A brief history of pooping in Game of Thrones

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms raises an interesting question: Where do people poop in Westeros?

At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about poop in the Game of Thrones franchise. That’s not a sentence I ever expected to write, but after HBO’s new prequel show debuted with a close-up shot of nervous diarrhea, the floodgates were opened and a steady stream of poo-focused interviews, thinkpieces, and explainers flowed out. And in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 2, showrunner Ira Parker keeps this unpleasant theme running with one scene in particular.

As members of the Targaryen royal family arrive in Ashford Meadow for a backwater jousting tournament, our hero Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) encounters a pair of high-ranking Kingsguards. At first, Dunk stares at them in awed silence, but the royal knights/bodyguards are surprisingly friendly. After a bit of chatter and a joke about Dunk’s hulking frame, one Kingsguard gets right to the point.

“Now tell me, Ser Duncan, is there a proper place to shit around here?” the first Kingsguard asks.

“Not really, no,” Dunk replies.

After the first Kingsguard walks off in disappointment, the second one sticks around to make a joke about his high-born peer.

“A man of such birth has never deigned to disturb his asshole with hay,” he says.

Dunk replies with a smile, “He’ll deign before the week is out, I’d wager.”

The implication here isn’t particularly subtle. While the Kingsguard is used to fancy castle bathrooms — or at least private outhouses — the best Ashford Meadow has to offer is a quiet corner and some hay for wiping. This raises an interesting question: Where do people poop in the world of Westeros? Aside from one iconic Game of Thrones death scene (more on that in a bit), the HBO franchise never offered an answer, until now. However, George R.R. Martin’s books contain a bit more information, and the takeaway seems to be: “People poop wherever they want to.”

So in case you somehow aren’t tired of reading about Game of Thrones and poop, here’s a brief history of just that. Just don’t forget to bring your own toilet paper (or hay).

In the 2011 novel A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen famously succumbs to diarrhea after drinking some dirty spring water. (Though some readers have speculated the scene described is actually a miscarriage.)

“Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up, she was shitting brown water. The more she drank the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew.”

In Dany’s case, pooping is painful and traumatizing. But a couple of books earlier, Martin offered a very different take. During the siege of Meereen in 2000’s A Storm of Swords, Strong Belwas, a former slave now fighting for Dany, uses defecation as an act of aggression. After brutally killing one of Meereen’s noblemen on the battlefield, Belwas takes the opportunity to antagonize the enemy forces:

“The defenders on the walls began firing their crossbows at Belwas, but the bolts fell short or skittered harmlessly along the ground. The eunuch turned his back on the steel-tipped rain, lowered his trousers, squatted, and shat in the direction of the city. He wiped himself with Oznak’s striped cloak, and paused long enough to loot the hero’s corpse and put the dying horse out of his agony before trudging back to the olive grove.”

(Head here to check out some fan art of this scene, if you deign.)

Finally, let’s discuss a “proper” shit in Game of Thrones. This scene also takes place in A Storm of Swords, but on the other side of Westeros. In the Red Keep castle of King’s Landing, Tyrion Lannister confronts his father Tywin mid-poop, and shoots him to death with a crossbow. Martin describes the moment of death in the best way he knows how: with defecation.

“The proof was the sudden stench, as his bowels loosened in the moment of death. Well, he was in the right place for it, Tyrion thought. But the stink that filled the privy gave ample evidence that the oft-repeated jape about his father was just another lie. Lord Tywin Lannister did not, in the end, shit gold.”

Martin certainly has a way with words, but while these three writing samples all tell very different stories of defecation, they all have one thing in common. In the world of Game of Thrones, even pooping can be a violent act. And while Martin’s never shied away from writing about bodily functions, he’s never shown much interest in depicting how the commonfolk of Westeros shit on an average day where nobody dies or gets diarrhea. Thankfully, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has finally provided the answer — even if it’s to a question most Game of Thrones fans never even thought to ask.