A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Small Story Scores a Huge Victory, but Does Tragedy Loom? |
Culture > Western Culture
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Small Story Scores a Huge Victory, but Does Tragedy Loom?
An HBO series mostly avoids woke and thereby succeeds.
William Sullivan | March 14, 2026
If, like me, you’ve largely given up on movies and television shows in recent years as we find ourselves awash in a sea of bad reboots and producers trying to out-woke each other rather than simply tell an entertaining story, I’d urge you to reconsider when it comes to the first season of this particular HBO series, which just wrapped a few weeks ago.
This story, a prequel to the wildly successful Game of Thrones series, is arguably the best television fantasy-adventure series in a very long time.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set in George R.R. Martin’s fictional land of Westeros, about which he weaves a rich tapestry over many centuries of its recorded history in his many books. HBO’s Game of Thrones series, based upon Martin’s as-yet-unfinished series of books known as A Song of Ice and Fire, is the most current story in this world’s timeline.
It is a massive story, densely packed with countless familial factions (known as Houses), myriad characters, interwoven story arcs, captivating palace intrigue and seemingly endless lore. Yet, you don’t need to know any of that to immediately understand the characters and the world of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The story is set nearly 100 years before the events of the Game of Thrones series, and the lead character, a knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (“ser” is the correct spelling in G.R.R. Martin’s world), is played by Irish rugby-player-turned-actor Peter Claffey. He plays Dunk.
Graphic: Corps of Armored Knights greet visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's armor exhibit (6) (855191870). Wikimedia.commons. CCA 2.0 Generic.
Dunk was an orphan as a youth, taken in by a “hedge knight,” which is a lower class of Westerosi knight who does not pledge allegiance to any prominent House. Playing alongside Claffey is young Dexter Sol Ansell, portraying a mysterious child known as “Egg,” a curiously wise young boy who becomes his faithful squire.
There is unmistakable chemistry between the two actors that really shines. But it is not just the performances that stand out. The writers made some brave choices as well.
It seems a novel approach these days, but these characters appear in the television show as they appear in the source material and woke virtue signaling in casting and storytelling isn’t dialed up to 11 for the sake of the presumedly woke modern audience’s appetite. Given HBO’s recent history, this is a very happy surprise.
In another 2022 prequel series to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, viewers see several characters summarily race-swapped in a manner that completely violates the source material and makes absolutely no sense.
Developed during the Great Woke Madness that ensued in the years following 2020, that show made choices to alter the source material in ways that we’ve come to expect. For example, the single, most important distinctive physical trait in the Targaryen family line (the family which rules the Seven Kingdoms in much of the history of G.R.R. Martin’s world) is that they are pale skinned and have silver-white or platinum blond hair. With House of the Dragon, HBO made several Targaryen characters black.
There’s a reason for this entirely silly decision, as it turns out. The showrunners are on record saying they didn’t want “another bunch of white people on the screen.”
Fans truly hate this kind of stuff, to the point of an entire critical industry being born. Hollywood, which designs its award shows to reward silly race-swaps and such, is lampooned by countless online personalities such as Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, and Ryan Kinel, who often have amassed larger audiences for their commentary than the content they’re ridiculing.
This is what makes A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms so special, and such a triumph in the age of modern television. A small-but-dedicated production crew and cast collapsed G.R.R. Martin’s epic world of Westeros into a small setting, telling an story to which everyone can relate, largely thanks to a notable lack of common, stupid woke distractions.
There are a couple of moments in the first two episodes in which unnecessary artistic decisions were made. After having listened to the producers’ commentaries, these decisions do seem a bit selfishly and childishly indulgent.
But beyond that, there is very little in the way of the over-the-top sex, violence, and gore that made Game of Thrones notorious and, perhaps unfortunately, off-putting for millions of people who would have otherwise loved the series.
In my estimation, however, this story is the purest of Americana. It’s a Horatio Alger story, told in a fantasy setting for a modern audience. We know immediately that Dunk had a hard life but what makes him a hero is that he owns a rare humility, in spite of his size and strength, and maintains an unmistakable sense of gratitude for what little he has been given. Most importantly, he carries a sense of duty and honor instilled in him by the poor, unglamourous hedge knight who fathered him until his death.
Young Egg sees the virtue in Ser Duncan, just like the audience does, which makes a six-episode span that averages just over 30-minutes per episode watchable.
That this kind of story still resoundingly resonates with audiences says something good about our culture. Our modern culture reveres victims, and virtue is often signaled by the rejection and spurning of one’s parents, societal norms, and the world at large for all manner of evils. But even today the Horatio Alger model holds up. Despite all the massively coordinated efforts by leftist social engineers to claw it out by the root, there remains in us an inborn reverence for the exceptional bravery, boldness, and most importantly, persistent moral clarity and a moral compass like the chivalric code of the Christian knights of medieval Europe.
This was a win for the culture that comes alongside some other recent victories, such as the news that a Disney executive named Pete Docter chose to scrap an LGBTQ storyline in the new Pixar film, Elio. He told the Wall Street Journal Disney was “making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.”
I cannot, however, yet vouch for future seasons of the series. Apparently, HBO has plans in the next season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to race-swap a crucial role in the series, for some reason that no one in the writing or production team will likely ever explain.
That casting decision will make no sense in the logic of G.R.R. Martin’s world, just as it makes absolutely no sense for HBO and the developers of this show to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by committing to woke race-swaps in future seasons of this show after its stunning past success.
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