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!

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!

Take a pandemic. Add the paranormal. Make it a uniquely American story of survival horror. The result: “The Stand,” Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel from 1978, a new mini-series adaptation of which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access.‘The Stand’ Review: Stephen King’s Pandemic Story Hits TV AgainDec. 16, 2020

Conceived in the pre-Covid era, the show has taken on new resonance since, telling the story of a weaponized virus that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But that’s only the beginning. The real battle happens afterward as supernatural forces of darkness and light — embodied by the demonic dictator Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and the holy woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) — duel for the souls of the plague’s survivors.

Since the original novel’s original release, King’s saga has entered the pop-culture consciousness in many different incarnations, including an expanded edition of the book and an earlier mini-series adaptation. In anticipation of the show’s arrival, we’re tracing the story from its point of origin to its latest mutation.

I wrote about the many inspirations and iterations of Stephen King’s The Stand for the New York Times.

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!

When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.

It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.

…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.

Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?

I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.

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!

It started when Jaime Lannister stood and said, almost to himself, “Any knight can make a knight.” In that moment the butterflies started whirring around my stomach, my throat drew tight, my eyes started swelling. It concluded when Jaime bid his captor turned peer turned hero Brienne of Tarth to arise, “a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” That’s when I started bawling like a damn baby — big, ugly, snotty honking sobs of compassion and joy. By the time Tormund started applauding and Tyrion started toasting and Brienne started smiling — Brienne! Of Tarth! Smiling! — I lost it completely. Judging from reactions to “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” Sunday’s fantastic episode of Game of Thrones, I was far from alone.

But it wasn’t just the inherent meaning of the scene for two of the series’ best characters — misfit woman warrior, Brienne, and her unlikely friend and recovering scumbag, Jaime Lannister — that got me.

Did it mean a lot to see Jaime finally make good on the knightly vows he’d spent most of his life using as a shield to cover for his atrocious behavior? Yes. Did it mean even more to see Brienne — who’s been searching for a place in a society that has no room for her, growing embittered even as she clings to a code most actual knights barely pay lip service to — receive the acceptance she’d earned a million times over? Of course.

But it was the dialogue that truly drove the momentousness of the scene home to me, because it was dialogue I recognized as a reader of George R.R. Martin’s Westeros saga. At a time when the show is operating on its own, “Any knight can make a knight” and “a knight of the Seven Kingdoms” are key phrases from the source material, in this case, a series of prequel novellas commonly known as the Tales of Dunk & Egg. Collected in a volume called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms— a title shared by the episode itself — they’re Martin’s most sustained look at what knighthood means, both as a way of life and in the hearts of those who wish to adopt it. Hearing those phrases on the show this deep into its run has a talismanic effect for book readers that couldn’t be achieved any other way.

I wrote about the references to the tales of Dunk & Egg in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” for Vulture.

PLUS!

BLAM 24: Life-Changing ASoIaF Writing

Dril and the boys wallow in the same miasma from which all our era’s reactionary movements have emerged — the MAGAs and Pepes, MRAs and incels, GamerGaters and ComicsGaters, Sad Puppies and Proud Boys and all the other doofuses with unwittingly infantilizing sobriquets.

With “the boys,” the humorist behind dril has tapped into the overall vibe in this country that there exists, somewhere out there ― perhaps in a TJ Maxx ― a lost masculine ideal. No one agrees on what it is, least of all dril, whose psyche is as piecemeal as his punctuation. It could be yelling at NFL protesters to stand for the national anthem or screaming at Disney for committing white genocide in the “Star Wars” films. It could be having sex all the time or having no sex at all. It could be respecting the majesty of the law or flouting it or both, depending on whom the law is meant to penalize. It’s the nightmare superego-id hybrid, 10 pounds of Blue Lives Matter shit in a five-pound “Live free or die” bag.

When men fail to live up to the puritanical amorality of the boys, they’re less than men, which is to say — as women have a lifetime to learn — they’re less than human. Such men earn sexualized insults like “betas” and “cucks.” They’re reduced to contemptuous acronyms like “SJWs” and “NPCs.” They make the soy face. They listen to dad rock. This blend of macho aggression and childlike vulnerability cannot be resolved in the real world, where it results in a racist, revanchist, minority party controlling all branches of government and installing sexual predators in every available position of power yet still acting like the David to the Goliath of Me Too, female gamers and the theoretical casting of Idris Elba as James Bond.

Dril and the boys reside in this all-American astral plane where the Large Son–Libtard civil war rages, where misandry is real and must be guarded against with magic spells. We recognize our own reality in their incoherent but nevertheless militant search for reasons to hoot and holler. As such, their romance presents us with an opportunity to convert the problematic into the pleasurable, just as surely as antihero dramas or even halfway decent kink.

I wrote about Dril, the funniest writer alive, and “the boys,” his best recurring characters, for HuffPost.

Whoa ho ho, what’s this? Illustrious Co-Host Stefan Sasse and @warsofasoiaf’s Something Like a Lawyer discussing the upcoming Battles of Ice and Fire in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast? Sure seems like it! Let’s see what Stefan has to say about it…

The Battles of Ice and Fire

In Sean’s second consecutive month with a leave of absence, Stefan is joined by Jim McGeehin, who writes the famous tumblr “Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire” and goes by the handle of “Something like a lawyer”. While his lawyering status may be somewhat in doubt, his command of the material is not.

Jim’s command of military and political matters is almost without equal in the fandom, and while he is too modest to accept the monicker of “expert” that Stefan tried to bestow on him, that’s really what he is. So it would be malpractice not to put his expertise to the test!

What we talk about in this episode are the upcoming Battles of Ice and Fire, referring to Stannis’ fight against Freys and Boltons and Barristan’s fight against the Yunkish in the expected opening of “The Winds of Winter”, when it finally arrives. We talk military strategy as well as political strategy, being aware that in a feudal society, no one can seperate both. We also venture into the literary qualities and discuss some more elaborate fan theories.

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 79

Additional Links:

Torrent Download Link

Stefan’s blog

Sean’s blog

Jim’s blog

Jim’s tumblr

First, a brief note: ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED, even when I’m not the one boiling it. I’m on hiatus from the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, so my Illustrious Co-Host Stefan Sasse is taking the reins, and he’s brought @poorquentyn aboard as his first guest to talk A Dance with Dragons!

Stefan, take it away…

The Best of the Bunch

Sean is taking a time off due to personal reasons. Until he’s back, to keep you guys with the content you know and love, Stefan will soldier on and line up co-hosts that are illustrious as Sean, or near enough that makes no matter.

The first in this colorful row is Emmet Booth, aka PoorQuentyn. Emmet is rightfully famous for his tumblr, and he delivered first-rate analysis of Euron Greyjoy, Quentyn Martell, Tyrion Lannister, Davos Seaworth and Theon Greyjoy, only to name a few.

But Emmet is also one of the most ardent defenders of “A Dance with Dragons”‘s literary qualities, and Stefan shares this feeling, so this is the topic we chose: What makes “A Dance with Dragons” the best of the five main novels.

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 78

Additional Links:

Torrent Download  Link

Stefan’s blog

Sean’s blog

Emmet’s blog

NotACast

Well, it looks like it’s gonna be a slow news day, so I might as well announce that I’m taking a break from the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast. I’m leaving it in the capable hands of My Illustrious Cohost @StefanSasse, who’s already got some killer guest hosts from the ASoIaF/GoT world lined up. We have a backlog of Boiled Leather Audio Moments for our patreon subscribers (http://patreon.com/boiledleatheraudiohour BAY-BAY) that I hope to roll out this month as well, and I will CERTAINLY return to talk about Fire and Blood in a couple months. For now I need to recharge and free up some time to work on long-delayed projects, so that when I return, which I hope to do, I can give this beloved thing of ours the attention it deserves. I’ve loved recording every episode and I’m so grateful for everyone’s support.