There’s a new trend in TV that I can’t help but notice: menacing characters eating apples with knives. It’s become the Honda Fit of TV tropes, in that once you see one, you see a dozen and inevitably one of them is that god awful burnt orange color that no one ever wants but someone always ends up with.

The first time I saw it was Daredevil season 2. Stick, the culture-appropriating muttering mentor of vague motivation, sat in the background of one scene, pointedly eating an apple with a small knife. He did it while one of his proteges went into a poison induced coma. He was still doing it when she came out. It was a different apple sure, but what does it mean? Besides Daredevil not owning any cereal? Who knows. Like everything else with Stick, it was very deliberate action signifying nothing and anything all at once.

On a meta level, what are we to take from this? What are Stick’s dietary habits and choice in utensils supposed to indicate to the audience? Is he a badass, so oblivious to Elektra’s plight that he is free to munch away? Is he so confident that she’s coming out that he doesn’t need to take an active role? And why the knife? That’s clearly the sign of a tough guy, using a weapon to do benign things. But does eating an apple with a knife convey menace or insanity? Sliced apples make me think of school lunches and the ruination of Happy Meals, and while both of those carry some weighted emotions, I don’t think that’s what the Daredevil creative team was going for.

Perhaps to add some clarity to the situation, everyone’s favorite torture pornographer Ramsay Bolton showed up on Game of Thrones this season doing the exact same thing. His subsequent stabbing of Osha the wildling with the apple knife puts GoT ahead of Daredevil in properly executing Chekhov’s cutlery, but does it help clarify the character trait being demonstrated?

Well, we know Ramsay isn’t particularly tough. His battle skills are shown to be in mopping up and midnight raiding. His hand-to-hand skills are in torturing already immobilized victims (either physically or emotionally.) So the knife/apple combo would seem to indicate insanity, the idea that someone would do something so banal as eat an apple before and after stabbing someone to death with the same knife.

You know what would have been better? If they showed him eating soup with a knife. Or pudding with a fork. Or something REALLY crazy, like a pineapple with a giant sword. Any one of those things would convey ANYTHING a lot better than someone using a knife to eat an apple. They certainly wouldn’t provoke 500 words of confusion. We’d watch Ramsay eat a pineapple off his sword and we’d say “You know what’d be funny? If Roose Bolton was the crazy one because then we could say ‘He has a screw Roose.'” See? No fruit confusion. Well, except wondering what other exotic fruits are found in Westeros.

Historical note: Benjamin Franklin was a big fan of apples, probably going so far as wanting the crabapple to be America’s national fruit. I think we could all get behind an episode of Game of Thrones where Ben Franklin makes a pie out of crabapples and then Ramsay Bolton sexually assaults him. Fun for the whole family!