Youngest of Queen Cersei's children, born in the Red Keep with the golden curls and emerald eyes that branded all three siblings the get of Ser Jaime Lannister rather than King Robert, though no man at court would say so within hearing of the throne. A plump, tenderhearted boy fond of applecakes and reading, he sparred clumsily with Bran Stark at Winterfell, was bowled over by Arya in a King's Landing alley, and once raised a fawn until Joffrey killed and skinned it for sport. In the war that followed Robert's death he was smuggled toward Rosby in a page's clothes at Cersei's order, intercepted on the road by Ser Jacelyn Bywater on Tyrion's, and held there as the acting Hand's hostage against his mother's hand on Tyrion's own. When Joffrey choked at his wedding feast Tommen screamed and wept beside the body, and the small council crowned him Tommen of the House Baratheon, the First of His Name before the corpse was cold.
Betrothed and then wed to the widowed Margaery Tyrell, who covered him in the same black stag cloak Robert had wrapped about Cersei, he kept his mother's favor only so long as he obeyed her; Margaery gave him three black kittens, Ser Pounce, Lady Whiskers, and Boots, and with them began to coax him from beneath Cersei's hand. To pay the crown's debts to the Faith, Cersei consented to the High Sparrow's rearming of the Faith Militant, who blessed the boy king and in time, on her own engineered charge of fornication, dragged Queen Margaery into a cell beneath the Great Sept; when the Sparrows then seized Cersei herself for treason and adultery, Tommen was kept hidden from his mother's walk of atonement by his great-uncle Ser Kevan Lannister, now Lord Regent and Protector of the Realm. He sits the Iron Throne a frightened child between the small council, the Sept, and an absent mother, signing whatever decree is set before him and asking after his wife and his cats, while in Dorne the Sand Snakes whisper of killing him and across the narrow sea the Iron Bank turns its coin to Stannis.