There are only 10 months to go before the next season of Game of Thrones, and while you can bide your time reading the books that spoil the events to come, or mainlining dreck like Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules to get your epic fantasy fix, a more patriotic solution would be to imagine your state as a Game of Thrones house, and to picture what sigil the bannermen would carry into war as they proudly represent, er, Nebraska or whatever.





It’s true that some U.S. states don’t lend themselves to a Thrones-y reinterpretation as well as others. For every House Virginia with a badass slogan like “Thus Always To Tyrants” (which actually sounds even tougher in the original Latin favored by the people of Old Dominion, as “Sic Semper Tyrannis”), there’s a House Delaware (House Delaware, sadly, has to draw its slogan from the words of Ser Wayne and Ser Garth of House Illinois, who once remarked “We’re In Delaware” as they fended off the Lannister-like manipulations of Rob Lowe.)

With 50 states, some of which lack a certain charisma, it’s only natural that Redditer “Boo-yay,” who created the sigils, might have struggled a bit. He used only the available art on HBO’s online sigil maker and says on the Reddit post that he “either used the states motto, ‘tweaked’ the motto, went by the state slogan, or made a play on the states nickname or popular saying.” But what’s interesting is how naturally some state iconography and slogans translate to the world of Game of Thrones: House Hampshire, with its watery crest and unmodified “Live Free or Die” slogan, could well have marched under Robb Stark’s command in the War of the Five Graces; House Texas’ “Do Not Mess With Us” might be a bit more colloquial than is customary for a House motto, but the longhorn skull and lone star image fit right in with the aesthetic established by the show (see all 50 sigils here).





The project is ambitious, as well; in addition to each of the 50 states (plus an additional one for Delaware that reads “We Are the First,” in case residents of the Diamond State resent the Wayne’s World joke), Boo-yay took on various U.S. territories: Houses Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, and Virgin Isles are also included from across the Narrow Sea, and House D. Columbia makes the cut as well (though the “Taxation Without Representation” slogan on the license plates didn’t make it on to the flag, presumably to avoid the masters of coin in Braavos).

There–now that you’ve read that and looked at the sigils (in the gallery above), it’s at least 10 minutes closer to the next season of Game of Thrones.