A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms 1x05 Reaction
schedule for ths rest of this week will be
fri- boys 5x01
sat- knight 1x06
Comments (24)
I mean you can't be too upset about someone dying who's name you haven't even bothered learning lol
A good man died, but he took that risk knowing that he was giving another good man a chance at life. He died honourably. Arlan took that risk for Dunk, and Dunk took that risk for Tanselle. Dunk not being knighted fits with a lot of George's characters in this world. They often have these contradictions between who they are and their status and perception from others. Brienne also embodies a lot of knightly qualities despite not carrying the title.
i love how this episode emphasizes mothers and what they represent, as we could've guessed from the title. lyonel telling baelor that mother loved him best and that the lack of favoritism maekar received would make him fight more fiercely, the dying soldier begging for his mother, dunk waiting for his mother, and arlan defending dunk in, you guessed it, the name of the MOTHER. as much as i love baelor, maekar was the standout side character for me, and i can't wait to get into it next episode. i always love the least loved, jealous, forgotten sons and daughters of the world. i do think last episodes hints at the fact that dunk was never knighted, not just because he couldn't knight raymun, but the visual parallel of raymun looking up at lyonel knighting him then cutting to dunk looking up at ser arlan and receiving... a shrug.
"my brother's mace, most like. he is strong" the way he says it with pride... grrm loves to write tragic brother dynamics. he literally sent the maester to his brother before thinking of himself.
I also love maekar in the novella saying he I does not remember the hit that killed his brother. I do think that it was a mix of desperation for his son and the resentment he harboured deep inside for his perfect brother made him swing harder
You were right in the intro the person you were thinking of was Baelor's father, the king. King Daeron The Good.
such a great episode!
Shout-out to Aerion, he's an absolute shit bag...but the man can fight. Thought for sure he'd do some sneaky cowardly shit but he went toe to toe with Dunk. For the amount of screen time they've had, this batch of Targaryens are some wonderfully nuanced characters.
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Also yes as you ladies have guessed it, Maekar (Egg's father) did not intend to kill his brother. You can see when he strikes his brother on the head during the battle, it was when Maekar was trying to get to his son Aerion to protect him and Baelor and Lionel were stopping him from going. Which explains why he fought aggressively and hit Baelor a lot harder than he intended to, he was trying to save his son.
Yeah, he's also fighting both of them at once and seems to swing blind at Baelor who is behind him when it happens. The books, for what it's worth, make a point of noting that Baelor was wearing his son's armor, which was smaller/tighter on him.
Pour one out for Beesbury, who asked Prince Baelor about the Kingsguard, to which Baelor told him not to worry, that HE would handle the Kingsguard, and then Beesbury was the first in the battle to be killed by none other than, the Kingsguard.
Best ep of the show.
"In my mind, there was a zero percent chance this was not happening. Because this is Game of Thrones." Fun fact: Today, Baelor's death feels like another (excellent) instalment in the long tradition of "GRRM kills your favourite character", but Martin published this novella all the way back before the second ASOIAF novel, A Clash of Kings. Before "For the watch." Before Oberyn Martell. Before the Red Wedding. There were shocking deaths in A Game of Thrones (duh), but Baelor is actually one of the original "GRRM kills your favourite character" heartbreaks. Fun, right?
That is a really cool tidbit about the context of the the novella's publication! Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, and painful/traumatic deaths are synonymous at this point.
This was one of the most intense battle scenes I’ve ever seen. Nothing glamorous about it, so muddy and gross. Props to the entire team behind the show
that guttural “waiiittttttt” by Egg makes me tear up immediately
Yeah... not my favourite episode of the season. They went overboard on the physical violence, I think. The lance to the gut -- and pulling it out?? Dunk need to watch The Pitt -- is bad to begin with. The knife through his hand should cripple that hand for life. And Dunk full-on carving up Aerion's femoral artery? But most of all: If I never have to watch a "flashback penultimate episode" again, it will be too soon. This one in particular felt like an exercise in stuffing as many Poor Orphan tropes into 15 minutes as possible. (I'd point out that the not-from-the-book material here is the weakest part of the season, but the invented/expanded stuff in previous episodes has been almost uniformly excellent 🤷♂️) Shout out to Bertie Carvel though. Baelor Breakspear rockets to the top tier of one-season-and-done characters in this franchise.
Genuinely have no idea what you mean by this?
Baelor’s death is obviously the big talking point of the episode, but what really stood out to me was how anti-climactic the whole battle felt. It didn’t feel like a clash between good and evil. It felt like a messy, morbid slaughter where no one really knows what they’re doing. I ended up feeling sorry for almost everyone involved. I couldn’t even really get any satisfaction from watching Aerion suffer. During the battle he kinda stops looking like a sociopathic monster. Instead he comes of as a cocky, insecure manchild suddenly realizing he’s out of his depth. Basically more Theon Greyjoy than Joffrey Baratheon. It kinda encapsulates what I love about this show. It examines how different people in Westeros — from smallfolk to nobles — are shaped and damaged by its institutions and hierarchies. This is also why Duncan is so lovable. Hes not naive to how horrible the world is. Hes literally grown up in hell. He just refuses to let it compromise who he is.
Oh Baelor...
A couple of the stabs were bad (the lance and the hand stab), but most of them will be superficial because he was being stabbed in chainmail. Chainmail is excellent at stopping stabs and slashes from swords and knives from doing any real damage. Tanking that many sword hits on his armour was part of why the realism of the fight is so damn good
In my opinion one of the best battle scenes out there and my favorite in the shows next to the Blackwater. The eerie silence, the fog and the words of the septon, framing the trial as a sacrifice puts you in a plane of legends, of knights in shining armor, only for that moment to come crushing down to the phrase of Logan Roy in Succession, “life is not knights in shining armor, it’s a number on a piece of paper, a fight for a knife in the mud”. The brutality of men hitting each other with no delicacy no beauty, becomes a terrible site to witness only for our hero to come victorious in a world that’s still broken. PS RIP Baelor Breakspear, the very best, eaten by the power structure he heroically tried to change