Loras Tyrell
The Knight of Flowers: Mace's son, the most dazzling young jouster in the Seven Kingdoms, devoted to Renly Baratheon.
A soul of House Tyrell, born at Highgarden.
The fuller tale
Season One
Loras Tyrell whispers a crown into Renly's ear.
Where they stand. King's Landing.
Season Two
Renly Baratheon's closest companion and, in the private language the camps use, something more — sworn to the Rainbow Guard and rarely far from the king's tent. He works the political side of the alliance as fluently as Renly works a room, pressing his sister's claim on the crown through marriage rather than swords wherever swords can be avoided. When a shadow with Stannis's face kills Renly in his own tent, Loras is the one who finds him, and the grief comes out first as an accusation: he goes for Brienne with a blade before anyone can explain what actually happened, and it takes Catelyn Stark's word to stop him from killing the one person who might have avenged the man he loved.
Season Three
The Tyrells hedge their bet and move Loras onto the board as a husband instead of a mourner. Betrothed briefly to Sansa Stark in a plan Olenna assembles to put a Tyrell claim on the North before anyone else thinks of it, he loses her the moment Tywin Lannister notices the same opening and claims Sansa for Tyrion instead. Reassigned to Cersei, he receives the news of his own engagement with the enthusiasm of a man being sentenced, and does little to hide it. Around King's Landing he keeps company with his squire Olyvar, a friendship the city gossips about more freely than Loras seems to want, and the deflection he offers Sansa when she asks about his tastes is polite, practiced, and not remotely convincing.
Season Four
Still promised to Cersei and no happier about it than before, Loras spends Joffrey's wedding as a groom-in-waiting rather than a guest of honor, standing near a throne his family helped buy for a king he cannot stand. When Joffrey collapses and dies at his own feast, the shock in the hall does not touch the Tyrell table for long; a son betrothed to the dead king's mother is still a useful thing to be, whatever anyone privately felt about the boy. Loras says little and is asked little, which suits him fine.
Season Five
The Faith Militant plot: Cersei restores the Sparrows and turns them loose on the Tyrells, and Loras is the first target. Arrested for his relationship with Olyvar — and for the men before him — he is dragged into a cell as a 'sexual deviant' while Cersei watches the family that has been crowding her for two seasons take the blow she engineered. Margaery lies under oath to protect him and is arrested herself for the perjury, which leaves brother and sister in adjoining cells at the mercy of a High Sparrow neither of them can bribe or charm. Loras spends the season's end exactly where Cersei wanted him — not dead, not free, and no use to anyone.
Season Six
Imprisoned through most of the year and visibly broken by it, he reappears thin, cowed, and missing an ear, ready to confess to whatever the Faith wants confessed and to give up his name along with his sins. He walks the walk of atonement at Margaery's side, shorn and silent, and means to take vows and hand Highgarden to the Faith entirely rather than fight for it — the Tyrell heir surrendering the house his grandmother has spent two seasons trying to save. He never gets the chance: the Sept of Baelor goes up in wildfire with the trial still underway, and Loras dies in the blast along with the family he was about to renounce and the Faith he had just joined.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died when the sept burned (S6·E10)
The Knight of Flowers confessed, was mutilated with the Faith's seven-pointed star, and renounced Highgarden itself — minutes before the sept that broke him burned with him inside it. House Tyrell's future died the same morning.
The show ends him in the Great Sept, broken first and burned after. Imprisoned by the Faith for his sexuality, Loras is worn down past the point his family bargained for: at trial he confesses everything, renounces his name, his claim and Highgarden itself, and kneels to take the Faith's seven-pointed star carved into his forehead — his sister's fury notwithstanding, the bargain his freedom required. He is given minutes to hold his new station. Cersei's wildfire beneath the sept detonates before the congregation can disperse, and the Knight of Flowers dies with his sister, his father, and the institution that unmade him, in the green fire of the woman who fed him to it. In the published books Loras is alive — burned and bedridden after Dragonstone, but breathing, his renunciations unmade and his sword, for what it is worth, still his.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings diverge on his rank and his ruin. Book Loras is the third of four Tyrell children — Willas and Garlan stand between him and Highgarden, both cut from the show, which promoted Loras to heir and thereby invented the Faith's interest in his inheritance. His book endgame is entirely different: as a Kingsguard knight he demands command of the assault on Dragonstone's garrison, takes the castle in a reckless storming, and is carried back scalded by boiling oil and gravely wounded — alive in the published books, but reported dying by increments, with readers left to wonder how much of the report is true and whose interests it serves. The show's imprisonment, confession and mutilation by the Faith have no book counterpart; the books' Loras never faces the Sparrows at all.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.