Few writer have as much king to draw you in with fun characters and thrilling adventures — and then crush your intent utterly — as George R.R. Martin . But the latest way that Martin deal to make me lose all hope for humans was particularly sneak . And just tremendously psyche - shredding .
Here ’s your spoiler warning — if you ’re not up to bucket along on all thing GRRM , you might get spoiled . Really ! I ca n’t go into any more particular without actually yield a spoiler . Here ’s a gif ofJon Snow versus Michael Jackson , to let you settle whether to take the plunge .
So I am speaking of the Dunk and Egg tales . They ’ve been around for years , but I had n’t get around to register them until they were collected in a lustrous volume lately last year , calledA Knight of the Seven Kingdoms .
These are a series of three novelette , which take lieu decades before A Game of Thrones , and they keep abreast a hedge horse nominate Ser Duncan the Tall ( aka “ Dunk ” ) who somehow acquires a very unusual squire named “ Egg . ” In fact , Egg is really Aegon Targaryen , a regal prince who is too far down the line of succession to have much hope of gain ground the can . Dunk and Egg travel around , birth dangerous undertaking , and Egg sees how the common people live , in a similar fashion to King Arthur going by “ verruca ” in The Once and Future King .
These fib are more light - hearted and impulsive than Martin ’s A Song of Ice and Fire tends to be , because they take place more or less during peacetime , and the post are generally crushed ( apart from some larger confederacy here and there . ) But they frequently deal with the horrific upshot of those interminable wars of dynastic succession in Westeros . And in the 2d , and most fascinating , story , Dunk and Egg deal with a minor local Almighty , whose neighbour has annex his flow , and it ’s a microcosm of how hard and complicated government can be .
As I save in my review article back in October , Dunk and Egg have a cameraderie that feels very remindful of Pod and Brienne in the other leger . And even though we cognize that Egg will become King Aegon V , he and Dunk find like entire underdogs , who sleep in ditch and get a raw deal every meter . Dunk is always threatening to clout the future tycoon on the pinna , and their friendship is both fresh and earthy .
And the “ royal person go among ordinary mass in disguise ” trope is one of the best , full blockage . Besides Wart , there ’s Hal in Shakespeare ’s Henry V , andall the many incognito princesses . We ’re conditioned by pop culture to believe that any prince or princess who operate among the common hoi polloi will become an awe-inspiring ruler , whose sovereignty will be both just and symmetrical . And part of what we see happen in the Dunk and Egg stories is Egg get word for himself just how challenging and insoluble the trouble of diplomacy are .
So you sort of expect to terminate with a hazy sensory faculty that Egg became a judicious Riley B King , who rule over a contented , peaceful realm , as a result of all the wiseness he bring in from being “ half a peasant ” in his youth . Right ?
But this is George R.R. Martin we ’re talking about here .
When we talked to Martin at Comic - Con 2013 , he assure us :
There is always this presumption that if you are a good man , you will be a serious king . [ Like ] Tolkien — in Return of the King , Aragorn comes back and becomes king , and then “ he ruled sagely for three hundred years . ” Okay , fine . It is loose to indite that time , “ He predominate wisely ” .
What does that mean , “ He ruled wisely ? ” What were his taxation policy ? What did he do when two noble were making war on each other ? Or barbarians were come in from the North ? What was his immigration insurance policy ? What about adequate rights for Orcs ? I mean did he just pursue a genocidal policy , “ rent ’s kill all these bloody Orcs who are still go away over ” ? Or did he attempt to redeem them ? You never actually see the nitty - gritty of opinion .
I guess there is an element of fantasy lector that do n’t desire to see that . I receive that fascinating .
So possibly I should n’t have been so thwarted when I found out what actually fall out when Egg the lovable gallant becomes a king . Martin put out a ginormous intensity calledThe World of Ice and Fireback in 2014 , and it contain the whole chronicle of Aegon V ’s sovereignty . Given that Aegon ruled not long before King Robert — his older brother Maester Aemon is still alive in A Game of Thrones — it makes sense that Aegon did n’t leave Westeros a paradise . But still , it ’s a major bummer .
fundamentally , Egg becomes king because there are no other good heirs , although it take a Great Council of hundreds of lords to adjudicate on the taking over . And then … shit happens .
First off , Aegon take the throne in the middle of an epic wintertime that lasts yr , and cause far-flung starving — and his attempts to send caryopsis to ease the hungriness in the Union only win him more enemies in the south . And those wars of dynastic sequence which make complicatedness for vernal Egg are still going on once he becomes king . As The World of Ice and Fire puts it , “ the unbelievable Riley B King was squeeze to spend much of his sovereignty in armor , appease one rising or another . ”
Meanwhile , Aegon attempts to push through reforms to give more right and protections to the coarse people , but this only provoked rebelliousness from the lords under him . The more Aegon tried to rule , the more frustrated he became by the process of via media . It seems like , reading between the lines , he learned compassion for the smallfolk , but not realpolitik , from his time as a squire . Even though he find firsthand the slipperiness of screen out conflict like the one over a minor lord ’s “ Chequy water , ” he has n’t fully taken on dining table how unmanageable diplomacy actually is .
And then there are Aegon ’s children . He married for dearest , back when nobody thought he had a serious scene at becoming Martin Luther King . And now , all of his kids want to marry for love as well . ( let in one son and daughter who want to carry on the o.k. Targaryen custom of incestuous marriage . ) Aegon has forebode all his kids in marriage to various noble house , and this is a major cornerstone in his plan to make documentation for his reforms among the nobility — so it ’s a vast setback when all of his kidskin defy him and marry whom they want .
So Aegon ’s reign was n’t peculiarly successful , overall . He was constantly campaign off Johnny Reb , sellswords and pretenders . His reforms were thwarted at every bend . His small fry screwed him over . But that ’s not why the story of Dunk and Egg leaves me feeling utterly depressed . Rather , I ’m horribly bummed about the way they both die .
After face defiance from his lords and his children , King Aegon becomes obsessed with take back dragons . If only he had command of some flying lizard , the fashion his ascendant did , he image he could make everybody obey him . Instead of encounter a hardheaded solution to his problems as a ruler , or deploying any of the underdog , scrappy resourcefulness that he was so honorable at as a boy , he decides his only Leslie Townes Hope is to handle a few WMDs , so he can exercise despotic power for the good of the kingdom .
As Aegon get older , his desire to retrieve a way to bring back tartar grows , until it ’s all he can think about . He sends citizenry all over the piazza , to the farthest reaches of Essos , in lookup of lore that could bring those dragon ballock back to life and make them hatch once more .
And then , just as Aegon is celebrating the nascency of his grandson Rhaegar Targaryen ( who by and by gets kill by King Robert ) , he does some final experiment to hear and institute back dragons . The World of Ice and Fire is vague about what really happens . But according to other sources I ’ve read online , Aegon tries to employ wildfire ( the hooey that Tyrion uses to zap Stannis ’ fleet ) to microwave a dragon egg . And it kill not just himself , but Dunk and a bunch of other people . So Egg dies in the most wasted , foolish , arrogant personal manner possible , and shoot his best friend with him .
Not only that , but in his fixation with dragons , King Aegon has pretermit the menace of the “ Ninepenny Kings , ” an alliance of sellswords with a pretender to the throne , Maelys the Monstrous . As before long as Aegon is drained , the Ninepenny King descend and plunge Westeros into a new and awful war , that is only steady down when a young horse named Ser Barristan Selmy slays Maelys the Monstrous in single combat . Aegon ’s son reigns only a dyad years , and then is succeeded by … the sore King .
So even in the short term , Aegon did n’t really will Westeros better than he found it , and if he had n’t gotten obsessed with bringing back dragon at the expense of actually ruling , he could have redeem everyone a lot of agony . But his pointless expiry is what evince that he did n’t really learn enough from his unique experience , back when he was known as Egg .
Top prototype : Song of Ice and Fire Calendar 2014 , artistry by Gary Gianni . Jon Snow vs. Michael Jackson gifvia Sawdust Films . All other art by Gary Gianni , from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms .
BooksGame of ThronesGeorge R.R. MartinTelevision
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