Thanks for the heads up, I guess, to Blogtown commenter Graham—who, surprising no one, apparently spends his days trawling craigslist for super-creepy Game of Thrones crap. SOMEONE GET IT QUICK! And then burn it.

• Via

Game of Thrones is a show about how betrayal is inevitable and honor is futile. It's a show about how life is hard, and brief, and devoid of meaning. It's a show about the foolishness of having ideals, the failures of optimism, and the entropy of society. It's about greed, murder, power, sex, family, and loss. To anyone paying attention, it's pretty obvious that Game of Thrones' sprawling, gripping story will not have a happy ending; like the George R.R. Martin books on which it's based, Game of Thrones is classified as fantasy, but when it comes to the people it follows and their desperate, hollow ways of trying to survive, it's brutally realistic.

It is, in other words, an incredible amount of fun to watch. And the best way to do so is on Blu-ray, which works out great, since the complete first season of Game of Thrones finally came out earlier this week.

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URGENT GAME OF THRONES NEWS! No, it's not that I'll (finally) have my review of the season one Blu-rays up later today. It's that thanks to HBO and the Oregon Food Bank, you can see a screening of the premiere of season two, early and on the big screen (as long as you're willing to drive your ass out to Beaverton). You can maybe even win an iPad 2 if you have the best costume, which you won't, because my Daenerys gown is stunning. Full info after the jump, in the form of a lazily cut-and-pasted press release.

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Tomorrow I'll have my review up for Game of Thrones' season one Blu-rays. In the meantime, though, there's a new trailer for season two, which I'm now going to watch several times in a row, thus throwing a wrench into the Mercury's stressful production schedule. Sorry, coworkers! But look!

HBO's second season of Game of Thrones is based on the second book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series—and maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I recall that second book feeling like a bit of water-treading compared to the all-around awesomeness of the first book and the jaw-dropping holyfuckingshitwhattheFUCK-ness that goes down in the third book. But no, I have to be remembering wrong, because this preview for Game of Thrones' second season looks just... yes. Awesome. This. Now. I am childish and impatient and sick of waiting and want to see shit beyond the Wall and Dany's dragons and this is what I want to be watching tonight please, thanks.

haha, eff you stannis, you have no friends

The standard thinking when it comes to television is that the audience should like a show's characters; that way, they'll be more inclined to tune in every week to spend time with those characters. So maybe one of the reasons I like Game of Thrones so much is because holy shit, so many of its characters are repugnant. Granted—and, so far, more in the books than the TV show—those pulling the stories' strings generally do a pretty good job of making you come around to characters you initially hated, and vice versa, but still: Game of Thrones is filled with hate-worthy (and fine, love-worthy) characters.

In fact, looking through io9's batch of new images from the show's second season, I found myself sticking all the characters pictured into, with a few exceptions, two categories: "HATE" and "LOVE." (Fun party trick: Ask any of my ex-girlfriends how "emotionally mature" I am!) So join me, won't you, on a journey to Westeros... and a journey into HATE and LOVE.

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Here is what it is like to read or watch Game of Thrones: Something comes out, be it a book or TV show, and you get really, really into it, and then it ends, and then you have to wait 40,000 years for the next part to come out.

But rather than doing the decent thing and letting everyone forget about it for a while until the next part is ready, the people behind game of thrones—George R.R. Martin on the book side, HBO on the TV side—constantly and infuriatingly remind everyone throughout the course of those 40,000 years that the next part is right around the corner. Martin will post a chapter from the next book, or HBO will make a dozen little behind-the-scenes YouTube videos, and everyone will get all excited again, and forget they still have 39,000 years to wait.

ANYWAY here is the latest ad for Game of Thrones' second season, and yes it looks good, and April 1 is still a ways off, goddammit.

• ROBERT MAXWELL, VIA

Over at GQ, occasional Mercury contributor Lindy West has a solid interview with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, and it's well worth a read, HOWEVER: It pales in comparison to the above image, which is one of two amazing photographs by Robert Maxwell that accompany said interview, and which is now my desktop wallpaper.

I'm halfway convinced that Game of Thrones is less an epic fantasy and more a mean-spirited attempt by George R.R. Martin and his goddamn cronies to teach the virtue of patience to a world that's grown to have none.

So while we spend the next decade grumpily waiting for book six, and while we wait until April for the forever-in-production season two, well... at least HBO knows how to market their shit. Here's a two-minute, behind-the-scenes ad for the show's second season, and it looks like it's gonna be great. Also, Arya, as always, is totally badass even though she's only in this for like two seconds, and even though she has boy hair now. VERY CLEVER, ARYA, THAT WILL TOTALLY FOOL EVERYONE

Seriously? That's it? Thanks for nothing. Jerks.

Game of Thrones starts back up in April of 2012, which is four million years from now.

• PETE'S DRAGON AND GEORGE R.R. MARTIN Draw your own conclusions.

Less than 10 hours ago, a good-sized crowd was lined up outside Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing for the midnight release of A Dance with Dragons, the long-awaited fifth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Here's a picture of the line when I got there; it eventually got to be about twice as long.) I love midnight book openings—it's rare and awesome to see people who're so excited about books they're willing to forgo sleep in order to get/read one—and moreover, A Dance with Dragons feels like a real book, big and heavy and with maps on the endpapers and snazzy foil embossing on the cover. I might've spent some time just looking at it before I passed out last night.

BUT ANYWAY. That was early this morning, and already there's news about the rest of A Song of Ice and Fire—namely, that Martin thinks his epic series might stretch to eight books instead of its projected seven. He tells The Atlantic:

Do you still think you'll be able to wrap everything up in the remaining two books?
I certainly hope so! That's my plan, that's my intent, that's what I'm going to try to do. But at this point I know better than to promise anything and write it out in blood.

I think some fans are hoping we'll end up with eight books.
Well, it's grown in the past—I'm not going to say those fans are wrong. When I started out, it was a trilogy. Back in 1994 when I sold this, it was going to be A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter—three books. But that scheme went out the window before I'd even finished the first book. I think it was Tolkien who said when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, "The tale grew in the telling."

Some who follow your work have voiced the idea that you've written yourself into a corner—that you've started so many narrative threads, and created so many hundreds of characters that it's become overwhelming to reconcile. You've even hinted as much on your blog . If that's the case, will you let certain story lines ebb, or do you feel obligated to see them all through?
There's no doubt that I've wrestled with this book and the complexity and size of the series, and that may be one reason why my writing has slowed down. But my intent right from the beginning was to do something huge and epic, with a cast of thousands and many different settings....

Maybe I did make it too big two books ago. But I've thrown the balls in the air and I feel obligated to keep on juggling them as best I can. You can't just forget about some of the balls, you have to deal with the plot threads that you've introduced. If I can pull it all off the way I want hopefully it will be great. And if I don't, I'm sure the world will let me know.

I'm really hoping book eight is called A Juggling of Thrones or A Panic of Dragons or A War of Winterfell. Or Sansa Dies.

Oh, thank christ—I was hoping someone would do this.

If you, like me, are giddily awaiting A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin's long-awaited fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (which everyone just refers to by the significantly less embarrassing title A Game of Thrones), you no doubt know that it's finally coming out next week. Also if you are like me, it's been forever since you read the fourth book, and your memory's for shit, and also you thought the fourth book was kind of boring and only about the lame characters, so you didn't bother remembering a lot of the boring stuff that happened to all the lame people in it.

So let's thank Tor.com for doing this:

It’s been over five years since we’ve visited Westeros and the lands beyond, and longer still since we’ve checked in with other characters that promise an appearance in A Dance With Dragons. One would need to reread the series just to remember what all the characters are up to!

For some, there’s not enough time to accomplish that, so we’ve put together a handy refresher as to where all the major characters are as of the end of A Feast For Crows!

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