HBO’s Making Game of Thrones blog is a good homepage bookmark for the summer months. For one, it regularly posts solid behind-the-scenes tidbits from Game of Thrones, and for another, everything on it is purely fantasy and totally unrelated to the world around you. Last year, Making Game of Thrones shared an image of the prop letter Ramsay Bolton mailed Jon Snow just before the Battle of the Bastards.

This week’s post is a continuation of that “photos of letters” series, and it displays the three prop letters used in season 7’s second episode, “Stormborn.” We see Tyrion Lannister’s letter to Jon Snow, inviting him to visit Daenerys Targaryen on Dragonstone; Sam Tarly’s letter to Jon, telling him to go to Dragonstone because there’s dragonglass there (duh!); and Jorah Mormont’s letter to Daenerys, explaining that he’s going to die. Thank goodness. If you’re anything like me, reading someone’s private communications is a thrill even when it’s a totally fake person who only exists on prestige cable.

As seen above, Jorah claims to have loved Daenerys since the moment they met. This statement is sort of bullshit. Jorah conspired with Robert Baratheon to spy on Daenerys and plot her assassination when they first met. But I suppose it’s rude to quibble with his recollections of the timeline when an incurable disease is already making its way nearer and nearer to his brain. It is a romantic thing to say, either way. I’ll concede.

This note is short and jarring if you’re the recipient. But all the mail carriers in Westeros are birds with tiny feet, so it makes sense that letters be kept short, sweet, and totally illogical. I suppose the fact that nearly everyone is constantly in a state of fighting for survival also limits how verbose they are with their correspondence. I keep saying this, and I’m sorry to pick on Jorah again, but it’s kind of irresponsible for a guy with a fatal communicable disease to write a letter by hand to the most important person in the entire country.

It’s a good prop overall though, and I’m glad I got to see it.

However, Tyrion’s letter to Jon is my favorite because “I appeal to you, one bastard to another,” is the funniest attempt at political persuasion that I’ve ever heard or seen. What an arbitrary commonality to call upon! It’s wild what served as networking in the centuries before LinkedIn.

You can read Sam’s letter over on the blog (it’s very short), and then poke around the digital archive of the Red Keep’s dragon skulls, if you want.

‘Til next Sunday on HBO.

I have loved you since the moment I met you,

KT