Vanity Fair: Four Ways You Can Get More Westeros Without Reading All Those Long Books

All Men Must Read! This article by Joanna Robinson for Vanity Fair highlights some things you can do to help the year long wait for season 5 go by a little faster:

We are now a little further into Game of Thrones withdrawal and it’s gotten pretty bad, hasn’t it? Have you started to look around elsewhere for your sword and dragon fix? Have you found yourself casting around, watching any old fantasy series you can find? Listen, I’m the last person who will stop you from getting to know Xena: Warrior Princess or even the BBC’s Merlin. But if it’s Westeros you want and you’re not willing to read those long novels, accept no substitutes. Author George R.R. Martin has actually written several shorter works of fiction set in Westeros. Why not give those a whirl and see if you like his style? (Spoiler alert: there will be feasts.) Here’s your guide to what’s out there. Look, there’s something for everyone. Don’t be shy.

Game of Podcasts

As much as I love watching the series, I also enjoy listening to Game of Thrones podcasts throughout the week while I slave away at my job. If you like to ponder the show and books as much as I do, consider these podcasts as excellent viewing companions:

1. Game of Owns
 


If you wish you had more friends who talked about Game of Thrones, this podcast is perfect. The four hosts (Zach, Eric, Micah, and Kate) have a great banter between them that often feels like you're listening in on an entertaining conversation between friends. Zach and Eric are "unsullied" aka they have not read the books past where we're at in the show (they have read A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings), while Micah and Kate have read all the books. All four of them are super-fans, and it's easy to get caught up and share their excitement towards everything that happens in George RR Martin's universe. At the end of each episode they give out their "Owns" or favorite "Best of" moments from each previously aired HBO episode. During the off-season they do a book club style reading from A Song of Ice and Fire, so you can follow them all year-round.

2. Bald Move - Game of Thrones Podcast
 


A.Ron and Jim have great chemistry that make this podcast highly enjoyable. Bald Move is one my favorite podcast sites, and I really like what they've done for GoT. This year they've added short ~20 minute Instant Takes. After every Sunday night episode when I come into work the next day, there is a podcast waiting for me, ready to alleviate the boredom and overall horribleness that is Monday Morning. A.Ron has read all the books, Jim has read none, so all spoilers are contained in the shows SPOILER SECTION which is stuck at the end of each long format ~2 hour episode. These spoiler sections have included a crack-pot book theory each week which has been incredibly entertaining and educational - I really hope they bring this segment back next year.

3. A Cast of Kings
 


Dave Chen and Joanna Robinson deliver the goods on this super-professional sounding podcast. Dave Chen has a film critic background (at the very least, it sounds like he does) and Joanna writes about Game of Thrones for Vanity Fair (and other writing for Vanity Fair I'm sure.) Together they give the most in-depth analysis of the show anywhere on the internet. Whether they are dissecting the show's use of rape or music in a particular scene, I always feel a lot smarter after giving this podcast a listen.

4. AfterBuzz TV - Game of Thrones
 


Maria Menounos' AfterBuzz TV network is generally hit-and-miss, but their Game of Thrones cast is fun to watch or listen to on YouTube or iTunes, respectively. Dave Klein is a good host (doesn't hurt that he's also very cute) and I love Kristen and Sarah, they remind me of how my coworkers might talk about Game of Thrones - if my coworkers ever watched the show. Kyle is a good season 4 addition, and I prefer watching him on this show than his own A Podcast of Ice and Fire (which I find a little bit TOO negative at times.)

5. Fighting in the War Room - A Storm of Spoilers
 


Fighting in the War Room is not a Game of Thrones specific podcast, but every Wednesday (following a Sunday night episode on HBO) they'd broadcast a special spoiler segment that I found highly enjoyable. Joanna Robinson from A Cast of Kings is featured in this podcast as well. Obviously if you haven't read all the books, you might want to NOT listen to this. But if you have, or you don't mind being spoiled, hopefully they'll return with their segment for season 5.

Gay of Thrones: Season 4, Episode 10

Before there was GaYme of Thrones, there was Gay of Thrones. Those Funny or Die assholes might have taken my preferred title for this blog, but that's okay, their video recaps are actually funny some times. On their most recent episode - Future Legendary Children (season 4 finale recap), ASOIAF creator George R.R. Martin makes a cameo where he reveals that Game of Thrones is actually his adaptation of The Princess Bride.

If Jonathan and co. return for season 5, I'll probably be posting their weekly recaps here. Hopefully I have a better grasp on embedding videos by then.

The New York Times: Women and the Thrones

This article by Daniel Mendelsohn for the New York Times is one of my favorite articles about Game of Thrones. Feminism is alive and well in Westeros! Daenerys Targaryen (aka Beyonce) and Sansa Stark (aka Sansa Fierce) are comin' for you Bolton and remaining Lannister bitches. An except:

Almost from the start, Martin weaves a bright feminist thread into his grand tapestry. It begins early on in the first book, when he introduces the two Stark daughters. The eldest, Sansa, is an auburn-haired beauty who loves reading courtly romances, does perfect needlework, and always dresses beautifully; in striking contrast to this conventional young woman is the “horsefaced” younger daughter, Arya, who hates petit point and would rather learn how to wield a sword. (Later on, she gets a sword that she sardonically names “Needle”: she too, as we will see, plays for keeps.) At one point early in the first novel Arya asks her father whether she can grow up to “be a king’s councilor and build castles”; he replies that she will “marry a king and rule his castle.” The canny girl viciously retorts, “No, that’s Sansa.”

The two girls represent two paths—one traditional, one revolutionary—that are available to Martin’s female characters, all of whom, at one point or another, are starkly confronted by proof of their inferior status in this culture. (In a moment from the second novel that the HBO adaptation is careful to replicate, Ned Stark’s widow Catelyn realizes that Robb doesn’t think his hostage sisters are worth negotiating for, although his murdered father would have been: they’re simply not worth what a man is.) Those who complained about the TV series’ graphic and “exploitive” use of women’s bodies are missing the godswood for the weirwood trees: whatever the prurient thrills they provide the audience, these demeaning scenes, like their counterparts in the novels, also function as a constant reminder of what the main female characters are escaping from. “I don’t want to have a dozen sons,” one assertive young princess tells a suitor, “I want to have adventures.”

Also this:

This is an arresting echo of the Greek notion that childbirth is for women what warfare is for men.

Cersei is a portrait of a tragic pre-feminist queen—someone out of Greek drama, a Clytemnestra-like figure who perpetrates evil because her idea of empowerment rises no higher than mimicking the worst in the men around her. (She ruefully remarks at one point that she “lacked the cock.”) By contrast, Dany Targaryen can be seen as a model of a new feminist heroine. Apart from the Starks, it is she who commands our attention from book to book, learning, growing, evolving into a real leader. We first see her as a timid bride, sold by her whiny brother Viserys, the Targaryen pretender, to a savage nomadic warlord whose men and horses the brother wants to secure for his own claim. But eventually Dany edges her brother aside, wins the respect of both the warlord and his macho captains, and grows into an impressive political canniness herself.

This evolution is pointed: whereas Viserys feels entitled to the throne, what wins Dany her power is her empathy, her fellow feeling for the oppressed: she, too, has been a refugee, an exile. As she makes her way across the Eastern lands at the head of an increasingly powerful army, she goes out of her way to free slaves and succor the sick, who acclaim her as their “mother.” She doesn’t seize power, she earns it. What’s interesting is that we’re told she can’t bear children: like Elizabeth I, she has substituted political for biological motherhood. Unlike the frustrated Cersei, Daenerys sees her femininity as a means, rather than an impediment, to power.

In The Game of Blogs, You Start Early or Get Lost in the Shuffle (Welcome!)

Welcome to GaYme of Thrones, the unofficial low budget, low-brow Game of Thrones blog with a gay twist (me!)

I can't promise you (the reader) that I will be updating this blog frequently, but when I do you'll be getting a lot of unoriginal content embedded by none other than myself, and a few original (deep) think pieces covering all the important topics like episode recaps, casting news, crazy fan theories (most of them will probably be my own) and an essay or two.

This is a show-first blog, but I have read all five books in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, plus those Winds of Winter sample chapters, gurrrl. Most of these posts will probably be television-series related, but if I do veer off into book discussion, I will mark those posts as "SPOILER POST".

I hope you enjoy this blog. I could have started this two seasons ago when the competition was low, but I've decided to start this during GoT's peak, where GaYme of Thrones will probably get lost in an ever expanding ocean of fan-sites, sub-reddits, and Tumblrs. Good look finding it, if you have found it (if you're reading this I'm assuming you have) welcome to the shit show.