Alright, folks, the Game of Thrones Death Pool is OVER and the results are in:
Congratulations to Maribeth on taking home the inaugural GOTDP Championship.
Maribeth and Dave Maulbeck were the only ones bold enough to guess "NOBODY" would sit on the Iron Throne. GREAT JOB, YOU GUYS!!
There was some deliberation once Bran was named "Ruler of The Six Kingdoms." We had to call the replay officials in Secaucus, and they confirmed the call on the field: The question was "Who sits on the Iron Throne?" and there is no Iron Throne now, so there ya go.
Our second place finisher, Kate, actually did guess Bran would be King, but alas. That's a bad beat.
Maybe this season didn't live up to a lot of people's expectations. It was fine. Anyway, I think we were all thankful to have this little extra action to keep it interesting. We're definitely gonna have to run it back with a Power Death Pool for their final season.later this summer. Who's in???
A while back we read an interview with George RR Martin where he briefly discussed the Night King’s army of the dead as an allegory for climate change: “while we’re tearing ourselves apart over [politics] and expending so much energy, there exists this threat of climate change, which ... really has the potential to destroy our world.”
Looking back on this last season, we think this metaphor works better now than ever. It helps explain a lot of the peculiar things that happened, or didn't happen, in the last 6 episodes:
What Really Matters: It's funny to hear GRRM say that the politics of the realm don't actually matter after he's spent 28 years (and counting) writing about it.
There's a lot of other things that Game of Thrones spent a lot of time on that also didn't matter vis-a-vis the Nigh King. Like prophecies - Clearly it doesn't matter who killed Cercei and it doesn't matter which Prince was Promised. In fact, Nothing the Red Priests/Priestesses did matters, since their role in the Great War was to "protect" a girl who died like five times.
Winning The Great War: Obviously right now there's no solution to global warming that's as easy as giving Arya a knife. But if we ever do figure one out, it'll likely be already too late for just about everybody in Winterfell.
People Don't Change: We actually loved how Dany was back on her bullshit like two seconds after the NK went down. Then we also loved how everybody laughed at Samwell when he invented democracy.
There's a lot of Samwell Tarleys out there in academia who think that an existential crisis - like an alien invasion or environmental disaster - could be a unifying, democratizing force for all of mankind. Rallying together for a common cause should help us see the humanity in each other. At some point what we have in common should become more important than what keeps us apart. So, of course, in the last episode of this epic allegorical adventure they got the ten richest people in the world together to say, with one voice - "Democra-what?? FUUUCK that shit!! BAAAAHAHAHAHA!!!!! FOH, Samwell"
HAVE A GREAT SUMMER-EVERYBODY!!!!!!
