HBO’s new Game of Thrones show finally made me care about GoT lore

A little way into watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — I think it was the scene in the second episode, “Hard Salt Beef,” when Dunk meets the Targaryens and asks Baelor to vouch for him in the tournament — I did something I’ve never done before. I visited a Game of Thrones wiki.

For context: My engagement with the fantasy universe created by George R.R. Martin is firmly on the casual side. (Off the top of my head, I don’t even know what it’s called. The GoTverse? The Westerosphere?) I watched every single episode of Game of Thrones with steadily decreasing interest and pleasure. I have never read any of Martin’s books, or watched any House of the Dragon, or played any of the several mysteriously bad video games.

I decided to tune in to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because I’d heard good things, and because the concept was appealing: a lighter, more grounded, character-focused take on Martin’s world, with shorter episode runtimes. And also with a lot less head-scratching tracking of complex family trees and multiple plotlines sprawling across continents.

So I was surprised to quickly find myself in the position of pondering the line of succession for the Iron Throne, the twists and turns of the Targaryen bloodline, and the precise placement of Dunk and Egg’s adventures in the Westerosi timeline — and turning to A Wiki of Ice and Fire for the answers. Surely this is the exact opposite of the point of the show?

Well, yes. But this is the inherent strength of focused, ground-level storytelling within a much larger story world that’s already been built out. The writers can lean on all that existing world-building for texture, scale, and implied significance without having to spell it out or construct it themselves. The characters and story can speak for themselves, unburdened by lore exposition or a need to encompass a whole fictional geography with their adventures. All that is already out there, ready to be found if the viewer wants to explore it, or just sensed if they don’t.

In a way, Game of Thrones already did this. Martin’s great strength as a world-builder seems to be his facility with building imagined histories, and every step of that series is enriched by his firm sense of what happened in the centuries before the present storyline. But that show is also a saga in itself, operating on a world-history scale. It is lore, unfolding in front of you and complete in its scope. Following it is an epic journey, but it can also be exhausting, and it left me with little appetite for filling in further detail.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is different. It leaves gaps for curiosity. There’s a king, but we don’t meet him on the show. Is he kind or cruel? Some of these Targaryen folk are callous, blond, and entitled in the expected manner, but some are honorable, and some seem somewhere in between. Baelor seems uncommonly cool. What’s his deal? I remember all the talk of the Mad King and how fucked up things got under him, how he represented the ultimate corruption of the Targaryen line. When did that happen relative to this? Is the fact that the Mad King’s reign is still in the future the reason this world, while still gritty and brutal, just feels so much nicer than the world we saw in Game of Thrones?

And, of course, there’s Egg. Even before the mid-season reveal of the true identity of Dunk’s squire, the writers can’t resist a tease. A fortune-teller foresees the boy sitting on the Iron Throne and dying a gruesome death. If that doesn’t send you scurrying off to read the fake history books, what will?

Filling in all these gaps was entirely optional to my enjoyment of the show, which is what made it feel fun, and not like homework. By contrast, some of Game of Thrones itself felt like homework, as I strained to absorb how the great families of Westeros were intertwined.

Photo: Steffan Hill/HBO

But let’s be fair: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms wouldn’t possess any of this resonance if Game of Thrones, Martin’s books, and his copious lore notes hadn’t done the work to establish it. That resonance goes beyond even the extra dimensions added to both on-screen and off-screen characters in Dunk and Egg’s orbit. It encompasses knowledge of events that will never be referenced in the show, because they transpire decades later.

The terror of the Mad King’s reign, the dragons’ re-emergence, the war in the North — these are ghosts of Christmas future, haunting A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and lending it an extra layer of poignancy. The world is diminished but also stable and safe, and it makes sense to its characters. It’s an inversion of the usual fantasy trope, in which characters living in a humdrum present recall a mythic past. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the myths are yet to come. The characters don’t realize it, but they’re better off without them.

I’m reminded of Andor — a much grander and more ambitious show, but also one that works because it tells the story of what real people did and worried about before the hero’s journey began for Star Wars’ original protagonists. Both Andor and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms are enriched by the epic sagas they prefigure, and they enrich them in return. There’s an echo of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in Marvel’s excellent Wonder Man, too — a tale of two characters desperately trying to ignore the fact they live in a fantasy continuity. In these shows, characters struggle to achieve their normal dreams: making art, winning a tournament, trying to live a little longer.

These three series show that ground-level storytelling in big fantasy universes can revel in both richness and specificity, and can give characters and human stories breathing room that is so often suffocated by more epic narratives. They also show how telling smaller stories can make those huge universes better. It’s fun to watch the adventures of kings and gods and heroes. But to understand what the world they live in is really like, you have to get down among the people, where you can look up toward those mythic figures and wonder.