Winter’s Been Here

At the time you’re reading this, Game of Thrones’s third-season premiere has come and gone. Blood has been spilled, pithy witticisms have been uttered, and important backstory has been conveyed through the medium of people fucking. And millions – literally, millions – of people have watched it, as they did the last couple seasons.

Here is Daenerys, surrounded by old creepy dudes. Just like the series!

That hasn’t stopped being weird yet. I picked up the books back in the dark ages of high school, when everyone was waiting for A Feast For Crows to come out so we could read it and then all start waiting for A Dance With Dragons to come out. So I’m not going to pretend I’m some kind of max-level, 90s-convention-fan-club ASOIAF hipster; by the time I got on the bandwagon, the first three books were fantasy standards.

You can read these on the bus now, without a paper bag.

But even still, they were fantasy standards. There were dragons and sorceresses and shit on the covers. George RR Martin was the sometimes-disputed but powerful king of a very particular kingdom, and his bounds extended no further. And as a big stinkin’ nerd, that was how it was and that was cool. Preferable, even. If I could have a conversation with someone about Jon Snow’s parentage, then that meant they were on my level. That there was a line demarcated on a cultural map, and we had crossed over to the side marked “Here there be dragons, and verily, they do not give a shit about cool, for they haveth their own whole thing going on.”

And then it was on TV, and everything changed.

Critical acclaim is one thing, and it’s fair to say that GoT has mixed results in that regard. For every pop-culture oracle or serious, weighty professorial type writing glowing and thoughtful things about the show, it’s still shackled to that great leg iron of “Isn’t that the fantasy show?” The New York Times is never gonna give it more than a condescending, guilty-pleasure kinda pat on the head. Fantasy fans are used to living with that. No, the thing that changed is mass appeal.

For Season 3, HBO finally admitted the truth: the kid in the corner in the robe & wizard hat is the one getting all their homework done. They gave Thrones a national premiere tour and a giant gala, with Brienne of Tarth, Robb Stark, et. al. swapping their armor for gowns & tuxes and walking down a literal red carpet. Last year’s MLB/GoT opening day promo* has spawned ever more forced sports analogies. People who’ve never picked up a polyhedral die or smashed open digital barrels for digital gold in their lives are creating their own house sigils at the urging of a twitter account with over 600k followers.

(*This is a cross-section of everything I love in the world, and also, you know Tyrion had the San Francisco Giants all the way.)

The thing is this: GoT is cool now. Cool in a wink-nudge, let’s be ready to poke fun at ourselves way, but so are all cool things; you’re not seriously cool until you can make fun of yourself a little. The culture surrounding this show admits the prevalence of pointless nudity, the dependency on fantastic plot elements like dragons & magical zombies, and the intricate clockwork of a detailed and developed imaginary universe, and none of that matters. Because Game of Thrones is cool, and if you’re not on board with the complexity or the silliness or the essential idea that a secondary world can host an awesome story, well, that’s your problem, not GoT’s. The momentum is in our corner.

And for those of us who have been there all along, or at least before it got cool to be here, well…yeah, it’s kinda weird. It’s tempting to do stuff like this, or at least to smirk and roll your eyes at television viewers’ theories and discussions. Myself, I miss no opportunity to interject “Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of [fan theories/tragic endings/long book waits/forced sports analogies/etc.]?” into the conversation. But at a certain point, we have to register the truth – A Song of Ice and Fire is not ours. It was never ours. It’s George’s, and he’s happy to share it, especially if people are going to give him ludicrous amounts of money for it.

“Grovel, motherfuckers.”

The hostility of geek iconoclasm is its own conversation, and one that we could do article after article on. You see it in D&D edition wars and MMORPG e-peen waving and the poisonous myth of the Fake Geek Girl; this idea that nerdy properties belong to us, that we suffered the slings and arrows of growing up as dorks and now people are just gonna walk in and enjoy it without earning it? Fuck that shit! It’s a natural feeling, and there’s a validity to that experience. But there’s also the simple truth that someone else’s enjoyment of something does not diminish mine*; never has, never will.

(*Exception for, you know, things like “racists hijacking your favorite band.”)

So, dorks, let’s try it with Game of Thrones. Let’s let our siblings and co-workers and random celebrities, who don’t know a Dondarrion from a Darkstar or Thenn from Ibben, into the conversation. We know more than they do, we were talking about it back when discussing ASOIAF at the water cooler was going to get you weird looks and first-and-last dates. That doesn’t make the show less awesome, or their enthusiasm for it less real. They just took a different road to get there. And if the show was your first exposure – to Westeros, to fantasy literature, to maps of places that never were – then thank you for joining us, and if anyone gives you shit for enjoying the show, well, they’re the ones with the problem. You’re here because GoT is awesome. Everything else comes in second.

But seriously, try the books, goddamnit.