Game of Thrones

Shame: is there a better sales tool?

If you’re not sure people will buy your cellphone, car, or piece of fruit, why not convince them that they’re bad if they don’t? Make them feel embarrassed or stupid. It just works. Shame sells.

That’s what Sodastream, the makers of a sparkling water machine, is doing, and they’re using your favorite show, Game of Thrones, to shame you.

Recreating Cersei Lannister’s walk of shame through King’s Landing, Sodastream enlists the help of Game of Thrones’ Thor Bjornsson (the Mountain) and Hannah Waddingham, who steps back into the role of Septa Unella, bell and all and shames a consumer for buying bottled seltzer at the store, like a real jerk.

via Mess Bog

Here’s a rundown of this perfectly normal, not crazy at all advertisement:

Like in Game of Thrones, Septa parades a person through the streets shouting “Shame” and ringing her bell. Only instead of shaming this consumer for political espionage and crimes against god, he’s shamed for buying bottled seltzer and crimes against “Mother Earth.” Septa chases the consumer back to the GoT set, where he meets the Mountain, who Mountain-splains the effects of plastic bottles on and the bounties of the environment, like peanuts! Then, back in his trailer, the Mountain sees the actress Hannah Waddingham taking off her Septa costume and is taken by her beauty. All in all, great commercial for a seltzermaker thingy.

via Dussenberg

Anyway, we should all be very ashamed of ourselves for even considering buying bottled seltzer over a Sodastream because peanuts. 

Based on their YouTube page, it looks like this is just the beingging of a whole sorted love affair between Septa and the Mountain, so get ready to feel weird for a while. 

via Shame or Glory

Enjoy this insane commercial!

This neat little video comes with a whole website where you can vote on your favorite Game of Thrones character to become the new party leader. 


via thegotparty

Each candidate has their own information page and platform.  There's plenty of GOT merch on the site so fans of the show will no doubt parse these bits of information to come up with theories on future plot developments but it's probably best not to take them too seriously.  Part of Petyr Baelish's platform is "Innovations in Transportation".

Possible spoilers ahead? 

The people who created this used a "machine learning algorithm" to figure out who is most likely to die next. They go into a much deeper explanation about their initial data gathering from the books and how they use those factors to predict who's next on the website.

They've also got a ranking system to show you who you can expect to die, although these seem to be based on what the books have revealed so far so we may find out if these predictions come true when season six begins. 

Peter Dinklage (AKA Tyrion from Game of Thrones) hosted SNL over the weekend. "Space Pants" was pretty good, but his best skit had to be this spoof of Naked & Afraid with Leslie Jones. 

You may have heard that the Beatles' former manager, George Martin, died recently. A lot of people saw that and thought that George R.R. Martin had died. 


via @JMDilling, @SpiralHorn, @NipunChopra7

Even a news outlet got confused. 


via @JD24

But the record has been set straight and we all know now that George R. R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones TV show and novel series, is totally still alive. 

Except this guy...


via @stillwellgray

He's... probably still a little confused. 

Game of Thrones fans will recognize Lena Headey as the infamous Queen Cersei Lannister. She's cool, mean and also a little bit drunk most of the time. In other words, if she could convince her brother Jaime to leave her alone long enough, she would be the perfect contestant on The Bachelor. This video simply confirms it. 



You tell 'em, Cersei. 

In a recent long-winded, tell-all blog post the creator of Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin delivered some heavy felt news; we won't have our hands on the 'Winds of Winter' for some time now.

This means Martin's missed another crucial deadline, and perhaps almost worse, season six of the show will now air before it's original source material hits shelves.

Martin explains a bit on what's going on in the following excerpt from his 1800-word long blog post:

Believe me, it gave me no pleasure to type those words. You're disappointed, and you're not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed... but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me. For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, "I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER" on or before the last day of 2015. But the book's not done. Nor is it likely to be finished tomorrow, or next week. Yes, there's a lot written. Hundreds of pages. Dozens of chapters. (Those 'no pages done' reports were insane, the usual garbage internet journalism that I have learned to despise). But there's also a lot still left to write. I am months away still... and that's if the writing goes well. (Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.) Chapters still to write, of course... but also rewriting. I always do a lot of rewriting, sometimes just polishing, sometimes pretty major restructures.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed the unexpectedly long wait is worth it.

Hafthór Björnsson famous for his role on 'Game of Thrones' as Gregor 'The Mountain' Clegane. We'll bet you didn't know that this massive godlike species of a man played professional basketball in Iceland before he took up lifting/moving very heavy things; and finally acting as his full-time career.

So, yeah. Take a moment to imagine this gigantic beast of a dude running down a basketball court, full speed, and with you as the only obstacle between him and the hoop.

Uhh, fu*k that noise is right. He's like one of those steroid-addled, veiny, superhuman, cartoon beasts from 'Space Jam,' but even bigger.

The scene in question, which appeared in season six of the show and not in the book, set the PC community ablaze with outrage. It's been criticized as being aired for sheer shock value, and for having no narrative value. People are straight up pissed.

George R.R. Martin approves of the producers decision to air the scene, and told the press his novels were written with the intent to portray the unfettered brutality employed with acts of rape as a means to get what one wanted throughout ancient European history.

This is a dark show and fans need to consider toning down their violent reactions.

Daenerys of House Targaryen, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons...and Sexiest Woman Alive?

That's the latest title Esquire had bestowed upon British actress and beloved Game of Throne character Emilia Clarke. The star took home the magazine's honor for 2015.

"Half pal, half dominatrix. Half kid sister, half sexy queen. The movie star who plays, in her real life, an anonymous, funny beauty. This is the gorgeous balance of Emilia Clarke," Esquire writer Benjamin Markovits notes.

To check out the rest of Emilia's photo shoot, hop on over to Esquire.

Tons of spoilers, yo.

Did Jon Snow have a twin sister?

Welcome to the wonderful world of Game of Thrones fan theories where anything is possible, everyone is everyone's brother/sister/lover/murderer and no one ever dies.

The most recent theory to ride the bloody waves of season five's finale is based around the prevailing R+L=J theory, which basically holds that Jon Snow is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. If you don't know about this, then watch the following helpful video:

Building off that theory and the presumed death of Jon Snow in the final scenes of season five, a new theory has sprung up, delicately explained by Mashable.

Here's where things get even more crazy. Some people are now combining an old theory – that Meera Reed, the girl currently with Bran, is actually Jon Snow's twin sister – with this other theory about Jon Snow's parentage; hence the R+L=J+M.

Despite the fact that Jon Snow looks a hell of a lot older than Meera in the TV series, this impressively in-depth Wiki of Ice and Fire lists the birth years of both characters as 283 AC – which would make them the same age. When you add in the fact that Lyanna Stark is also listed by the Wiki as dying in 283 AC (and Meera's supposed father Howland Reed was with Ned at the Tower of Joy on the day they went to find Lyanna), it seems like there's more than enough ground for a good old fan theory.

You know Meera, she's the gal with the bow and the sister of the mysterious Jojen. They weren't seen this past season and are probably still just hanging around with that old tree dude, who turned out to be the three-eyed crow.

If this theory is true, it basically means three things.

1. Jon Snow might actually be dead, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

2. Meera's got a much bigger role to play than we thought.

3. Game of Thrones stole the plot of Star Wars and added lots of sex.

"My father has it, I have it, my sister has it, and they all did each other." — Jon Snow, maybe

Game of Thrones spoilers may occur. You've been warned.

There's no real reason we can surmise why Katniss Everdeen would aim her bow and the other 12 districts against Jon Snow, or why she would kill Ygritte of all people, but there it is.

By all accounts, Jon Snow had a pretty terrible end of this last season.

And depending on what we recently saw as filming began on Game of Thrones season 6, it might not have been as bad as it looked(?).

Katniss hasn't had an easy life either. So it seems pretty insensitive of her to go after Ned Stark's bastard. Still, the people of Westeros don't live fair lives full of justice.

It's a great mashup and makes us wonder just how Jon Snow would fare in The Hunger Games competition. He'd probably have a terrible time getting sponsors. We all know he's the worst dinner party guest.

Here's the most recent trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, which mercifully directs Katniss away from the Wall:

Oh Steve-O, you have not been kind to your balls over the years.