It’s the second Boiled Leather podcast to drop today! In the latest installment of our Best of ASOIAF series, Stefan and I take a look at the inspiration for next month’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, “The Hedge Knight” — available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Wanna hear me read the prophecy section of the House of the Undying aloud? Wanna hear me and my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse then talk about everything BUT the meaning of the prophecies? The Best of ASOIAF series continues with a look at one of the most momentous and talked-about chapters of the entire saga on the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, available anywhere podcasts are!

I’ve waited for years to announce this: The complete Boiled Leather Audio Hour archives — over 200 episodes dating back to 2011 — are now available wherever you get your podcasts!

Dive into fourteen years of analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon; wide-ranging discussions about SFF literature, television, and cinema driven by our resident critic, Sean T. Collins; history and politics coverage spearheaded by our resident historian, Stefan Sasse; countless special guests, including Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, acclaimed horror novelist Gretchen Felker-Martin, big names from throughout the ASOIAF fandom, and much more!

Friends, one of the perils of being the longest-running ASOIAF podcast on the internet is that much of our infrastructure was set up years ago, making updating it a real challenge. Until now, only the 20 most recent BLAH episodes were available at any given time via podcasting apps, and you had to dig through our download archives manually if you wanted more. We’ve hunted for a fix for years, hiring professionals and everything, so of course in the end it was something unbelievably simple that everyone had just somehow failed to catch. Ain’t technology grand?

Be that as it may! I could not be more thrilled than to present to you what has become one of my life’s great efforts and achievements. Endless thanks to Andrew Fulton for the miracle work, and of course to my illustrious cohost, Stefan Sasse, without whose herculean efforts and effortless command of countless topics this podcast would have ceased to exist long ago. This is for you, buddy.

And it’s for all of you who’ve ever listened, or ever been curious about listening. Please spread the word far and wide in the fandom: There’s never been a better time for BLAH! BOILED LEATHER FOREVER

art by the mighty Julia Gfrörer

In the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the longest running GRRM/GoT/HotD podcast on the internet, Stefan and I continue our Best of ASOIAF series with the Battle of the Whispering Wood! I read the whole thing aloud! Available at our Patreon or wherever you find podcasts!

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is back! For our 200th episode (!!!), Stefan and I tackle the big one: The Red Wedding. The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on the internet, baby! Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Our series on A Song of Ice and Fire’s Greatest Hits continues with a new Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast on the Hound’s origin speech from A Game of Thrones, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In my most recent appearance on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our “Best of ASoIaF” series with a look at Bran’s dream from A Game of Thrones—available here or wherever you get your podcasts1

Oh man, I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. The Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast’s “Best of A Song of Ice and Fire” series resumes as Stefan Sasse and I take a look at Septon Meribald’s monologue from A Feast for Crows, my favorite passage in the whole series. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The final iteration of my increasingly enormous House of the Dragon character guide is up at Vulture. This takes you all the way through the entire first season. Thank you for playing along!

We experienced technical difficulties, but now the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Listen to Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of House of the Dragon right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Much of the finale’s storytelling is conveyed through largely silent close-ups of people’s faces, particularly Rhaenyra’s. What was the thought process behind that?
I think about the amount of craft and hard work that went into getting that set built and those costumes made and those wigs put on everybody’s heads, just to get to a space where I can have two people talking to each other at a table or by a fireplace. Those moments are a testament to everyone’s work.

I tell the actors to take their time and live in those moments of silence, to not feel they have to rush through those scenes. I call it “the mud” — those complex, human, partner-on-partner scenes. I cut my teeth in network television, and I think silence scares people; I appreciate a show where the silences are deliberate choices to make it more cinematic and emotional.

One of my favorite moments is when Rhaenyra comes in and she’s just been crowned queen. Emma and I talked about this: “Sit and wait until you feel you have something to ask or say. Think about your dad: What would he do? Look at all those faces looking back at you. Where do you start? What are your first words as queen? Just be there until the line wants to come out.”

I interviewed Greg Yaitanes, the director of House of the Dragon‘s excellent season finale, for Vulture.

That seems to be the case most specifically with Prince Daemon. Much of the fandom wants to see him, as you put it, wearing a white hat or a black hat, to the point that many of them criticized Sara Hess, a writer and executive producer on the show, for her less-than-glowing assessment of Daemon. Did you see this coming?

I’m having trouble understanding it. We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming.

To me, Daemon is the antihero of this story. He’s a character with a real darkness to him, who’s dangerous and charming in equal parts. I knew people would be fascinated by him and latch onto him, but I figured they’d do it in the way they did with Jaime Lannister or Bronn or the Red Viper. I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future.

Nobody in the show writes in a vacuum. I’m the lead writer; I oversee everything that happens on the show; every choice comes through me. If it’s on the screen, it’s because I either wrote it or approved it being written. Sara Hess and I wrote 85 percent of Season 1 together. We did not set out to write villains and heroes in this. We set out to write interesting humans and complex characters who are hopefully compelling, but compelling doesn’t always mean heroic or unimpeachable.

I see Daemon as having heroic aspects to him, and I understand why people would. I mean, he’s incredibly charismatic, he’s handsome, he looks great in that wig, he rides a dragon, he has a cool sword. I totally get it. But if you’re looking for Han Solo, who’s always going to do the right thing in the end, you’re in the wrong franchise, folks.

I interviewed House of the Dragon co-creator and co-showrunner Ryan Condal for the New York Times.

Which brings us back to that torn-out page Alicent sent to Rhaenyra as an olive branch. The two girls were just 14 when Rhaenyra was declared heir and Alicent was sent by Otto to “comfort” a grieving Viserys, putting an end to those carefree days. Luke was just 14 when he died. And so a war set up long ago in the names of two children, who grow into women whose shared childhood memories nearly prevent that war from breaking out, becomes inevitable when a child dies. None of these poor kids asked for any of this, but the system — the monarchy, the patriarchy, the violence underpinning it all — turned them all into cogs in the war machine anyway.

Dragons, incest, one-eyed princes, ancient prophecies, etc.: They’re the flashy, occasionally sleazy adult-fantasy stuff that have made Dragon blockbuster material. The arresting visuals — the meeting between Rhaenyra and Otto at sunset, Luke’s flight through the stormclouds, all those hulking dragons — help as well. But it’s that central tragedy, of two well-meaning women slowly made into realm-destroying monsters in a world where actual monsters still take wing, that elevates the show above its genre counterparts. Forget dragons for a moment; there are other ways to soar.

I reviewed the season finale of House of the Dragon for Rolling Stone. Heck of a show!

Stefan Sasse and I are back with our latest weekly BLAH, this time focusing on House of the Dragon Episode 9! Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The latest iteration of my House of the Dragon character guide is now up at Vulture, covering the events of episode 9. Brush up before the finale!

Perhaps it’s too late at this point to ask, but does some part of Ser Criston still love Rhaenyra?

[Smiles ruefully.] First love is first love. I think everyone will always love the person that they fell in love with for the first time. From the first time you hear a beautiful piece of music, you’ll always love it, even if you’ve heard it a hundred times, because you remember that first time you heard it. So yeah, he will always love Rhaenyra.

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Fabien Frankel for the New York Times.

Okay, so: Why didn’t Rhaenys just torch the royal family and the whole Green crew?
[Laughs long and hard.] I know! The temptation is there, right? In the end, she makes a bigger choice. We see that at the moment with what’s going on in Ukraine; to choose not to destroy is the better choice. That’s an important thing for us all to remember right now.

It’s why she would have made such a great leader. She had, in that moment, all the power. Yet she has respect for Alicent as a woman and a mother. They understand being in the grip of other people who might torch them. They know the only right choice is not to go there. Furthermore, it’s the intelligent choice, on her part, not to torch a whole bunch of innocent people in the room. What’s to be gained? In the end, it’s not her battle.

The escape she makes on the dragon is something that’s been brewing since that very moment she was passed over wrongly, unjustly, for the crown. It’s this yearning just to get the hell out and get away from the whole ruddy lot of things. When she bursts out of that arena, she’s internally saying, “Fuck you all.” It’s more about that than a need for revenge or destruction that the men might’ve jumped onto. She’s breaking her own glass ceiling.

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Eve Best for Vulture.

Writer Sara Hess and director Clare Kilner give the whole affair the vibe of a tense political thriller, as alliances are forged and broken and various players jockey for position in the new regime. Much of this is achieved through deft character work that helps shore up some of the show’s shakier decisions.

For example, is it a little annoying that Alicent decides to crown Aegon instead of Rhaenyra due to a sitcom-style mix-up involving Viserys’s dying declaration? Sure. But it’s worth noting how duty-bound she seems to feel about it; as far as she’s concerned, she’s doing the right thing and honoring the late king’s wishes, not gleefully screwing her frenemy over. In fact, she fights — hard — to keep Rhaenyra alive in the face of opposition from no less than her own father. Actor Olivia Cooke threads this needle with aplomb.

Similarly, Rhaenys’s decision not to roast the whole royal family comes across as foolhardy, at least at first. But keep in mind that, like Alicent, the older woman is trying to avoid a war, not start one. If she were to inaugurate her former daughter-in-law Rhaenyra’s reign by sneak-attack slaughtering Aegon II, Otto, and Alicent, as well as innocents like Aegon’s sister-wife Helaena, how would that help anyone?

(One quick note: Helaena appears to have foreseen Rhaenys’s dragon attack, muttering about “a beast beneath the boards” earlier in the episode. Pay attention to this one, folks.)

Then there’s Aegon himself. He’s a thoroughly contemptible person, and he both knows it and hates himself for it, as conveyed through a remarkable performance by actor Tom Glynn-Carney. He has no desire to be king, and says so; he thinks his mother’s claim that his dad declared him the heir on his deathbed is bullshit, and says so too. But once he hears the roar of the crowd, he begins to change his tune, holding his legendary sword Blackfyre aloft and pumping it to pump up the people. Given that his only hobbies appear to be drinking and making weaker people suffer, that’s not a good sign.

I reviewed last night’s episode of House of the Dragon for Rolling Stone.

Stefan Sasse and I review House of the Dragon episode eight in the new Boiled Leather Audio Hour, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

I’ve once again updated my weekly House of the Dragon character guide for Vulture to reflect the events of the most recent episode. Check it out!