HBO's Game of Thrones is a show with very complex character relationships (in plot terms). Often characters make choices that have a lasting effect on people they have never met, on the other side of the world. Some decisions are bigger than others; some have consequences that are far reaching; some affect only the decision maker themselves. One thing that seems to prevail, as a concurrent theme across many of these choices is, strangely, that they are incredibly... stupid. It is rather bewildering, actually, when you consider that these occurrences will exceed the sum of your fingers if you tried to count them all. So in honour of the characters we all know and love, and in anticipation of the upcoming Season 4 premiere, I've laid out some of the best ones for you to consider. Some of them are blunderous errors, made haphazardly; some are a result of direct character flaws; some of them are unfortunate; and some are just downright unbelievable! All of them however, have in some way or another, terrible, terrible consequences.
20. Stark Lads Miss Dire Omen
We'll kick things off pretty much at the very beginning: the first of many a Stark blunder on the torrid and bloody path towards their family's destruction. In Season 1, Episode 1, the Stark men are returning home to Winterfell, having just executed a deserter from the Night's Watch (you could argue that ignoring the deserter's warnings of White Walkers was another bad call, but based on the information at hand at the time, there was no intelligent reason why they should believe him). Travelling through the Wolfswood, they come across the fresh carcass of a stag, and some ways off, a felled direwolf with a broken antler piercing her neck. A stag and a direwolf coming together: both now dead. Jon Snow is the one to recognise the omen of the direwolf, it being the symbol of the Stark household, but he equates the numerical coincidence of the she-wolf's five pups and the five Stark children as an omen that they should bring the litter under their protection. What he misses, and what everyone misses, is the foreboding significance of the dead stag in the picture. Low and behold, King Robert soon comes to Winterfell; his house sigil is the horned stag. Ned and Robert embrace as old friends, a stag and a direwolf coming together: eight episodes later, both are dead. Perhaps not a deliberate choice made here, but this one goes down as a definite warning sign overlooked.
