first woman knight, Brienne uncharacteristically breaks down into tears over a man.

But that was not the true meaning of the heartbreaking scene, according to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The actor tweeted a link to a piece dissecting the scene from News.com.au which refers to the scene as the most misunderstood moment from the final season, and Coster-Waldau added his stamp of approval by tweeting, "Yep, that's it."

In the article Nikolaj Coster-Waldau shared, writer Sam Clench argues that Game of Thrones fans misinterpreted Brienne's tears in her final scene with Jaime. While many fans saw Brienne's tears as her reaction to being rejected by the man that she had grown to love and had just had sex with for the first time, Clench states that Brienne is actually so distraught because of Jaime's immutable self-loathing. She has seen Jaime grow from a villain to an actually good person over the course of their journeys together, but in that moment of Jaime listing all of his terrible actions and stating that he does not deserve anything better than another terrible person like Cersei, Brienne sees that Jaime still does not believe he has transformed into a good man.

Since Brienne knows that Daenerys is planning to destroy King's Landing, her tears are really over the fact that Jaime will likely die thinking that he is still an evil, undeserving villain rather than the good person she has seen him become, the writer argues. And apparently, this is the correct interpretation of the scene, since Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has signed off on it.