I recruited my friends Tinkered Thinking (✍️📚 author of White Mirror & The Lucilius Parables) and Jameson Olsen (🎧 host of Becoming the Main Character) to do a *deep* dive on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's 1998 novella The Hedge Knight.

🚨 If you haven’t seen the show, bookmark this and come back. Seriously. This one’s worth avoiding spoilers and going in blind. 🚨

I was totally charmed by this series. The writing, the acting, the music, the cinematography, the sets, and the costumes. It all feels more tactile and real than most of what's on TV right now. And here's the thing: after we watched it, we all read the novella, and we all agree the show might actually be better. That almost never happens with adaptations.

In this pod, we go episode by episode, compare the novella to the show, and argue about what we want from season two. Along the way, we get into trailers that ruin movies, what makes a great villain entrance (hint: it involves a horse 🐴), the philosophy of praxis, David Goggins taking souls, and why Dunk might be one of the most lovable protagonists on television right now, despite being “thick as a castle wall.”

Some of the rabbit holes we go down:

Why narrow scope is this show’s superpower, and why more IPs should tell bite-sized stories instead of promising the world and failing to deliver it.

The Die Hard approach to the final fight: he doesn’t win because he’s better, he wins because he won’t stay down.

"Are there no true knights among you?" The gap between the title and the oath. ⚔️🛡️👑

Why Aerion knows every loophole. Showing up to a bar fight with a few Navy SEALs.

Everything the show added to the novella (Lyonel! Flea Bottom! the goose eggs!) and why most of the additions are improvements 📙

Dunk thinks like a child, Egg thinks like an adult. The inversion is the point.

Where could Egg’s arc go from here? Can the show actually make us hate him? (Tinkered has a theory about the series finale that I kind of want him to write.)

Word of the day: praxis.

Lesson of the day: “Get up.” (Maybe it’s a whole philosophy 🤔)

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Going Deep with Tinkered Thinking and Jameson Olsen ⚔️🥚🛡️🏰🐴