Sword boy: Stark v Lannister

I've always fucking loved a good sword fight, whether it's Errol Flynn going completely apeshit in The Adventures of Robin Hood, or some of the spectacular light-sabre battles in the various Star Wars (The climactic Phantom Menace face-off is objectively the best), or Ash doing some crazy shit in the final battle of Army of Darkness.

But my favourite sword fights in the past decade were all on Game Of Thrones. It's become extremely fashionable to take a dump on all things Thrones in the past year - largely due to excruciating levels of audience entitlement that still fucking infuriate - but one of the great appeals of the show for me was always the fight choreography, which was often completely brilliant, right until the end.

So after a couple of weeks of taking a literary focus at the Tearoom of Despair, all I wanna do for the next week is highlight seven of my favourite sword fights from the show. They are all largely one-on-one affairs - none of the big battles really count - and while they are all beautifully choreographed, they all have something different to say about character or skill or thematic elements of the whole damn story. And I could watch all of them over and over again.

So let's start with one of the earliest efforts:



There had already been some swordplay in the first half of the first season, but this short, sharp exchange between two of the main characters set the standard for two blokes trying to hack each other up for swords. Even ignoring the long and strange history between the two characters - both had nothing but contempt for each other after the king-slaying - everything you need to know about them is there in the way they thrust, block and move around each other.

Ned is all brutish and to the point, with no fancy flourishes, while Jaime is nothing but fancy floruishes, and is genuinely delighted to finally have a crack at a Stark, and actually face a proper challenge for the first time in years.

It comes to a brutally early end with Ned getting stabbed in the leg from behind, but for a minute or two, Game of Thrones showed that sword fights were more than just action, and could contain multitudes that reams of dialogue could never deliver.