A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms Addresses A House Of The Dragon Complaint

Winter is coming, and so are spoilers for "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" episode 4.

"A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is truly a gift from the gods old and new. It's a "Game of Thrones" spin-off that feels simultaneously familiar and completely different. Sure, the smallfolk of Westeros continue to suffer on the series while the highborns do awful things, but the show is also sincerely funny and heartfelt in a way that neither its parent series nor its previous prequel/spin-off, "House of the Dragon," are. Hell, "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" even incorporates songs, which are a vital element of George R.R. Martin's source material that's been mostly left out of previous adaptations of his work.

The show itself focuses on the humble tale of Dunk (Peter Claffey), an errant hedge knight trying to make a name for himself at a big tourney. Except, even in a small-scale story like this, Martin's world-building makes sure everything connects to the larger history of Westeros. Indeed, our hopeful knight is accompanied by a small, young squire named Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), who's really Prince Aegon V Targaryen and, as such, related to several major "Game of Thrones" characters.

It's a testament to the writing on "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" and Martin's original "Hedge Knight" novella that bringing in the Targaryens doesn't feel like fan service or contrived. Instead, the former remains a self-contained story that offers a different perspective on familiar ideas — like seeing how the smallfolk look at and interact with the Great Houses. The show's humor, in particular, is also a big part of why it works, as we see in its latest episode when Egg admits something that "House of the Dragon" fans know all too well: Targaryen naming conventions are exhaustingly repetitive.

When Egg goes to visit Dunk in jail, he finally confesses to lying about his name, explaining that "Egg" is short for Aegon and that he was named after Aegon the Conqueror. When asked how many Aegons have been king, Egg answers four, with an annoyed look on his face. If you had to live directly in the shadow of the previous four Aegons, including the creator of a centuries-long dynasty and the guy who single-handedly led to five Blackfyre Rebellions, you'd want to go by a nickname, too.

Egg doesn't explicitly insult the Targaryen naming convention, but his disdain for his family's legacy and the long lineage of Aegons brings to mind a common complaint about "House of the Dragon" — namely, that it features too many characters with identical sounding names, which, in turns, makes it easy to mix characters up. It doesn't help that both sides of the Dance of the Dragons, the Greens and the Blacks, have a child named Aegon. Even "House of the Dragon" star Olivia Cooke has said that she struggles in this respect, admitting, "Everyone's called Aegon or Rhaenys or Rhaenyra."

But despite Egg's efforts, the traditional Targaryen naming conventions aren't so easily dismantled. Indeed, we already know he'll be far from the last Aegon in the Targaryen line, with even Jon Snow (Kit Harington) still bearing that name when he's born so many decades after "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" takes place on "Game of Thrones." For now, however, we can take solace in the fact that Egg would prefer to go by a different moniker.

"A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is currently streaming on HBO Max.