How to Live in a World Obsessed With Game of Thrones
There is one more Game of Thrones episode left. Many people will have postpartum experiences. I will feel relieved. I spent eight years deciding not to watch the defining TV show of our decade. For a while I felt like an outcast, like Jon Snow, or Arya Stark, or Theon Greyjoy, or Tyrion Lannister. Ok, I read the books. But you don’t have to go that far to defeat GoT FOMO.
Don’t start looking now
The show is awesome and you miss it? May be! But don’t start now! Believe me, I waited several months to watch the first season of Westworld , and I felt cold and lonely. (And boy, this is a show after which you don’t want to feel cold and lonely.) If you start watching now, which is great, you will be very excited and want to go through with all your fellow thrones. observers. But they won’t even remember half of the material from the first season and will worry about talking to you without spoiling the surprises. They will leave and want to talk about Dune .
If you think you’ll really enjoy the show, wait until the next big anniversary for other people to join. The series premiered in 2011, so its 10th anniversary could be revived in just two years.
Read all spoilers
Don’t do this if you have hopes of seeing the show in the future! Thrones has a great storyline that rewards clean hours. But by this point, you’ve already ruined at least part of the story, right? You should be aware of some of the basic deaths or twists of characters. So I haven’t watched a Marvel movie in ten years, but I know what Thanos was doing.
So, you want to bathe in all the good stuff to screw things up on your own terms, you can try someYouTube superframes, episode summaries, and TV Tropes pages . There are many interesting moments that you can enjoy without their context. And if you’re a nerd storyteller who just didn’t care about a particular execution of Thrones , you might really be interested to read about a show you’ve never watched.
Read books
I wholeheartedly recommend books over shows. They are really funny! Page violence is less of a concern and the story is richer, including backstory.
The Game of Thrones show is over 70 hours long. At a normal speed of reading a book, it will take you 120 hours or more . Almost double the time, but it’s much easier to schedule, especially if you’re reading this on your phone. (I personally read some of them on Kindle, some in mass market paperbacks that are more fun to get in the park on a summer day.)
If you particularly enjoy the scene, you can watch its TV equivalent. And when the two versions differ, you will probably prefer the book version and feel a little smug that you, an intellectual, have chosen to read rather than watch.
To feel like a smuggler, follow this tweet without spoilers on the differences between books and TV series. The point is, the show has been ahead of the books because the books are not over yet, and many viewers feel the series suffered as it had to find its own path.
Yes, in fact, the last books have not yet come out, and instead of finishing them, Martin released an entire book with additional backstories . This man wrote an imitation of a history book about his unfinished history. If this sounds cool to you, then follow that instinct and read books. And then decide whether to step back and see how the show decided everything, or wait for Martin to actually release the last two books (ha ha ha).
Immerse yourself in Rome
Or Deadwood, or Borgia, or Crown, or Legacy, or Borgen, or Deep Space 9, or Wolf Hall, or the first two seasons of House of Cards . Immerse yourself in a grand drama about a power struggle that either ended long ago or is just gaining momentum. Something that does not need to be watched together with the whole world. Or catch up with Killing Eve . We’re all watching this now, right?
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