The whole point of Game of Thrones is that you thought one thing was gonna happen but then another thing happens, and that works until it doesn’t anymore.

At least for me. I got out at the end of the Fourth Season, Fourthmeal if you will, at what might have been the last episode but maybe it wasn’t and I don’t super care if it was. There was a fight between two characters with a result I didn’t buy, with a result in the vein of “yeah, dummy, well, ha ha! This is how it’s gonna go instead” and then rubbing your nose in it, and I decided there was other stuff I could do with my time. I’m not a prude by any means, arguably I’m an enthusiast, but they perpetually act like they’ve just discovered sex online and they’re so naughty and it’s whatever.

I liked that it was mostly what you’d call in D&D a “low magic setting,” the world had inherited what more or less seemed like a ton of nonsense that could be interpreted in various ways and it created a lot of problems, which is more or less how things work in the “low magic setting” we actually live in. Except now it’s like a wizard cranked open a kind of arcane hydrant and a high pressure jet of mystical stuff is on the table, from resurrection to time travel, and you can tell any kind of story you want to but I don’t have to watch it. I’m not sure which direction constitutes conceptual North in that story anymore; I don’t know where it is and I don’t know where I am in relation.

It has such cultural gravity though that even though I’m mad about it I still want to know what happens; want my prior investment to ultimately bear some kind of fruit. A Song of Ice And Fire was fetish gear back when it came out in book form, and it’s been wild to watch its incursion so far into mainstream culture that’s become a deeply normal if not functionally necessary thing to know about. It’d be like walking into Target at the first thing you see is a giant mesh bin of ball gags.

(CW)TB out.