Nice Job Breaking It Hero / Game of Thrones

• Congratulations, Sansa! Lying to the king and queen about Joffrey got your own direwolf killed!
• Congratulations, Ned!
  • Resigning from the position of Hand right after your wife has angered the most powerful House in Westeros leaves you both vulnerable to Lannister attacks.
  • Ignoring Littlefinger and Renly's advice and showing mercy to Cersei's illegitmate children by warning Cersei you know about them has led to Cersei and Joffrey ruling, your guards all being killed, Robert's death, which is the very reason you became Hand in the first place, you being arrested and eventually killed, the death of several of your family members and the destruction of your entire House! Varys called him out on this the following episode, pointing some of this out.
• Congratulations, Catelyn!
  • Capturing Tyrion Lannister has compromised the safety of your husband and daughters in the capital, caused his really pissed off father to unleash Gregor Clegane on the lands of your own family and helped spark off a civil war between your family and the Lannisters! Whilst Gregor Clegane pillages your father's lands, Jaime Lannister starts a fight with your husband in the streets! Your only evidence was Littlefinger's testimony and even then, Ned insisted on a measured approach while you arrested Tyrion on the spur of the moment and then kidnapped him by taking him to the Eyrie.
  • Releasing Jaime Lannister has undermined your son's authority, making him look weak and unable to control his own people, enraged his bannermen and deprived your side of an extremely valuable hostage with nothing in return. Also, there was absolutely no guarantee that the Lannisters would agree to release Sansa and Arya even if they got Jaime back.
• Congratulations, Robert!
  • The death of Rhaegar Targaryen at your hands. Rhaegar was a perfectly sane, popular, and highly charismatic man, who many in Westeros looked forward to eventually taking the throne, especially because it would rid them of his utterly despised father Aerys's nightmarish reign. Instead, you took the throne for yourself in conquest and in less than 20 years, managed to bankrupt the entire realm and sow the seeds that would lead to the outbreak of civil war and a foreign invasion after your death. Then again, the Mad King himself was shaping up to be one of the better Targaryen kings before he rather suddenly went insane, so we can't be sure Rhaegar's future didn't hold similar insanity.
  • Sending assassins after Daenerys managed to piss off Drogo enough that he changed his mind about not invading Westeros!
• Kudos, Daenerys!
  • Saving a wise woman from rape and then asking her to save the life of your husband has led to said husband winding up as an Empty Shell and your son to be stillborn.
  • Despite liberating the slaves in Astapor and Yunkai, those two cities end up back in the hands of despots as soon as you move along. In Meereen, your negligent care of her dragons has caused collateral damage. Furthermore, your Black-and-White Morality approach to punishing the Masters has resulted in the deaths of some of the more sympathetic political figures as well. Leaving your dragons unattended leads to the death of a three year old girl.
  • Her attempt to enforce the rule of law in Meereen when it comes to the murder of a prisoner awaiting trial only leads to rioting from what used to be her most fervent supporters, and is unlikely to have impressed the Masters either.
• Good job, Mirri! Destroying everything of value to the naive queen you sought revenge against has made her more cunning and dangerous than her deceased husband or stillborn son could ever have been. Bonus points for teaching her that mercy is for the weak, giving her a crash course in blood magic, and providing the means for her to hatch three dragons.
• Nice one, Jon!
  • Not being able to bring yourself to execute Ygritte gets several of your Night's Watch brothers killed.
  • Your attempt to talk Tormund out of killing the horse breeder actually gives him an extra reason to do precisely that.
  • Him telling his sisters about his true parentage even though Daenerys tells him not to tell them, trusting that Sansa will keep the information if she and Arya are sworn to secrecy; leads to Sansa spilling the information to Tyrion who in turn spills this to Varys, which in turn teases conflicts between Jon and Dany's respective supporters while they're battling Cersei. It can be argued that the betrayal of Dany's trust and Sansa's subsequent scheming heavily influenced Daenerys' eventual Sanity Slippage and transformation into the budding Mad Queen.
• Jon and Daenerys share one as of the end of Season 7. Jon & Friends go north of the Wall to attempt to capture a Wight to bring back to prove the threat to Cersei. While out there, they get surrounded by White Walkers and their army and trapped on an island in a frozen lake. They manage to get word to Daenerys, who arrives with her three dragons to help. During the fight, the Night's King stabs Viserion with a magical ice-lance, causing him to crash into the frozen lake and die. After Daenerys and the others get away, the Night's King has his army pull Viserion's body out of the lake, and raises him as an undead dragon. He then rides undead Viserion and uses him to attack the Wall with his fire breath. Viserion's attack causes the wall to shatter, leaving a gaping hole in it, which allows the army of the Dead unhindered access to the Seven Kingdoms.
• Congratulations, Robb!
  • Sending Theon home in an attempt to gain military support resulted in the exact thing your father prevented by keeping Theon as a hostage in the first place, and now you have to fight a war on two fronts!
  • Breaking a sacred vow that you will marry the daughter of an important ally (who allowed your army to cross his territory in addition to providing you with several thousand troops) will likely get you tagged as an oathbreaker, not to mention harming your military position and giving the notoriously prickly and treacherous head of the family a good excuse to betray you. These actions come back to haunt Jon and Sansa three seasons later, as they blame Robb for dragging their family members into war and getting them killed.
  • Executing Lord Karstark despite all counsel lost you the support of his soldiers, forcing you to turn to the infamously untrustworthy Freys whom you already pissed off by breaking a marriage pact!
• Kudos, Loras!
  • By inciting Renly to make a bid for the throne you made a civil war worse and got your lover killed.
  • By telling Olyvar about your secret betrothal, the information is passed to the Lannisters, who move to block your family's plan.
• The Stark's dislike for Lannisters leads them to buy Littlefinger's lies about them killing Jon Arryn, actions which helped spark the War of the Five Kings.
• Arya Stark has a few:
  • Hitting Joffrey and running away with Nymeria, leading directly to Mycah and Lady's death.
  • Her attempt to steal a letter from Tywin is discovered by Amory Lorch, who is in turn killed by Jaqen right in front of Tywin's eyes. Tywin believes then that the assassination was meant for him, and he responds by ordering all the farms and villages around Harrenhal to be ravaged and his own men to be decimated as punishment. Later Arya realises she should have gotten Jaqen to kill Tywin, the Dragon-in-Chief of House Lannister, right from the start. And why not Joffrey and Cersei while she was at it, as Gendry later points out.
  • Arya's Hot-Blooded personality finally takes a direct toll on her in "The Bear and the Maiden Fair", when she irrationally runs away from the Brotherhood, in a war zone, with no supplies and in the middle of the night, only to find herself made a prisoner by The Hound immediately.
  • In Season 6, when she decides to abandon the Faceless men, she's stabbed several times for her troubles and manages to get help from a woman she previously saved...which then leads to Lady Crane getting brutally murdered by the Waif.
• Sansa decides to entrust Theon (despite hating him, and knowing that he betrayed Robb and believing strongly to have killed her baby brothers) to trigger her only means to escape Winterfell. Thanks to that, her entirely loyal well-wisher gets brutally tortured and killed and her own situation is made even worse than ever now that Ramsay knows that she tried to escape.
• Sansa and Arya share this during Season 7: Sansa sending Brienne to King's Landing leaves Sansa without a confidante who rightfully distrusted Littlefinger and leaves Sansa all the more vulnerable to his machinations, whilst Arya threatening to expose the letter Sansa wrote to Robb and all the Northern lords thretaens to further destabilize the Northern lords' unison in the face of their coming enemies. Subverted when Sansa and Arya reveal at Arya's supposed trial that they're onto Littlefinger's machinations to drive a wedge between the sisters.
• Bran Stark:
  • Bran is ultimately responsible for making Hodor the way he is. In the same episode, Bran's actions inadvertently cause the deaths of the Three Eyed Raven, Summer, several Children of the Forest, and Hodor.
  • Also, his order to Rickon and Osha to seek refuge with the Umbers ultimately results in them being betrayed and turned over to Ramsay, with both dead by the end of the season.
• If the sacrifices to the Lord of Light are actually useful, Davos' decision to save Gendry from Melisandre indirectly leads to another sacrifice of royal blood - and this time Shireen is the one who is sacrificed.
• In Brienne's attempt to protect Arya Stark, she ends up (supposedly) killing Sandor Clegane, the only person left that was keeping Arya safe. And to top things off, she loses track of Arya.
• The Children of the Forest, it's revealed in season 6, created the White Walkers as an army to drive humanity away from their land. In an added irony, the White Walkers ended up turning on their creators as well, turning the lands beyond the Wall into a frozen wasteland in which they hunted their creators down, due to being cut off from the human territories beyond. With the season 6 finale, it's implied that the Children of the Forest have now been wiped out entirely by their creations, in a truly ironic death.
• Rhaegar Targaryen's love affair and elopement with Lyanna Stark ultimately led to the end of the Targaryen dynasty. His defeat at the Trident drove Tywin to turn on Aerys and sack King's Landing, which led to the deaths of his father, his children, the rape and murder of Elia, and the exile of his mother, brother, and unborn sister.
• In "Histories and Lore: Dragons", Maester Pycelle states that in King Aegon V Targaryen's final years, he became obsessed with dragons and burnt himself and several others in an attempt to hatch dragons at Summerhall. Bear in mind this is Maester Pycelle we are talking about, but the Summerhall disaster is mentioned numerous times in the Lore. In the books, he wasn't "obsessed" with dragons the way that his crazy older brother Aerion Brightflame was. Rather, from all the time he spent wandering Westeros with Ser Duncan, he became a populist reformer after he was crowned, raising taxes on the rich lords to ease the suffering of the peasants. This made him a lot of political enemies and the great lords of the realm started to oppose him at every turn. As the years went on and such frustrations mounted, he became honestly convinced that having a couple of dragons like Aegon the First did was the key to keeping all of the great lords in line and pushing through his reforms. He had nothing but good intentions, but they ended up killing him, his best friend, and his eldest son in the fire.
• Jaime Lannister:
  • In his youth, Jaime engineered a Rescue Sex scenario in the benefit of Tyrion. His younger brother, unaccustomed to kindness, fell in love and married the girl, who was actually a sex worker. Tywin put an end to it; he pimped her out to his whole guard and forced Tyrion to watch, leaving him mentally scarred for life.
  • Jaime lies about Brienne's family wealth to prevent Locke from raping her, but later, on his way back to King's Landing, he hears that Locke refuses her father's ransom offer because he expects more and finds a mere 300 gold dragons an insult coming from an island full of sapphires. (In fairness, Jaime then turns right around and rescues her.)
  • He retroactively does this by outfitting Brienne with a fine suit of armor, a Valyrian steel sword bearing the mark of the lion, and having Podrick Payne act as her squire. Despite Jaime's intentions, these lead to Arya and Sandor distrusting Brienne when she finds Arya and a fight breaking out because from all appearances, she looks like she's in league with the Lannisters.
• Jaime and Tyrion Lannister effectively share one in particular. After Jaime frees Tyrion from his cell so he can be smuggled out of King's Landing to save his life, Tyrion upon parting ways with him takes a detour and he finally snaps and kills their father Tywin. Tywin's death would have a lot of negative repercussions for the Lannisters such as the Sparrows taking over King's Landing, which in turn would lead to Cersei's aforementioned takeover and the death of her and Jaime's last surviving child, and Cersei fully assuming control and dooming House Lannister's future to certain ruin through her stupid courses of action. Cersei also makes a point of mentioning to Jaime that him freeing Tyrion led to Tyrion becoming one of their enemy's closest advisors.
• Tyrion Lannister has a few:
  • He could've controlled himself at his trial and just gone with Jaime's plan, saving his life and letting his brother get his father's approval back (though he didn't know about that part). By making his huge outburst, he severs that lifeline and the plan is shot to hell.
  • His attempt to barter with the Masters falls flat on its face when they decide to take back Meereen anyway. The city is ultimately less prepared for his efforts, since they aren't expecting the attack.
  • Season 7 can be summarized as "Tyrion Lannister Ruins Everything". He proposes a military strategy that results in all of Daenerys's Westerosi allies being killed or captured, he allows Cersei to play him in order to convince the heroes that she will join them against the White Walkers, giving her the chance to retake the continent; and he convinces Jon and Daenerys to send an expedition north to capture a wight, and after it predictably goes horribly wrong, he then fails to dissuade Daenerys from bailing out their allies, allowing the Night King to gain access to an undead dragon. In short, Tyrion broke the wall for a scheme that was doomed from the start.
• Varys:
  • The assassination attempt on Daenerys that he orchestrated was bungled, and Khal Drogo EXTREMELY pissed off, pushing him to start preparing an invasion of the Seven Kingdoms. This was almost certainly his planned result however, being part of the conspiracy backing the invasion. Three-and-a-bit seasons later, Varys acknowledges the chain of disasters that (partially) resulted from his conspiracy to put the Targaryens back on the Iron Throne.
  • An even more obvious one is him warning Olenna Tyrell about Littlefinger's ambition and trying to set up a marriage between Sansa and Loras. In retrospect, he just gave Olenna a glowing recommendation of the one man other than them, who was ruthless enough to pull off a regicide and serve as her partner-in-crime. This led to Joffrey's assassination, so not a great loss all in all.
• Mossador takes it upon himself to slaughter one of the Sons of the Harpy after Daenerys resolves to give him a fair trail, and claims to have done so as a favor to her, clearly expecting to be praised for his efforts. This forces Daenerys into a Sadistic Choice between either abusing her power, or making a deep political and personal sacrifice. The end result; Daenerys loses a huge chunk of her loyal supporters, a massive riot breaks out, and Mossador loses his head.
• Stannis's decision to assassinate Renly causes the Tyrells to join the Lannisters, which leads to his defeat at the Battle of Blackwater. Of course, if he hadn't assassinated Renly, they would have killed him within a day.
• In a roundabout way, Olenna's assassination of Joffrey ultimately leads to the downfall of her house. Had the assassination not occurred as it did, Tyrion would not have taken the blame and Tywin would not have sentenced him to death. Had Tywin not sentenced Tyrion to death (cruelly using Tyrion's lover as a witness against him in the process) Tyrion would not have murdered him during his escape. Tywin's death left a power vacuum in King's Landing and precipitated the rise of the Sparrows, who imprisoned Loras and Margaery and ultimately got them killed in Cersei's destruction of the Sept of Baelor.
• The Lannister-Tyrell army play right into the Sparrow's arms, and he manages to usurp public support by the populace from the Crown to the Faith.
• As it turns out, Margaery bargaining with the High Sparrow ultimately put herself and her brother in a worse situation than had she held out.
• Tommen abolishing Trial by Combat forces Cersei to take more drastic measures.
• Tormund's charge towards the wall of corpses in the Battle of the Bastards ends up almost killing Jon when the Wildlings and Northmen inadvertently trample him into the mud.
• Beric setting the polar bear wight on fire causes the Hound to freeze up, which leads to Thoros getting seriously wounded.
• When stranded on an island in a frozen lake besieged by the Army of the Dead, with only the treacherous water keeping the dead from closing in, Sandor gets bored and starts chucking rocks at the wights. Then he whiffs a shot and it slides along the ice, showing the wights that the lake is solid enough for them to cross.

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