GAME OF THRONES PRIMER
HBO’s excellent series Game of Thrones just barely started its second season. This show is totally awesome, guys. I think you should watch it, but I realize it can be intimidating to start in the middle of something with such a complex storyline. That is why I’m offering this recap of what’s gone down so far. This is really a public service, as I see it, and it’s way easier than picking up trash on the side of the road.
So, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. Basically they call the show that because a whole lot of different people are trying to be the one that sits on this throne. They call it the Iron Throne because one bad-ass king in the older past made it out of melting the swords of all of his enemies, which probably hurts your ass like hell, but looks pretty sweet. Too bad none of his enemies were attacking him with cushions.
Okay, so at the beginning there are a bunch of different families, okay? And the whole thing is set in like knight times with kings and armor and shit. Oh, but it’s not like our Earth, it’s like another sorta version of Earth, like in the Lord of the Rings movies. So there’s the Stark family up in the cold and frozen north and they’re always all like, “Oh shit, winter is coming,” which is apparently a big deal because maybe they have like winters every year and shit like we do, but they definitely have these big mega winters that come without any sort of schedule, and last for years and years, and maybe even scary monsters come out during these winters. Like some of the kids haven’t even lived through a winter yet. It’s a little weird that they don’t have a different word for the other winter, if you ask me. Seems like it would be confusing. At first, their main Stark guy cut some dude’s head off, then was like taking care of shit at his house in the north where he lived, but then the king made him go down to the capital city, King’s Landing, so he tried to take care of shit there, and I was all, “Oh shit, go Game of Thrones! Fuck shit up!” but then he went and got his head cut off because it turns out he was played by Sean Biehn, whose contract states his character can never survive anything.
Before he got all de-domed, Sean was helping out his old buddy, the king. I kinda dug this dude, because he was an old school Henry the VIII style king with the fucking and drinking and hunting and shit. I was saying, “Oh shit, Game of Thrones, you’re kinda fat sloppy, but you’re sorta charming, like a pig with personality.” He made Sean be “The Hand of the King” which sounds too close to “The Hand Job of the King” I sometimes think, but it’s like the second in command. Which, as you know, can be a shitty position to be in, and Sean Biehn’s head on a pike would probably agree. But all that didn’t happen on the king’s watch. He was just sorta kinging around, not doing anything. I was saying, “Oh shit, Game of Thrones, aren’t you going to do shit?” and then he got straight up gored by a boar he was hunting! So that meant that Robert Baratheon wasn’t king anymore. He died the way he lived – being gored by a boar.
Okay, then there’s the Lannisters, who are a bunch of blonde, mean, rich jerks, except maybe for the one who’s a little person, who is a whoremongering drunk but very cool and likeable. He’s all about strategy and thinking things through, and he’s pretty dark. His brother was the one that killed the king before Baratheon, who they call “The Mad King” which is the kind of nickname monarchs only get AFTER some dude kills them. You don’t call an insane king insane to his face, unless you have some sort of crazy death wish, you fool. So, they call that one “Kingslayer” which means “king slayer” not “king’s layer”, in case you’re wondering. No, he doesn’t have any time to be fucking the king, because his favorite hobby is fucking his own sister! Which is gross and all, and apparently frowned upon, but then the Mad King’s family all apparently wed bro to sis all the time, so it’s maybe a double standard. Oh, and they’re even twins! That’s somehow grosser! His sister was Sarah Connor on the Terminator TV series, but blonde now so she can fit in with this blonde family. She was married to Baratheon before he got all boar-gored, but instead of bearing him heirs (which was totally her job, I’m not being sexist, that’s just the way it is), she went and beared heirs to her twin brother! He’s played by the dude from that show New Amsterdam where he was immortal but the show sure wasn’t because it got cancelled fucking fast. But ain’t nobody know she had these incest bastards (good punk band name) until Headless Game of Thrones figured it out (which sorta led to his head removal, courtesy of the incest bastard king, Game of Thrones). So, her kid ascended to the throne when Baratheon fucked with the wrong boar, and now he’s all, “I’m Game of Thrones, bitches, I’m going to hold Sean Biehn’s daughter here in the capital city.”
Meanwhile, away from all these Europe-looking places, there’s another blonde brother/sister pair, with total incest vibes, but just vibes, not straight doing it like those other two. They’re the kids of the Mad King, and they’re on the run because Baratheon’s totally going to kill them, because he’s like, “Oh, so you two Game of Thrones want my fucking throne? Fuck to the that!” Their symbol is the dragon, and the chick starts off pretty soft, but by the time we catch up to now she’s a total bad-ass, and promises to get even bad-asser. Her brother marries her off to this dude who played Conan in the new Conan movie. He’s pretty much like Genghis Kahn or something, he’s in charge of this whole horde of “barbarians” that think killing people at a wedding is good luck. Almost Klingon-like in their war-loving ways. So, I’m watching her come up in this horde and I’m like, “Oh snap, Game of Thrones, you’re totally adapting to this horde lifestyle!” She even ate a horse’s heart (raw) once in front of the whole horde and was like, “Suck it, bitches! Bring me dessert!” Her brother got uppity and the Conan guy decided to kill him by POURING MOLTEN GOLD ON HIS HEAD! Like, “Hey, here’s a fucking crown for you, sissy boy!” And I was like, “Shit shit shit! You’re not Game of Thrones anymore, bitch!” It was dope and very brutal.
After Sean Biehn’s total headectomy, his oldest son was like, “Fuck. That.” and said, “Hey, all these other hard northern dudes. You swore oaths to my family, and I’m calling that shit in.” So all these hard northern dudes were like, “No, you’re a bitch,” and he said, “Oh yeah, would a bitch sic his giant-ass dire wolf on you and have him eat your fingers?” and the wolf totally ate the guy’s fingers and the guy said, “Fuck me in my northern ass, that was totally shit-crazy! Let’s keep drinking beer or mead or whatever and now I’m even more loyal than ever, even though I’m fucking mangled.” Sometimes being bad-ass doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Oh shit the wolves! I just mentioned the one and I forgot about that. Okay, so all the families have their symbols, like heraldry. Like the symbol for Guinness is that harp or something. So the family in the north, Sean Biehn’s family, the Starks, their symbol is a wolf. And one day they find a bunch of baby wolves, but they’re not even regular wolves they’re “dire wolves” which apparently means, “Like a wolf, but the size of a horse, and murderous, and loyal as fuck, and can apparently take orders.” They don’t show up that often, but it’s pretty cool when they do. But guess what else they have on this show? Fucking dragons! When Game of Thrones’s husband the Conan dude got killed fucking murdering a guy for shit-talking his wife (it was a sweet fight – he basically threw away his daggers and killed the guy by ripping out his tongue bare-handed, but then got an infection and kinda died like a bitch, which makes you really say praise to penicillin), Game of Thrones took these dragon eggs, and basically people on the show believe in dragons, but they say they’re all extinct, and then she said, “Okay, fuck this, my brutal husband is dead, so let’s burn his shit, because that’s what we do,” and they burned him on a funeral pyre, and then she straight up walked right into it with the dragon eggs! And stayed there all night until the fire burned out, and at the end of it she was naked as fuck because her clothes burned off, but there wasn’t a mark on her and the dragon eggs had hatched and now she’s got three baby dragons! Those shits are gonna fuck up some wolves when they get bigger, I have no doubt! Do you see any other Game of Thrones with even one dragon? Because I don’t.
So, the other Sean Biehn kid is a bastard, and apparently that’s fucking tough shit for him because it essentially means his life is fucked and he can’t do shit. He will never be Game of Thrones. So he decides he’s going to join the Night’s Watch, which is these dudes that are like the French Foreign Legion and they sit on this big ass wall which essentially is all like, “Hey, Wall of China? Fucking suck these wall-nuts, because you’re basically like a kid’s sand castle compared to me.” It’s like a giant fucking wall that keeps the northernmost part of the world separated from the regular people because apparently there’s wild people and monsters there. At first I was like, “Whatever, monsters,” but when I saw dragons and dire wolves and shit, I started thinking, “Uh oh! Monsters!” There was even this dead dude that came back to life until the bastard’s wolf attacked it, so you know some shit is going to go down.
Baratheon has two brothers, one of whom is gay (which apparently would be bad press if it got out), and one of whom is a total soldier dude who helped Baratheon get the throne in the first place. They both know that Game of Thrones is a bastard, so they think he doesn’t deserve the throne, and they do, so they’ve got their armies out and they were about to face off when Game of Thrones’s sexy/fucking priestess/advisor/whatever the hell she is, get this, fucking GAVE BIRTH to a smoke demon and sent it out to kill the gay dude, so his army was like, “Oh, sorry, Game of Thrones, we’ll follow you now.”
Oh, by the way, Sien Biehn’s family a long time ago took in this one dude who’s family rebelled in the past so they’re not well regarded, but apparently now that he hooked up with his real father again, the father is like, “Let’s use our naval superiority to fuck shit up!” and the guy is like, “Yeah, fuck Sean Biehn for raising me, I’m totally going to betray that shit!” So this dude is now in charge of a sailing ship and he’s all, “I’m fucking Game of Thrones of the sea! Ahoy!”
So, ever since they lopped off his dad’s head, we have Game of Thrones with all his northern dudes, fighting against Game of Thrones’s blonde, rich family. They each have hostages on each side, and they’re fighting each other, and Game of Thrones is basically saying, “I’m seceding, and I’m going to be King in the North, but first I’m going to fucking kill Game of Thrones for having my dad killed.” Meanwhile, Game of Thrones, the Mad King’s daughter, is trying to raise her dragons and get a big enough horde to come back and fuck things up her own way, with dragons raining down fire from above, Game of Thrones is trying to gain some naval strength to attack from the sea, and Game of Thrones just fucked up his brother’s shit, via smoke attack (super effective).
Oh, and if that weren’t intrigue enough, one of Baratheon’s bastard sons, who is in a way a more legitimate heir than the bastard king Game of Thrones, has been hanging out with one of Sean Biehn’s daughters, who’s posing as a dude, and they’ve both been taken by the blond asshole family and have to be secret because they’d both be good hostages/targets, and now Sean Biehn’s bastard is up north of the wall looking for monsters, and basically ready to come into his own as a total ranger killmachine.
That’s basically it! So, now you can watch and you’ll know what’s going on when people put swords in each other and you can say, “Fuck yeah! Go, Game of Thrones! Look out! Game of Thrones is behind you!” I hope you enjoy! Next time I’ll give you a recap of AMC’s Mad Men so you can figure out if Mad Men really killed a chick, or if he was just dreaming; what’s going to happen to Mad Men now that he’s divorcing his wife; and why Mad Men gave that guy a hando in the movie theatre.
Ben
"Whoever heard of a Charlie in a box?"
