Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms Has A Huge Game of Thrones Easter Egg Hiding In Plain Sight
Egg’s family bridges the gap between this series and Game of Thrones.
All Targaryen roads lead to Danaerys Targaryen. The Game of Thrones heroine was our introduction to the silver-haired family, and now there’s a whole spinoff, House of the Dragon, about her ancestors fighting with each other. Rhaenyra, for example, is about her sixth-great-grandmother (the “about” accounts for all the inbreeding that makes genealogy difficult).
At first, it seemed like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms would distance itself from this iconic family, but Episode 3 changed everything. But the Game of Thrones character it had the biggest tie to wasn’t Daenerys — it was someone you may have forgotten was a Targaryen at all.
Warning! Spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 3 ahead!
Egg makes his big reveal in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 3.
In the last moments of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 3, Egg reveals his true identity: he’s actually Aegon Targaryen, youngest son of Maekar and youngest brother of Aerion. However, he’s not the only Targaryen we find out about. When Dunk is in the Fossaway tent drinking cider with Raymun Fossoway, Raymun goes on a bit of an anti-Targaryen rant. “Daeron’s a sot. Aerion’s just vain and cruel. The third’s so useless, they were gonna ship him off to a citadel to make a maester of him. And the youngest…” he says, before Egg — the youngest son he’s talking about — interrupts.
We are all too familiar with Aerion, and now we know Daeron was the inebriated guy in the inn from Season 1, but who is this mysterious third son who was shipped off to become a Westerosi doctor? That’s Aemon Targaryen, the kind brother who actually gave Egg his nickname.
If that name sounds familiar, that’s because this Aemon is actually Maester Aemon, the elderly, blind maester who joined the Night’s Watch. He was a big part of Game of Thrones, becoming a mentor for Samwell Tarly. In Season 5 of Game of Thrones, Aemon passes away from old age, and his last words are actually spoken to Egg. “Egg,” he says, “I dreamed I was old.”
Maester Aemon was a secret Targaryen hiding in plain sight.
It’s actually thanks to Aemon that Aegon is even able to become King Aegon V in the future. In the Tales of Dunk and Egg novels, when Aemon joins the Order of Maesters, he has to give up his Targaryen name, but when Aerion loses his life in a truly dumb way and Daemon, naturally, catches a fatal STD, Aemon technically becomes first in succession. But Aemon chooses to decline the crown, meaning Aegon becomes king.
After Aegon’s coronation, Aemon elects to join the Night’s Watch so that rebels couldn’t use him as a pawn to usurp his younger brother. He serves as maester at Castle Black for so long that his original Targaryen heritage was forgotten — Jon Snow would serve with him for years without knowing he was his great-great-uncle and Daenerys’ great-uncle.
So Aemon is the forgotten Targaryen, but that’s completely by design. It meant he could live a quiet life and not get embroiled in Targaryen drama and actually pass away from old age, something that’s unfortunately rare in his family. He may be “useless” to Raymun, but he’s a North Star to Game of Thrones fans.
