Favorite Dysfunctional Couple

Happy soon-to-be-Valentine's-Day! We're celebrating with our favorite not-so-perfect couples from literature, much like those from this week's review book, Dangerous Liaisons.

I think Hamlet and Ophelia from William Shakespeare's Hamlet are pretty dysfunctional, but I love them anyway. They're both psychotic in their own special ways, but they still love each other, despite all the craziness and scheming around them.

Hamlet doesn't understand women very well, thanks to his upbringing, so he misunderstands practically every move Ophelia makes. Polonius (Ophelia's father) doesn't want them to marry, because then Ophelia would have more power than him. He bans her from seeing Hamlet, and she obeys. Hamlet's mad at her for this.

But you know they still loved each other because of how Hamlet behaves at the funeral and how Ophelia can only respond to Hamlet's yelling at her by begging God to forgive him.

Aww.

If you don't think that Cersei and Jamie are the most dysfunctional couple ever, you've never read Game of Thrones.

If you're wondering why I'm choosing a brother & a sister when we're picking couples... well, then, you've also never read Game of thrones.

Let's just review a few bullet points of their relationship:

• They're twins, who have sex.
• All of Cersei's children are Jamie's
• Jamie joined the Kingsguard so that he could be near his sister.
• Jamie threw a kid out a window so no one would ever discover that he was having sex with his sister.
• Jamie got his hand cut off and now his sister thinks that he's gross
• We're pretty certain that either he, or his sister, killed Cersei's husband (who just happened to be the king.)
• They killed the king's adviser... a few of them, in fact.
• Cersei and Jamie's son is about the most horrible, malicious little prick you've ever met, and yet, he's now the king. 

They're on a constant quest for power, these two siblings, and they're doing everything that they can to bring everyone around them down.  Cersei at least has the sense to realize that she won't be quite so powerful if people figure out she's boinking her brother, but her brother doesn't seem to have that sense.  I'm only in book three, so I can only imagine that this relationship is going to get more... weird as the books continue.