Game of Thrones Used the Same Trick Twice in a Row and We Didn't Notice

The show has been very good at dropping hints about tragic events throughout the episodes, but in one case it simply copied and pasted

Image Credit: HBO

If there's one thing that Game of Thrones has (more or less) always done well, it's been dropping hints about events that would happen shortly. In some cases, they've just led us astray, like the famous partly unfulfilled prophecies that have infuriated fans, in others they've been downright literal. In the first season alone, two examples are very, perhaps too similar to each other. Let's go back to the first episodes of the HBO series, whose famous episode 9 was so shocking to fans who didn't know the novels that it helped make Game of Thrones the media phenomenon it has been for the past decade. 

Ned Stark's death has in fact lit the spark, but as we know there was every reason to predict it from the first episode: in the scene in which the Stark family finds dire wolf pups, in fact, there was also an adult specimen fatally struck by the antlers of a deer. The meaning is very clear: a Stark (wolf) killed by a Baratheon (deer). A few episodes later, in fact, here is Joffrey Baratheon condemning the former first knight and lord of Winterfell to death.

So far so good, but have you noticed that Game of Thrones used this "trick" again during the first season? Before Ned Stark's death, in fact, that of his friend and King of the Seven Kingdoms Robert Baratheon was also anticipated. At the beginning of episode 7 (Game of Thrones), we see Tywin Lannister while... skinning a deer. On paper, it wants to make us understand that the Lannister lord has no problem killing and flaying, getting his blood on, and therefore shows his ruthless nature, but on a deeper level, it anticipates the killing of the King at the hands of the Lannisters. 

Not for nothing, at the end of that episode Robert dies thus giving way to the events that animated Game of Thrones. Have you noticed that the series used the same way to anticipate a sensational death in the space of a few episodes? Tell us your opinion, as always, in the comments.