10 Things You Learn Rewatching Game Of Thrones Season 1

Animals play a key role in Game Of Thrones, but in Season 1, they basically tell you what's going to happen in advance. Ned Stark (*sniffles*) discovers a dead stag in the woods with a slashed belly. Further down the track, he finds a dead direwolf with a bloodied stag's antler protruding from it, with five cubs and an albino runt of the litter beside the corpse.

The direwolf is the sigil of House Stark, and Jon Snow explains that there's one cub for each of the Stark children. The additional runt, of course, goes to Jon himself. He's the outcast of the family. That's the meaning we're all expected to take away from the scene, but there's more. 

House Baratheon's sigil is a stag and Robert Baratheon is killed by a torso wound, much like the animal in the woods. Even more remarkably, the death of the parent direwolf, killed by the stag, replicates Ned Stark's execution under orders from Joffrey Baratheon. 

It's fascinating foreshadowing that makes the huge deaths seem not quite so surprising.