That Knight’s a Fuckup (and I love him)

a tribute to the screwups in steel out there

I simply love garbage knights. Your classic knights in shining armor who you can trust to slay dragons and rescue maidens? Feh. Give me a knight who’s lying about being a knight in the first place, who’s crazy, who trips over his own armor, who falls on his face against the beastie. I want a knight who’s terrible at his job, who gets knocked off his horse immediately and gets back up again because he has to. Because he understands—far more so than his legitimate compatriots—what being a knight is: struggling, and being brave, even though he’s unfit for the task.¹

You can find a recent example of the garbage knight in Ser Duncan from the GoT prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (which I promise is good even if you’re a Game of Thrones hater, more on that in a bit.) There’s also Maximus from the Fallout show, who—just like Ser Duncan—starts out as a squire in a medieval-ish world and lies about having been knighted.² And our two lying screwups have deeper literary origins: Don Quixote is the proud father of the type.³ Nobody ever messed up more knightly quests than Don Quixote; no one is more loveable. Cervantes often can’t decide whether he’s mocking his creation or mocking those who would mock Quixote, who’s after all just trying to do some chivalry over here. And then two centuries later, Alexandre Dumas introduced his D’Artagnan as “a Don Quixote of eighteen” to an audience who understood exactly what that meant: this kid’s a romantic idiot. But a well-intentioned and loveable idiot, and one whose adventures we want to follow, as he fucks shit up and still wins the day.⁴

And then we have A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, where “loveable idiot who fucks shit up and still wins the day” seems profoundly antithetical to GRRM’s vision. Again, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a prequel to Game of Thrones, and if Ser Duncan lived uhhhh severalmany decades later into the events of the primary series, he would get immediately murdered. And yet GRRM wrote the cute, charming “Dunk & Egg” novellas on which the new series is based, which follow the adventures of Ser Duncan (Dunk) and his squire Egg, as they bumble in and out of various quests. Dunk and Egg encounter—and sometimes cause—terrible events, but the readers/audience know they’ll always survive: the fake knight and his plucky squire are goodhearted people who are trying their best. As we constantly see with the fuckup knight, he might not always win, but he’s a hero we can root for, knowing he’s serious about his chivalry.

And in this way, the novellas/A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms may be less narratively “innovative” than Game of Thrones with its constant rugpulling and endless cynicism, but they’re also more fun, and certainly more realistically medieval than Game of Thrones ever was.⁵ Instead of the cliched, deep dark brutal Middle Ages where everybody’s always betraying and killing each other, the novellas/A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms depict real people doing real things: hanging out, partying, extending kindness or denying it mostly based on prior allegiances, self-interest, and personal liking. The show has a general Renaissance Fair atmosphere that feels a little fake, partly because we’ve seen festive outfits and drinking at Renaissance Fairs, but also because—thanks to shows like Game of Thrones—we’re not accustomed to the fact that people in the past wore bright silly outfits and weren’t always miserable.⁶ The hierarchical social structure as depicted in both show and novellas is largely functional, if oppressive; there are rich and poor, and that’s all rather static, but such were the times. People in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms aren’t constantly dying or being crushed; rich and poor alike have lives, and sometimes even get to keep having them. They don’t just exist to die into the theme of “everything is brutal and nothing matters lol.”

One of my deep frustrations with Game of Thrones has been how critics and audiences alike took it as “true” unlike other genre stories. It wasn’t solely the supposedly “realistic” depiction of the medieval era; Game of Thrones rang “true” to a late 20th/21st century audience because it was a portrait of the “fuck you got mine” attitude of the present. And in a way, that’s fine—fantasy is always in some sense about the era in which the writer lives, and not the era supposedly portrayed. But the acceptance of our present as particularly dark, cruel, despairing, and bloodthirsty gave the cynics a pass. If we’re all monsters, constantly stabbing each other in the back, then we might as well keep stabbing. If the world’s a bloodthirsty game, and you either win or you die, you’d better keep winning at all costs.

And the utter lack of hope not only rendered the books impossible to finish, but also painted our present with a hopelessness I’m not sure it deserves, or is found in many other stories for a reason. The Dunk and Egg novellas have resolutions (quite nice ones). Is it because they have a more classic narrative structure; they rely on a pre-existing and well-loved type of hero? I think it’s because they acknowledge that stories end; narratives end; eras end. The garbage knight saves the day; or he has a more equivocal victory; or, like Don Quixote, he recants and dies. But he does something. He goes somewhere. There’s an arc and a point, not just “everything is bad forever.” And even in “everything is bad forever,” GRRM captured a certain zeitgeist—many of us have felt that everything will be bad forever. But it’s not true, or at least not true that it’ll be the same forever.

Our stories have certainly moved on: we have not one but two fuckup knights roaming the streaming services. At the end of the most recent season of Fallout, Maximus goes up against a horde of Deathclaws (big scary dragon-mutants); he defeats them, with help from the community. Then, very injured, he stumbles off to find his long-lost girlfriend, and does. It’s romantic; even a bit silly. Not everyone will like this sort of thing: some people prefer cynicism, because it makes them feel “realistic,” that they’re imbibing something true. But realism these days includes heroism against impossible odds, and community assistance; realism includes love. Realism includes trying very hard, even though you may be a fuckup; getting knocked down by monsters, and still fighting back.

1. You could argue that every knight fails to be really “good” at knighthood; they always struggle. Even Lancelot, Galahad, etc. But there’s a huge difference between a hero who has trouble beating the bad guys, or struggles against himself and his failings, versus an illegitimate fuckup who shouldn’t be there at all but keeps going.

2. Maximus’ world is post-apocalyptic medieval, but it counts. While we’re here, I really liked the Fallout S1 episode where Maximus was able to relax in a fluffy white robe for a bit. 1) deeply relatable 2) even fuckup knights get to chill!!!! maybe more so because they’re fuckups.

3. I can cite obscure fantasy novel examples of the garbage knight if you want: Prince Rupert in Simon R. Green’s Blue Moon Rising, Sir John in Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane (although that one’s really a crisis of expectations), a character in Tanith Lee’s short story “Draco, Draco,” (though it’s not the character you might think it is at first). I CAN GO ON.

4. Some of the later Three Musketeers sequels aren’t as fun, partly because of weaker plotting and partly because D’Artagnan has grown up and is less of a fuckup. Yawn.

5. I keep forgetting about House of the Dragon, that other GoT prequel show. I watched part of the first season and disliked it—seemed cynical and same-y! I guess there’s an audience for it as there is for many other types of stories, though this is also brand extension.

6. Medieval outfits were, in fact, much stupider than anything on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms:

haaaaaaaats