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.

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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.

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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.

Ser Garlan Tyrell

We’re making up for lost time with our second subscriber-exclusive BLAM mini-podcast in 24 hours! This installment’s question comes from $5/month subscriber Matthew Miller, who wants to know what role Sean & Stefan think Ser Garlan Tyrell will play in the remaining two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. Though we’ve barely seen him at all, his reputation precedes him — including IRL, where GRRM himself has said Ser Garlan will play a major part in the story’s endgame. What part do we think that will be, exactly? Click here to subscribe for the low low price of $2/month and find out!

(Click here to buy this episode’s theme music.)

A Different Verse of A Song of Ice and Fire

A Patreon snafu kept us from posting our latest BLAM, but we’re back with a new subscriber-exclusive mini-podcast, based on questions from readers like you! (No, not you, the other one — yeah, you.) This episode, $5/month subscriber Andrew Dill asks Your Illustrious Cohosts which parts of the world of Ice and Fire that aren’t covered thoroughly by the main narrative we’d like to see explored more in-depth. It’s an interesting question, and our answers range all over the world. Click here to subscribe and find out!

(There’s no way to legally download this episode’s theme music, but it’s “Horror Head” by Curve if you were wondering.)

Before the Game of Thrones

What was life like before A Game of Thrones? No, not for your illustrious cohosts (we can hardly remember; was there life before A Game of Thrones?) — for your favorite POV characters! On this installment of BLAH, Sean & Stefan discuss the attitudes and events they feel must have shaped the day-to-day lives of George R.R. Martin’s main characters prior to the start of A Song of Ice and Fire. How did Ned Stark balance his professional obligations against the ghosts of the past? What did Jaime Lannister have in common with a pro wrestling heel? What was the impact of domesticity on Catelyn Stark, and of domestic violence on Cersei Lannister? Why was Tyrion Lannister less interesting before the books began — and why was Davos Seaworth more interesting? It’s a deep dive into character and theme (and of course pure speculation), and we hope you enjoy it!

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In the contemporary internet sense, the Dune discourse is wild and wide open, without the warring-camp, protect it at all costs mentality that plagues so many other geek-culture staples. If you say “The spice must flow,” you aren’t risking hours of replies from angry pedants the way you might if, oh I don’t know, you point out that in Justice League, Aquaman’s trident (from the Latin for “three teeth”) has five points instead of three. Unless you try very hard, you’re also unlikely to encounter anyone complaining that Dune has been ruined by SJWs and soyboys, or that critics who like it have been bought off by that sweet De Laurentiis money. Yet it’s still a sprawling invented world that provides you with all the esoterica and trivia and map-reading and jargon-slinging joy of any other. You can get stoned and stay up until the wee hours making dank Duncan Idaho memes with your friends, or with no one at all, completely unmolested.

And perhaps I’m going out on a limb here, but based on the source material and the filmmakers historically associated with adapting it — including Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner movie gives us a solid recent point of comparison — Dune-iverse phrases like “Tleilaxu ghola” or “prana-bindu training” or “He is the Kwisatz-Haderach” are never gonna reach “Infinity Stones” or “Ten points for Gryffindor” or “A Lannister always pays his debts” levels. Anyone who’s seen the very real Dune coloring and activity books, which look like an elaborate prank, can attest to how tough it is to boil this stuff down to four-quadrant consumability. It’s true that the books are bestsellers, but so is the comparable work of Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which became a well-regarded science-fiction film that nevertheless won’t be getting Happy Meal tie-ins anytime soon.

No matter how much Lynch’s version trends upward in critical estimation, no matter how (or if) Villeneuve’s new version pans out, this is just not a franchise that’s scalable in the Transformers or Harry Potter way. It’s too dense, too weird. It smells like sun-bleached library paperbacks. Which, by the way, are the only form in which Dune has been successfully franchised, in the form of sequels co-authored by workmanlike SFF writer Kevin J. Anderson and Herbert’s son Brian. Dune references signal shared knowledge to those in the know, and that’s about it. Dune fandom is an un-fandom.

More than anything else, this is what makes immersion in Dune such an attractive prospect. Paul Atreides found anonymity, friendship, and freedom in the secret ways of the unconquerable Fremen desert tribes (Fremen, “free men,” get it?); his life after that point was a prolonged struggle to export that sense of freedom to others. Consciously or not, Herbert himself summed up the promise of Paul’s life in his introduction to New World or No World, repackaging it as a plan for the survival of the species and the planet we live on.

“The thing we must do intensely is be human together,” he wrote. “People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans a head of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. Together.” Dune is one small, goofy, vital way of sharing something wonderful with each other, and with nothing and no one else.

For my debut at The Outline I wrote about Dune, the nerdiest popular thing you can enjoy without feeling like a corporate shill or a footsoldier in some weird fandom war. I went real long and real deep, so please take a look!

Moment 21 | Westerosworld

From HBO’s dreams to BLAM’s reality! It’s a crossover between the concepts of two of TV’s biggest shows on this edition of our Patreon-exclusive mini-podcast, courtesy of subscriber Chris Schera, who asks what storylines we’d want to take part in if a Westeros-themed Westworld-style android theme park existed. This was a fun one — click here to subscribe and listen for just $2 a month!

(Click here to buy this episode’s theme music.)

Moment 20 | Tywin’s Heirs

Tywin Lannister only has two sons, one of whom is sworn to the Kingsguard and the other of whom he hates. Why has he never attempted to father more heirs? That’s the question facing Sean & Stefan in the latest BLAM mini-podcast, available exclusively for our $2-and-up Patreon subscribers. The answers involve both in-story considerations and the meta-quirks of writing. Sean is also forced to say the words “the old Tywin two-pump,” so there’s that to look forward to. Click here, subscribe, and enjoy!

(Click here to purchase this episode’s theme song.)