I should state these have nothing to do with how much I like a character, and are only a partial accounting since I’m not really focusing on his virtues, of which there are many. Either way, you’re absolutely right that mistakes is a poor choice of words for a complicated set.
I think the entire Tysha/Shae thing is something that I initially took as “oh this tells us why Tyrion is so bitter” which I’ve now modified as “Still makes Tywin a monster/hypocrite, but fairly unflattering to Tyrion since he is so focused on self-pity when it’s really the women who paid a tremendous price for being with him”. In particular, I think of what I initially saw as a crime of passion (killing Shae) as more of coolly deliberate act of settling accounts, namely because of how Martin describes how it happens.
I hadn’t really looked at the idea of “petty motivations;” I mean he’s ambitious and wants power, but in considerable measure I read his efforts at intrigue as being self-preservation, the attitude of an anti-Ned trying to secure himself against almost certainly malevolent intentions and the very suspect power of Littlefinger. I may be overlooking things you’ve noticed.
Well, I’d have to look back at the sections but I remember thinking early on when Tywin chastises him for his snarking that, actually, dad is right on there,and that’s what clued me in to that line of thought. Throughout his time as Hand, Cersei’s motivations are so clear and easy to work around (since they both should want to keep the throne more or less intact) that you’d have to be blind not to notice. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect her to ever trust Tyrion 100% simply because as a mother and as an independent ambitious/somewhat deluded actor, she’s got her own agenda.
But there are opportunities for him to recognize that her paranoia is at least somewhat legitimate and re-channel it into something productive, the kind of thing a Hand should do. Instead, he sees his role early on as countering her, and quickly falls into this petty Lannister vs. Lannister feud with a tremendous amount of effort devoted to fighting what could have been a perfectly avoidable foe, and even an ally in the loose sense that it’s better to have your kin on the throne than a stranger when you’re someone who is universally despised as a default position. Since he’s the replaceable one as Hand and leftover sibling, and Cersei for better or worse is holding the strongest cards in the Lannister hand, he’s not accurately gauging the importance of not antagonizing her needlessly or for points that don’t mean anything in the end score.
Lastly one might talk about “cases where he screws up,” plans poorly, etc, and the results are costly for him or others. I’m thinking in a vague sense that he probably did this a number of times - but then he’s human, so what’s the big deal really?
Yeah, those are of the least concern to me. In the aggregate, he’s one of the better decisionmakers in the game, but he’s never concerned enough about defusing the vendettas that people build against him (especially Cersei and to a lesser extent Joffrey), even when they are obviously imperiling his life.
What actions at the wedding were you referring to exactly?
I meant specifically the dumping out of the wine after being the cup-bearer, which makes him look guilty as hell to any witness given the cause-effect approach to criminal investigation we’ve seen throughout the series.
Anyway, I’ll try to gin up some specifics for the above later, but that’s the overall impression with which I tempered my original view of Tyrion of someone who was wronged into murderous exile. I still miss the guy and I definitely understand why he offed Tywin in the end, it just seemed like a preventable set of circumstances that landed him at that point.
