The dragons are coming! The dragons are coming!

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys, the Mother of Dragons

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

Oh. My. God. The dragons are coming. So are the direwoves and the White Walkers. Oh yes, and the three-eyed ravens that can see the future. And the future they see is the end of the world as we know it.

I can hardly wait.

All this can mean only one thing: a new season of Game of Thrones is upon us.

Game of Thrones, if you’re one of three people in the world who don’t know this, is a TV series created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. It’s an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. The first of the series of novels is A Game of Thrones.

This seventh season of the world’s most popular TV show begins Sunday, July 16, on HBO. And this season, the next to last, promises to be even bloodier than the sixth, which was plenty bloody itself. Remember the Battle of the Bastards?

Well, the advances I’ve read warn that we haven’t seen anything yet.

It is, after all, end-game time in the seven-season battle to see who will finally get to sit on the Iron Throne of Westeros — and stay there.

(Spoiler alert: it won’t be Donald Trump.)

Everybody has their Game of Thrones favorite. Mine is Daenerys Targaryen, who went through a real trial of fire to become the Mother of Dragons.

She’ll be in the fight with her three fire-breathing dragons, now grown to the size of 747s. With her will be the “imp” Tyrion Lannister, a character who makes up for his lack of size with a gigantic, sharp wit.

Cersei Lannister now rules on the Iron Throne in King’s Landing. She has earned her place the hard way, having been forced by religious leaders to parade naked through the city while people pelted her with excrement and shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” She got back at them by blowing up their wing of the palace. So then Cersei went back to her incestuous affair with her twin brother, Jaime.

Don’t you love a nice family story?

And then there’s Jon Snow and Sansa Stark in Winterfell, after Jon defeated Ramsey Bolton in the Battle of the Bastards. They’re accompanied by the ever-plotting, ever-whispering Littlefinger and the wonderful warrior Brienne of Tarth, who has vowed to protect Sansa to the death.

Watch out, Littlefinger.

In fact, watch out everybody. Watch out, Bran Stark, not that he hasn’t had a hard enough life as it is, what with being left a paraplegic after being thrown from a tower. Hey, all he was doing was spying on Jaime and Cersei Lannister having sex. Jeez.

Anyway, Bran, accompanied by his ravens and his stone-cold killer sister, Arya, and a direwolf or two, are making their way back home.

And then there’s Euron Greyjoy, the expected super villain of Season 7. And then, of course, winter is coming. The zombie-like White Walkers are heading for Westeros.

Donald Trump famously promised that the “American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” But he didn’t know Westeros. In that fictitious continent, the opposite is true.

The carnage begins now. I can hardly wait.