Stefan Sasse and I discuss the role of magic, the very lifeblood of fantasy, in A Song of Ice and Fire in our latest BLAH podcast—listen here or wherever you get your pods!

Also, our $5/month Patreon subscribers can hear us talk about the characters who surprised us most in a Boiled Leather Audio Moment mini-episode!

Stefan Sasse and I address the role of monsters—the inhuman kind, I mean—in A Song of Ice and Fire in our latest episode, available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

And if you’re a $5 subscriber to our Patreon, you can hear our take on the role of Hizdahr in the story. Go subscribe!

It’s me and Stefan Sasse on the future of the Westeros Cinematic Universe—multiple spinoffs and prequels, an animated series, and even a stage play—in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In our latest mini-podcast at the Boiled Leather Audio Hour patreon, Stefan Sasse and I discuss our favorite A Song of Ice and Fire characters. There’s lots more where that came from on that patreon, so do consider subscribing!

I’ve joined my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse for a brief, Patreon-exclusive conversation about the depressing discourse surrounding Game of Thrones Season 8. It’s sure to make us a lot of friends and it’s available right here!

Who taught Bran Stark and future media superstars Dunk & Egg how to do what they do? Find out in part three of me and Stefan Sasse’s series on the Teachers of Ice and Fire in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, available at our Patreon or wherever you get your podcasts!

Who taught Sansa and Arya Stark to do what they do? Stefan Sasse and I examine this question in the first part of our series on the teachers of Ice and Fire in the latest Boiled Leather Audio Hour episode—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Stefan Sasse and I tackle the Tyrion sample chapter(s) from The Winds of Winter in our latest BLAH episode, available via our Patreon or wherever you get your podcasts!

In the latest episode of BLAH, Stefan and I discuss the Barristan sample chapter(s) from The Winds of Winter. Available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

The Winds of Winter keep blowing as Stefan Sasse and I tackle the Arianne II sample chapter—available here or wherever you find your podcasts!

You’ve got time on your hands—why not spend it by listening to Stefan Sasse and I discuss the “Arianne I” sample chapter from The Winds of Winter in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour—available here and wherever fine podcasts are sold!

I’m back on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast to talk to my co-host Stefan Sasse about the “Alayne” sample chapter from The Winds of Winter! Intrigue abounds! Find it here or wherever fine podcasts are sold!

Nine years. One hundred episodes. My illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse and I celebrate the Boiled Leather Audio Hour’s big milestone by reflecting on why A Song of Ice and Fire resonates with us in the first place. Click here to listen or find it wherever you find your podcasts!

Me and Stefan Sasse vs. the “Mercy” sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter—it’s all going down in the latest episode of our podcast, available at our Patreon or anyplace podcasts can be listened to!

Stefan and I are starting a series of Boiled Leather Audio Hour episodes going in-depth on each of the available sample chapters from The Winds of Winter, starting with a look at Theon I!

I’m back on BLAH this week with a look at the role and symbolism of water in A Song of Ice and Fire—including water-based magic, houses that derive their strength and identity from water, the use of bodies of water by characters in the story, and more!

When I picture the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the first word that comes to mind is obscene.

The dragons are technical filmmaking achievements of a scale and quality never before seen on television. They are emblems of high-fantasy spectacle with real awe and real bite, in a field now dominated by literally and figuratively bloodless blockbusters. Most guttingly, they are symbols of the wonders of the natural world, pointlessly destroyed by merchants of death. For all these reasons, their killings made me want to look away … which is exactly why I felt the need to look closer. And the survival of the third, greatest, and last dragon in the Game of Thrones finale made that need impossible to resist.

Surviving the deaths of his siblings, Drogon leveled King’s Landing at the behest of his master and mother, killing countless thousands. Yet after her death, freed from human control for the first time in his life, he appears to decide against further devastation in favor of escape. He flies away and his future is unknown.

But while the minds of these dragons remain a mystery, what they symbolize can be sussed out more readily. With two of the creatures killed by two very different enemies and the third taking off on its own, the departures of the dragons track with the trajectory of the show’s final season. As such, they serve as legends on a map of the future. Two paths say, “Here be dragons.” The third is wide open.

I wrote about the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons and what they symbolize for Vulture. Many people have called this the best writing I’ve ever done on the show, and I tend to agree.

Bran, Arya, Sansa, Jon: In their final destinies, the heirs of House Stark all defy their house words, “Winter Is Coming.” After showing us a nightmare for eight seasons, Game of Thrones finally dares to dream of spring.

I reviewed the series finale of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. I loved this show, and I owe it so much.

1. “The Bells” (Season 8, Episode 5)

Sansa Stark: How long do I have to look?
Joffrey Baratheon: As long as it pleases me.

Miguel Sapochnik, the man behind “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “The Long Night,” succeeded Neil Marshall as the show’s master of war. Returning to the director’s chair one last time for the series’s penultimate episode, he turns off the dark that confounded many viewers during the Battle of Winterfell. But does he therefore dial down the carnage that occurs any time large numbers of people decide to murder one another for a cause? Oh, no. Oh, not at all.

“The Bells” ratchets up the queasy terror of the last battle episode set at King’s Landing, “Blackwater,” by making its narrowly averted nightmare come true. This time, instead of stalling at the city walls, the invaders make it inside—with the help of Daenerys Targaryen and the last dragon she has. And before the episode is over, there’s barely a city left to sack. The Breaker of Chains breaks bad at last, unleashing dragon fire on tens of thousands of innocent civilians and reducing King’s Landing to rubble and ash.

This war crime was a long time coming, and the seeds had been planted since the start. No, I’m not talking about the innumerable people whose execution by Dany went excused because they were nominally “bad guys.” I’m talking about Bran falling from the tower. Viserys Targaryen and Robert Baratheon and Khal Drogo failing to survive a single season. Ned Stark losing his head. Jaime Lannister losing his hand. The Red Wedding. The Purple Wedding. The Red Viper. The death of the dragons.

Every single swerve that upended what the story seemed to be about was building to this moment: A self-styled liberator perpetrating a massacre on a previously unimaginable scale, both as an in-story act of violence and an on-screen work of filmmaking. This is the show, and it always has been. Game of Thrones forces you to look. Long may it burn.

I ranked every episode of Game of Thrones from worst to best for Vulture. I stand by this.

“I have come … But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!”

Frodo Baggins broke bad. After a journey spanning thousands of miles, hundreds of pages, and a trilogy of books, the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings did the one thing he’d aimed to prevent anyone from doing ever again: He claimed the One Ring, the ultimate weapon of the evil Sauron, as his own.

This betrayed everything he and his friends had fought and suffered for, but, fortunately for the hobbit, no mere mortal could hope to harness and wield the Ring’s power. All Frodo really succeeded in doing was alerting Sauron to the jewelry of mass destruction’s presence in the one place it could be destroyed, the volcano where it was originally forged.

Of course, this too would spell disaster if the Dark Lord were to reach Frodo in time to reclaim the Ring and turn it on the good guys amassed at the gates of his wasteland kingdom. Only dumb luck and Frodo’s own prior kindness saved him in the end. The mutated hobbit called Gollum, whose centuries of solitude with only the object’s dark magic for company had turned him into a hopeless Ring junkie, bit off Frodo’s finger to take the Ring back. He then promptly fell into the lava, destroying himself, the Ring, Sauron, his minions, his castle, and his impregnable kingdom all in one go. If Frodo had killed the vicious but ultimately pathetic creature during his many earlier opportunities to do so, all would have been lost.

But still: Tolkien chose to bring his magnum opus — the fountainhead from which the entire epic-fantasy genre has flowed — to a climax by corrupting his virtuous protagonist and giving him no agency in his own redemption. I first read The Lord of the Rings 33 years ago, and to this day I can’t hit that part of the book or watch that part of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation without gasping, “No, goddammit, no!” The character whose pure heart and noble intentions made him the ideal vehicle for bringing the most dangerous weapon in existence to its appointed place of destruction was, in the end, neither pure nor noble enough to resist trying to use the loaded gun he’d been carrying all that time. In the parlance of our era, you simply hate to see it.

Unfortunately for Daenerys Targaryen, there’s no Gollum present in Game of Thrones to knock her off her dragon’s back and then, I dunno, fly the thing directly into the side of a mountain at full speed. Her hero’s journey ends in villainy that no one — at least, perhaps, until Sunday’s series finale — has the power to stop.

I tried to contextualize Daenerys Targaryen’s actions in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones for Vulture. I’m proud of this piece.