Fuck Hyle Hunt for a lot of reasons, but fuck Hyle Hunt in particular because of how he participated in the game organized attempted rape of Brienne at Highgarden:
Big Ben Bushy was the first, one of the few men in Renly’s camp who overtopped her. He sent his squire to her to clean her mail, and made her a gift of a silver drinking horn. Ser Edmund Ambrose went him one better, bringing flowers and asking her to ride with him. Ser Hyle Hunt outdid them both. He gave her a book, beautifully illuminated and filled with a hundred tales of knightly valor. He brought apples and carrots for her horses, and a blue silk plume for her helm. He told her the gossip of the camp and said clever, cutting things that made her smile. He even trained with her one day, which meant more than all the rest.
She thought it was because of him that the others started being courteous. More than courteous. At table men fought for the place beside her, offering to fill her wine cup or fetch her sweetbreads. Ser Richard Farrow played love songs on his lute outside her pavilion. Ser Hugh Beesbury brought her a pot of honey “as sweet as the maids of Tarth.” Ser Mark Mullendore made her laugh with the antics of his monkey, a curious little black-and-white creature from the Summer Islands. A hedge knight called Will the Stork offered to rub the knots from her shoulders.
All the other “suitors” were, to varying degrees, treating Brienne as a woman in their attempts to “court” her. Ben Bushy’s gifts may not have been explicitly romantic, but the “silver drinking horn” could certainly have been seen as a non-gender-specific appropriate gift for someone of Brienne’s class; even having his squire clean her mail might have been seen as a reflection that she had no squire herself (because what boy would want to squire for a woman), or that as a woman she could not know how to clean her mail herself. Hugh Beesbury heightened the romance of his gift by comparing its sweetness to that of the “maids of Tarth”, the sort of poetic association Westerosi culture might praise from a man to a woman. Mark Mullendore is no stranger to entertaining women with the hope of romancing them; he did the same with Megga Tyrell, even presumably bemoaning the loss of his Summer Islands pet (hence why Megga speaks about getting him another). Edmund Ambrose and Richard Farrow, of course, went fully romantic with their gestures, with flowers, love songs, and the offer of an intimate ride together; Will the Stork decided on an even more directly intimate path, with the suggestion of a massage.
But Hyle Hunt? Hyle treated her as his fellow knight. He not only gave her a book of “tales of knightly valor” (of the sort that could as much appeal to a young knight as a young woman - Bran and Loras easily recall the stories of Westerosi chivalric heroes like Aemon the Dragonknight and Ryam Redwyne), but giving her a silk plume and treats for her horses marked her out as a knight. These gifts would never have been necessary (unlike the cleaning of mail), but they showed that Brienne was an armed warrior first, someone who would of course have a helm and horses; too, for at least the silk plume, this was a gift that could only be given to a knight (or, more generally, someone who wore armor). It is particularly important that for Brienne, Hyle training with her “meant more than all the rest”: for that one moment, Hyle was acknowledging her as a warrior on his same plane, the same way he would with any (male) knight. For Brienne, who had suffered throughout her childhood with being thought of as ugly and a “freak”, who had longed to be a knight and trained for it, this would have seemed a rare, beautiful acknowledgment; she was welcome, Ser Hyle’s gesture suggested, she was one of them (solidified by his gossiping with her; he seemed to be building a jovial camaraderie with her, as he would with any of his fellow knights).
And what was all of this for? So that he could convince her to have sex with him, despite Brienne clearly showing no romantic/sexual desire for any of them. He gave Brienne the knightly acknowledgment she so wanted, just to win 8+ gold dragons (and potentially Brienne’s hand afterward, if he were trying a Daemon Targaryen-like strategy). He never really thought of her as a knight - indeed, immediately after meeting her again he insulted her martial skills, saying that she could never have beaten Robar Royce and only “on a good day” have bested Emmon Cuy. All he did was purely for his own (literal) profit.
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dailybridgerton
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