While A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms might be ‘non-woke,’ it’s not the explicitly conservative piece of pop culture we need.
The first season of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a prequel to Game of Thrones and the third adaptation from the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, has been met with glowing critical and audience reception. The show has pulled in massive viewer numbers, and a second season has already been greenlit.
And the show has gotten a surprising amount of positive attention from conservative commentators who often bemoan the sorry state of pop culture.
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is good bc it actually shows that a knight can be a hero and morally good. Been years since any show had a character like this
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) February 3, 2026
The closest we're going to ever get to a 10/10 show this decadepic.twitter.com/K4NGnzWRFL
— Aesthetica (@Anc_Aesthetics) February 24, 2026
For those who haven’t seen the show, peasant-born Ser (in the world of Westeros, that’s how it’s spelled) Duncan the Tall, claiming to be recently knighted by his dying master, seeks to uphold the chivalric code and win the glory that eluded his former guardian by entering into a tourney. Along the way, he picks up his own squire named “Egg,” befriends some powerful lords, and becomes embroiled in a feud with a sadistic prince that necessitates a trial by combat.
The show is … good. The dialogue is well-written, the characters are engaging, and the fight scenes are terrific. The sets, costumes, and armor are all top-notch — up there with the best of Game of Thrones or even the Lord of the Rings films. Perhaps most surprisingly, it has a really good kid actor and a really good character for that kid actor to play.
But while A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms might be “non-woke,” it’s not explicitly conservative either.
It might be seen as conservative in the sense that chivalry, honor, and justice are central themes of the story, and those themes are not treated as jokes, as is so often the case in irony-poisoned Hollywood. It’s conservative in that it’s sincere. The snarkiness and meta-commentary are kept to a minimum. It’s a simple story of right versus wrong, and, seemingly for once in a media landscape in which evil so often triumphs or is at least excused with a tragic backstory, right unambiguously wins.
The problem is, that’s the bare minimum. The Wizard of Oz is pretty similar, but few people would argue that’s an explicitly “conservative” film. Perhaps it is by virtue of the fact that no one in it is trying to push transgenderism on children, but that’s a pretty low bar.
Those are, and should be, politically neutral values.
The author of the novella on which the show is based, George R.R. Martin, is an avowed leftist, and outlets have reported that he was highly involved in the adaptation. So it’s unlikely that any conservative values were intentionally injected into the show.
There’s also plenty for conservatives to dislike in this show, and it doesn’t shy away from the grittier and seedier aspects of medieval life. It’s vulgar (nudity and scatological humor abound), and the primary religion of this fictitious world is a shallow and cynical analog for the Catholic Church. In fact, religion in this universe is treated as naive superstition at best and near-demonic at worst.
The right has an unfortunate tendency to claim any piece of pop culture that appears “non-woke” as its own and celebrate it as a sign that the woke stranglehold on media has finally broken and that we’re on the cusp of getting those good ol’ fashioned family values back on our TV sets, often to disappointing results.
Being “non-woke” is not the same as being anti-woke, and anti-woke is not necessarily the same as being conservative. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms might be “non-woke” because it’s not actively pushing a leftist agenda. But it’s not anti-woke in the same sense as, say, Dave Chappelle’s comedy special in which he lambasted transgender insanity. But no one in his right mind would call Dave Chappelle conservative. Neither are other stand-up heroes the right has adopted in recent years, like Bill Burr or Bill Maher.
And that’s what I mean by a show that is truly conservative. When was the last time we saw a mainstream show treat Christianity as anything other than a joke or blatant hypocrisy used by greedy elites to rule over gullible masses? Conservatives cling to anything that is even partially “non-woke” because of the utter lack of truly conservative content in our media landscape outside of a few niche sources. Against the juggernaut that is the leftist pop culture machine, merely “non-woke” or anti-woke content is not enough to reverse the trends in our society. We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that a show like this is going to turn the tide, because it’s not. Conservative content used to be the mainstay in American media, and it must be again for our culture at large to change.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and other shows like it might provide a small light within the media dark age we currently find ourselves in, but until conservatives can take control of the institutions that create pop culture, we’ll have to keep settling for scraps.
