Thursday, April 11, 2019

Your Essential Game of Thrones Catch-Up Guide

With Game of Thrones Season 8 just around the corner, are you starting to realize that you could use a little refresher on the last eight years of Westerosi drama—from Daenerys’s gradual journey across the Narrow Sea to Jon Snow’s history of brooding? Think about it, and you might just realize that you don’t recall how Jaime lost his hand, or what Arya got up to before learning to be a faceless assassin, or who Tormund Giantsbane is. Thankfully, Joanna Robinson is here to help. V.F.’s chief maester has compiled a series of handy recaps that take readers through every previous season of HBO’s epic fantasy, following the major story lines of nine core characters who have made it all the way to the start of Season 8 (though none of us believe Cersei’s really going to get to the end of the series without being murdered in some spectacularly satisfying way, right?). We suggest beginning below, with her recap of Season 7, and going backwards until you reach the long-ago days of Season 1—when the Stark family was happy and whole at Winterfell, and everyone believed the White Walkers were just creatures out of a fairy tale. It was a nice time; of course it couldn’t last. For more—much more!—Game of Thrones content, be sure to sign up for our new Westeros Update newsletter, written by Robinson.
Elsewhere in HWD, Julie Miller dives into the unconventional marriage at the center of Fosse/Verdon;The Crown coronates a new Princess Diana; Yohana Desta applauds Jude Law for strutting around a beach in a white Speedo, as all good young popes should do; and Warner Bros. tut-tuts Donald Trump for using a portentous piece of Dark Knight Rises intellectual property without permission.