Funny / Fire & Blood

• The prelude to the Field of Fire provides some hilarious dramatic irony as Mern Gardener and Loren Lannister are convinced that the fight will be a Curb-Stomp Battle in their favor. Why? Well, they have more soldiers, but also they're meeting Aegon's host on a wide, flat plain with nothing but vast fields of wheat and grass, and since there hasn't been rain in a fortnight, with only a bit of a wind blowing in their direction, the ground is dry, creating perfect conditions for their heavy cavalry. Of course, what an open, windy, extremely dry field of grain with no cover might mean when the other side has fire-breathing dragons somehow never crosses their minds.
• After noting that both Prince Joffrey's and the Clubfoot's feet were stolen from their resting places, Gyldayn wonders if there's some magical component to feet that makes people keep stealing them.
• Once construction is completed on the Red Keep, Maegor invites all the builders, stone carvers, architects etc. to a three day feast/orgy — and then has them all killed, to prevent them revealing the secrets of the construction of the castle. Before the dust has even had time to settle, he starts planning the construction of the Dragonpit. Anyone hired to work on the new building project immediately flees King's Landing.
• Jaehaerys insisting the empty places in his Kingsguard be filled with victors in a tournament melee, rather than the jousting, citing that assassins rarely come on horseback with lances.
• Queen Alysanne convincing Jaehaerys to start setting up some wells in King's Landing by bringing some tankards of the local water up to the Small Council and daring them to drink it. They don't even dare.
• King Viserys response when he learns of Daemon's antics in the Stepstones: "Let Daemon play at war, it keeps him out of trouble," as if Daemon wasn't his brother but his rebellious teenage son.
• While it's the cause of a lot of tragedy, there's also a kind of Black Humor surrounding Rhaenyra's sons 'by' Laenor Velaryon, and how fervently Rhaenyra and her father are determined that no one call them bastards; from decapitating Vaemond Velaryon and feeding his body to a dragon, to removing the tongues of Vaemond's five cousins who go protesting to Viserys. Alicent, before the 'speak and forever lose your tongue' rule was passed, manages to get in an excellent jab at Rhaenyra via Laenor when Lucerys is born: 'Do keep trying, soon or late, you may get one who looks like you.'
• Criston Cole, surrounded by the Blacks, challenges the enemy commanders to a three on one Trial by Combat, no doubt wanting to go out in a blaze of glory. He's instead told he can shove it and the Blacks have their archers turn him into a Human Pincushion, deliberately making his death as unromantic and humiliating as possible. Pate of Longleaf even quips that he doesn't want any songs about how bravely Cole died. (Since we never have heard of any songs sung about Cole, it would seem Pate managed to succeed on that front.)
• After Rhaenyra takes King's Landing, Queen Alicent somewhat belatedly suggests having a Great Council to decide between Aegon and Rhaenyra. Keep in mind that she does this in front of six dragons. Rhaenyra basically tells her stepmother to go fuck herself.
  • A desperate Alicent also suggests dividing Westeros between the two. By complete coincidence, her suggestion is Aegon gets the Westerlands, the Stormlands and the Reach (i.e., the "good" bits rich in resources) while Rhae gets King's Landing, the Crownlands, the Riverlands, the Vale, the North and all the islands (or, in other words, the crap and ungovernable bits). Curiously enough, this does not sway Rhae.
• When Rhaenyra searches for more dragonriders outside the Targaryen bloodline, one of the people who jumps at the chance is the dwarf fool Mushroom. His only attempt ends with his pants on fire and him jumping into a well.
• The sheer fact that Cregan Stark's forces only show up after the civil war is over and both sides of the Targaryen family have been all but wiped out, including the guy who actually won! Even taking into account how long Cregan would realistically need to muster forces from an area the size of the North, it still takes them two years to get there; and the majority of the Northmen are highly annoyed since they missed the whole thing and won't get to die in battle, which was the main reason they even agreed to come.
  • Once Cregan allows Perkin the Flea to take the black, all but two of the crowd of people awaiting execution "suddenly evinced a deep desire to defend the Wall."
• At one point Queen Alysanne considered if one of her youngest daughters Saera and Viserra might make a good match for her son Vaegon, but noted that the problem with that idea was that:

  Alysanne: Vaegon has never looked twice at either one of them. I am not sure he is aware that they exist. Perhaps if some maester wrote about them in a book...

  Jaehaerys: I shall tell Grand Maester Elysar to commence tomorrow.

  • Elysar trying to get Vaegon interested in women by giving him the medieval equivalent of a Playboy magazine (in this case, an erotic book filled with drawings of naked women having sex with men, beasts, and each other). Vaegon kept the book but still showed no interest in actual girls.
• Torrhen Manderly's judgement of the Rogare brothers in connection with the failure of their family's bank. Lotho Rogare, a banker himself, is found guilty and given the choice between the Night's Watch or losing his right hand; he chooses the latter, cheerfully thanking the gods that he's left-handed. One must assume this factors into Manderly's amusingly petty judgement of Roggerio Rogare, who, as a simple proprietor of a luxurious brothel, is found completely innocent, but sentenced to seven lashes nonetheless.

  Roggerio: For what?!

  Torrhen: For being a thrice-damned Lyseni.

• When Queen Alyssa dies of childbirth complications, her daughter Rhaena furiously confronts Alyssa's second husband Rogar Baratheon, blaming him for her mother's death. She warns him that if he ever marries another woman, she'll burn his castle down with him and her inside it. After she leaves, he brushes her off in front of his male buddies, claiming he isn't scared of a woman's talk. At the end of the chapter, there's a brief footnote:

  Rogar Baratheon never wed again.

• The future Aegon IV beating his baby brother with a dragon egg as small children really sets the tone for what their story will entail.
• When his regents debate over who is next in line for the throne, Aegon III suggests his cupbearer Gaemon, on the basis of his prior experience as king (some smallfolk insurgents briefly tried to pass off the four-year-old Gaemon as a Targaryen and install him as king.) For someone who never laughed, the kid had quite a mouth on him. Grand Maester Munkun's pontificating on the importance of the Heir Club for Men is then cut off by Tyland Lannister pointing out that all the other Targaryen men (so far as they know) are dead.
• Septon Eustace sounds somewhat perplexed by a "strange euphoria" that took hold of King's Landing after Aegon II's death. Mushroom, in a rare example of his account sounding objective, explains that everyone was drunk celebrating.
• The problems the regents have with Baela Targaryen. Deciding she's too wilful, they try to marry her off to Thaddeus Rowan, but she immediately refuses on the grounds that he's overweight, bald, forty years her senior and she's already slept with two of his sons. "Not both at once, that would have been improper." They lock her up in her room. The next morning, she's already missing. It later turns out that she'd snuck out, disguised herself as an ordinary washerwoman and just strolled out the Red Keep's front door. Then she hurried off to the Velaryons and married her cousin, Alyn. At this point the regents collectively throw their hands up and agree to pretend this was the plan all along.
• After getting sick of trying to get his young daughter Daella wed due to her neurotic behavior and fear of basically everything Jaehaerys states that he can order 100 naked men to line up and let his daughter choose from them. Queen Alysanne is not pleased at the joke.

  Alysanne: One hundred naked men would frighten her.

  Jaehaerys: One hundred naked ducks would frighten her.

• When Septon Eustace leaves King's Landing, Gyldayn has this to say about his replacement: "Alas, Septon Bernard would rather compose holy music than write down court gossip and his writings are therefore of little interest to historians and scholars (and even less to those who enjoy holy music, it pains us to report)."
• Rogar Baratheon's attempt to launch a coup against Jaehaerys borders on Epic Fail. He openly announces his intentions to the Small Council, but absolutely nobody buys his argument. Jaehaerys's mother (and his wife) fires him from his position as Hand, and Lord Corbray enforces this with Lady Forlorn. His attempts to kidnap Jaehaerys's nieces to use one of them as a puppet queen similarly fizzle, as Queen Alyssa and Lord Corbray have plenty of forewarning to hide Aerea from him and his brother is bluffed into surrendering by the High Septon's steward after a septa stalls him at the door of Rhaella's motherhouse.
  Donnel Hightower: His own wife took his hand and cut his balls off.
• When Cregan Stark prepares to execute those responsible for King Aegon, the first to be beheaded requests to take the black, and Cregan, as a northern lord, honors that request, since the Night's Watch always has need of men. The narrator remarks that at that moment, all of the other condemned, with the exception of Gyles Belgrave and Larys Strong, suddenly expressed a deep desire to serve in the Night's Watch.

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