Cool Chair: Difference between revisions

* The Iron Throne in ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' is intentionally [[Cool but Inefficient]]. Aegon the Conqueror took the swords of all the defeated lords of Westeros and hammered them into a scary but still very sharp throne, saying that a king should never sit easy. Kings often cut themselves on the throne, and legend states that it has killed at least one of them. 

** The populace seems to think that it might be magical and harm only bad kings. Joffrey gets stuck with it when he's at his most arrogant and bratty after the Battle of Blackwater (and goes crying to Mommy). Also, Jaime mentions that Mad King Aerys always has scabs from sitting on the Iron Throne. Both, of course, are awful rulers, so the assumption is that the throne is rejecting them. Of course, it could also just have been a really bad idea to create a chair out of swords. 

* The Eastern Empire from Mercedes Lackey's later [[Heralds of Valdemar|Valdemar books]] also features a throne of blades, except it's all the personal weapons of every leader the entire line of Emperors has conquered in ''hundreds of years'' of history. 

* Somewhat subverted in ''Garfield's PET FORCE'', a series of short young-adult novellas written by Jim Davis, in which [[Garfield]], Odie, Nermal, Arlene and Pooky are sucked into the universe of a comic book starring characters conveniently similar to them. The planet they end up on is a monarchy, and the king is...Jon Arbuckle. Since being royalty can do little to change the fact that he's still fundamentally Jon, he's had the traditional throne replaced with a recliner upholstered in naugahyde, chosen on the basis that stains wipe right off.