Game of Thrones season 8: There’s an unexpected “act of love” in episode 2

For an episode that ends on a song about ghosts, Game of Thrones’ “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” also has some love in it.

Are you still feeling some feelings about Jaime and Brienne’s moment when he makes her a knight of the Seven Kingdoms on Game of Thrones? So is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime himself. Speaking to TheWrap, he offered some insights as to Jaime’s thoughts, down to calling it “obviously an act of love.”

Be still, our shipping hearts, and let us contextualize that a bit. “It’s clearly a woman that he has enormous admiration for and just a human being that he admires,” he says of Jaime’s perspective on Brienne. Admiration, we will admit, is a much better basis for any kind of relationship than incest, and in an episode where there were physical displays of affection, this touched a deeper thread of emotion.

You could perhaps think of it as a new incarnation of courtly love, since Brienne is neither married nor a traditional noblewoman. Instead of writing poems to express his devotion or otherwise following the rules at all, Jaime is giving her something that not very many people can do. This writer called it “one of the most meaningful things” on the show, and our own Lacy Baugher picked that thread up in the analysis of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Speaking of the rules of the relationship, though, he actually breaks another earlier, in their first conversation, by not verbally jabbing at her, and she calls him out on it. You could even say that the knighting is his act of apology. As Coster-Waldau notes, that’s something Jaime can do, but it does require a certain willingness to break some long-held customs about who’s deserving of knighthood. They may not be rules, but they’re close.

In other words, it’s an “act of love,” yes, but it’s also an act of rebalancing the scales. As the big battle approaches, letting these two finally be equals in terms of titles is truly an “act of love” between two friends (or something more, maybe).

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