I was assured upthread that they’re basically the same show.
True, I forgot about that.
True, Geralt is basically an exterminator.
I’ve never seen The Witcher but it seems to be a real stretch to suggest that they’re the same.
One question left unanswered in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms; did Ser Arlan actually make Duncan a knight or is Duncan lying about that? Given how honorable he seems, I’d like to think that Duncan wouldn’t start off with such a big fib.
I didn’t feel as if that question was unanswered; I thought it was pretty clear that he did no such thing, and never really implied that he would (Duncan says something like “he always said he wanted to make me a knight one day” and then we cut to them riding, Dunk asking “will you make me a knight someday?”, and his master ignoring him to hack up some phlegm).
Oh that’s not unanswered at all. They made it explicitly clear that he’s full of shit. (Literally; they showed him with explosive diarrhea behind a tree.)
If you recall, he justifies to himself that he should keep the armor and sword because if he buried it with Ser Arlan, it would just get rusty and be wasted. And yes, in flashbacks it is clear that Arlan treated Dunk as a servant more than a squire being groomed for knighthood, and in no way expected him to ever become a knight.
The plot to this series is nearly identical to the film A Knight’s Tale, where similarly a squire’s master died, and the squire took his master’s equipment and decided to declare himself as a knight, and used that pretense to join a tournament to make it into a reality.
I don’t think that’s at all clear from the flashbacks in the most recent episode – ISTM that as Dunk got older, they became much more friends and equals. And they did practice fighting – and Dunk seemed to dominate those practices in the limited bit we got to see.
But at that point why was he not knighted? that is not something that should wait for your death bed. He was grown, had served honorably for what looked like decades, was clearly a better fighter than his master… so why was he not a knight already?
Even if his relationship improved, it seems clear that he was never knighted. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been all of that indecision and rationalization in the beginning of the first episode. And all throughout that episode it was reinforced.
I think the second episode was trying to establish that he really was treated well, and his near-worship of his old master wasn’t because he’s an idiot who fell for a bunch of stories, or some kind of Stockholm syndrome, but because they really did get along well and he did learn a lot. It’s just that he was never made a knight, and there didn’t seem to be any indication that Arlan ever intended for Dunk to become one, however good their relationship became.
I agree he was probably never knighted… I’m just saying that it’s not clear this was deliberate by Ser Arlan. It may have been an oversight (i.e. he declined so quickly, and Dunk either didn’t think to ask or was ashamed to ask Ser to knight him while he was dying). Maybe Arlan even said something like “you’re a knight now, my boy… I’m too weak to do it myself, but go ahead and tell everyone you’re a knight”.
The way Dunk speaks about Ser Arlan, IMO, makes it clear he believes he’s fulfilling Ser Arlan’s legacy and ultimate wishes, or at the very least not at all betraying them. Arlan may have even intended to knight Dunk but was waiting for a new squire candidate to come along, and putting it off until he had a replacement. Maybe he was even just putting it off because he didn’t want Dunk to leave him.
That’s certainly possible, sure. But I think it’s clear that he’s lying, and probably lying to himself. Otherwise, what they made very clear in the first episode made absolutely no sense. Why would they do all that and then retcon it in the second episode?
Honestly, though, I still find Dunk to be a very sympathetic character. “Fake it until you make it” is not necessarily a sin. And he seems earnest and noble in his way. He seems to have more of a knight’s temperament than most of the other knights he has interacted with so far.
And really, when you get down to it, what makes you a knight is other people believing you’re a knight. Heck, the way they confirm it in the show is for someone else to vouch for you. So once you convince people you’re one, you are one for all intents and purposes.
The way they show the flashbacks directly contradicting what Dunk says about Ser Arlan, at least a couple times that i recall (there was also “he treated me well”, cut to Ser Arlan slapping the shit out of child Dunk several times), to me implies that Dunk’s worship of Ser Arlan was not quite based on the reality of the situation.
“I am his legacy” he says at the end of the 2nd episode. I think the “am I to be knight, like you” scene from the 1st episode was meant to show that Dunk’s memory is indeed rose-tinted.
Not a hugely important point, whoever is right here… I just don’t see Dunk having such positive feelings for Arlan if he felt, in any way, that Arlan didn’t want him to be doing what he’s doing now.
Maybe, I can’t say you’re wrong. Arlan might very well have cheered Dunk on were he able.
The way I interpreted it was that Arlan was decent enough to Dunk but that it never would have occurred to him to knight a commoner. Not because he couldn’t, clearly he was allowed to elevate a commoner, but because he just didn’t see Dunk that way. His successor was the son he lost fighting for the lord who couldn’t even remember him, and Dunk was just “the help”. Doesn’t mean he had to be abusive towards “the help”, but he’s not gonna put them in his will either.
This was my interpretation as well, although I think that Dunk is less lying to himself than doing what he thinks is fair (and TBH he’s not even wrong).
One way to look at it is that a knight is someone who earns the right to be a knight, and if someone acts like a knight and does what a knight is supposed to do, they have as much right to the honor as anyone else. Certainly they have more right to it than someone who just inherited the title. I don’t think that anything Dunk is doing is immoral.
Yes, I agree with this too. The only way there’d by something “wrong” with what Dunk is doing is if being “knighted” truly did cause some kind of metaphysical change to occur, such that there was a difference between someone who was legitimately knighted and someone who wasn’t. Obviously someone operating within the framework and belief system of Seven Kingdoms Feudalism probably would think that there’s some kind of true metaphysical change that occurs when you are knighted in the name of The Seven, but from an outsider’s perspective, that is of course horseshit and if Dunk is going to use the social power that comes with knighthood (including the permission to wield weapons and thus physical power entailed as a result) to do good, then it’s fine by me.
From our outsider’s perspective, yes. And even in-world cynical people like Varys think so. But presumably being knighted is meant to mean something within the belief framework of the Seven.
I don’t think we’ve seen any indication that Ser Arlan was not a commoner like Dunk. He was from the village of Pennytree, and there’s no indication that he was any sort of noble there. There’s no “House of Pennytree”, at least not identified anywhere.
I thought one of the guys Duncan appealed to said something about Arlan being a hedge knight himself, which I understood to mean that he was also just a commoner.
He was probably not from a great noble house but also not a commoner, an “hidalgo” the Spanish would call it, perhaps the son of a second son, or the son of a nobleman’s bastard, there was a class of “not a commoner but not landed either” people.
I’m not aware of any support for this in the text or the show. Arlan clearly was a Hedge Knight – Dunk even says so, or thereabouts.