Millennials have been accused of killing many things, including the wine, napkin, golf, and movie industries, the McDonald's McWrap, cereal, vacations, bar soap, gyms, and, perhaps most tragically, call-center productivity. But there might just be hope for one innocent victim of the millennial murder streak: humanities departments. At the very least, Harvard’s humanities department should soon see a huge uptick in interest—once its Game of Thrones-themed history course gets off the ground.

According to Time, the Folklore and Mythology class will examine George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, as well as HBO’s TV adaptation, highlighting the way each “echoes and adapts, as well as distorts the history and culture of the ‘medieval world’ of Eurasia from c. 400 to 1500 CE.” The class will also explore the various character archetypes the series relies on, including “the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on,” and compare those to their analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend.

Racha Kirakosian, one of the professors who will teach the course, told Time that her students at Oxford were the ones who first got her hooked on Game of Thrones. The Thrones fans in her classes, she noted, were the ones who seemed most enthusiastic about the material she taught. “When I read medieval verse epics with my students, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s like in Game of Thrones,’“ Kirakosian said. “No, if anything at all, it’s the other way around. Isn’t it partly our job [as professors] to use that interest and go deeper?”

The concept of centering courses around pop culture to engage students is nothing new: plenty of classes have been based on TV and film. The Harry Potter franchise, for instance, has inspired several colleges to add courses that directly appeal to Potterheads. And yes, there are even already several colleges that offer Thrones-inspired courses. But given its Ivy League status and the relatively stuffy reputation that can go along with that legacy, Harvard’s decision to add such a course sends a message of its own regarding the potential these classes can offer—and just how high of a priority it is to bring students back to the humanities.

This course comes at a time when interest in the humanities is waning. As Time notes, humanities departments nationwide conferred 8.7 percent fewer degrees in 2014 than they had two years earlier. At Harvard specifically, the rate of undergraduates who chose to major in the humanities plummeted from 36 percent to 20 percent over six decades. This course will be an intro course—in other words, one that targets freshmen. As such, Kirakosian said she hopes the course will serve as a “recruitment tool” for medieval studies and the humanities.

It’s hard to imagine many students saying “no” to learning about medieval history through the lens of one of TV’s biggest sensations, so there’s just one question left: will this course properly examine just how abundant tits and dragons were in the real-life medieval times? Hope springs eternal.