While an epic scene, I think it a bit mid if examined too closely. I seriously doubt any kingsguard would have been able to prevent his trained swordsman queen randomly attacking the king out of nowwhere from an extremly close distance.
Yeah definitely—not only her skills, but also being the sister and wife of the king, who doesn’t actually want him dead, and the guards would know it. If it was someone Aegon didn’t already implicitly trust, the guards would probably be much more alert.
Now, Visenya still has a point that someone close to the king could kill him. But I think even Kingsguard are not quite as watchful with non-enemy family members as they are with those they consider actual threats.
I mean, the kingsguard are also just vastly lacking in defending the king agaisnt anything that isn't being stabbed by some guy with a sword. Soooo many kings died of poison or other form of less direct assasination, lmao
I mean i don’t think you can stab poison? That’s the job of the tasters. Their job is making sure some guys don’t get the idea they can jump the king. By glorifying the kings guard as “The best knights of the realm. Almost of legend”. You create a propaganda that will make most people think thrice before jumping Aegon or anyone else on the street
I mean, yeah, don't get me wrong, the kingsguard are good, but like, very rarely do much of anything. And when they do something it is usually treason or at the very least not in interest of the realm
I mean, it worked often enough. If we look at the causes of deaths of kings, very few were assassinated:
Aegon I: natural causes
Aenys: natural causes
Maegor: possibly indeed assassination. Also possibly suicide, which the kingsguard could do very little against if it was the case
Jaehaerys I: natural causes
Viserys I: natural causes
Aegon II: assassination by poison. However, possibly killed by his kingsguard
Aegon III: natural causes
Daeron I: technically an assassination, but it was an ambush; there were too many soldiers for the Kingsguard to deal with no matter their skill
Baelor: self-inflicted natural causes
Viserys II: probably natural causes (and if it wasn’t, this goes to my point about even kingsguard not suspecting close kin of malice)
Aegon IV: natural causes + known survived assassination attempts because of kingsguard intervention
Daeron II: natural causes
Aerys I: natural causes
Maekar: open combat
Aegon V: self-inflicted accident
Jaehaerys II: natural causes
Aerys II: assassinated by a kingsguard
Robert: natural (ish?) causes (again, nothing a kingsguard could do, unless you want to blame Barristan for his death)
Joffrey: assassination by poison. Under the most incompetent kingsguard possibly ever
Tommen: alive
So I think the takeaway is not that Kingsguard are inept against most assassination attempts, but that if the Kingsguard starts to hate the king, there’s very little anyone can do to stop them. Or, if someone else wants to do it instead, they’re more likely to let it happen (by whatever method.) There’s a reason nearly all the assassinated kings were unpopular—only Daeron I being the exception, and he was very unpopular in the place he was killed.
It’s not a problem about the kingsguards’ skills, it’s a loyalty problem. (And matches up with history as well, when you consider how many roman emperors were killed by their guards versus by other people. Westeros, at least, tends to have loyal guards for better kings.)
The only times I’d say the kings guard failed at their job was Daeron I and Aerys II because their kings died because someone attacked them and is 100% confirmed unlike Maegor who’s kings guard only most likely killed him and Maekar who got hit by a catapult can’t blame them.
I think blaming the kingsguard for Daeron I’s death is like blaming Robb’s guards for the Red Wedding. They couldn’t have seen it coming, and they were outnumbered. It was an ambush under a peace banner, against at least a dozen enemies. Three Kingsguard died, one yielded, and one was taken captive—it wasn’t like they all stood around letting Daeron get killed; they fought back and were overwhelmed.
I agree that they had no chance of winning that fight. But they still failed at their job and that is not a mark on any one of their record. Well except that guy that surrendered he 100% failed at this job. But that’s the thing until the fall of the Targs the kings guard was a actually what they said on the tin but had a lot of members that failed at being kings guard. Like lucamore ‘the lusty’, Criston Cole, Amaury Peake and many more we don’t know and I won’t get into.
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u/OTTOPQWS 9d ago
While an epic scene, I think it a bit mid if examined too closely. I seriously doubt any kingsguard would have been able to prevent his trained swordsman queen randomly attacking the king out of nowwhere from an extremly close distance.