Let’s Consider The Outrageous Implications Of The New ‘Game Of Thrones’ Poster

In HUGE news for all Thronies, the Game of Thrones season seven poster has finally been revealed, rolled out to promote HBO’s hit-show at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.

Now, let’s all just take a moment to appreciate everything that’s going on here, before we go on to deconstruct AT LENGTH each of the myriad of possibilities that this lush teaser could portend for the heavily anticipated seventh season.

Now, Game of Thrones hasn’t been shy to tease and titillate us with its previous seasons posters, such as the chilling and portentous ‘wall of dead people’ from season six. In a show known — nay renowned — for its flagrant disregard for people’s feelings when killing off fan favourites, this poster was a cheeky and grim promise that anyone — even Arya Stark — could be next, the fuel for George R.R. Martin’s monstrous hunger for blood and medieval banquets.

Or what about the season five poster? Is that a dragon? A goddamn dragon? It is. That’s amazing.

How can you possibly get better than the awesomeness of a dragon?

Well let’s see:

Now, on the surface, this might look like a really obvious reference to the blatant theme of the entire show, drawn from the name of the book series that Game of Thrones is based upon: A Song of Ice and Fire. If you look carefully, there is both ice… and fire. But it’s the extra details that have really gotten the fandom as excited for the new series as Joffrey is about poison pie.

If you think about it, it’s the lack of clues that is in essence the biggest clue: we’re all asking things like, ‘Will the funny man get his own dragon?’ and ‘What about the mean wine-queen, what’s she doing?’ but this poster, instead of answering yes or no, is saying that we are both ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ with our guesses. We are both near and far, neither here nor there.

This poster is a liminal promise of nothing at all. Nothing at all.

But let’s think four-dimensionally about this: what happens when ice meets fire? It’s the original odd couple! Things do not work out well for anyone. In fact, ‘Things Do Not Work Out Well for Anyone’ is a great slogan for the show. In Game of Thrones, ice can either represent the hardy people of the North, and their disastrous clashes with their decadent enemies in the South.

Or it could be referencing the clash of ice zombies known as ‘White Walkers’ versus dragons, known as ‘Spicy Wing Boys’. Or it could literally reference that giant wall of ice, cleverly known as ‘The Wall’ and perhaps there’s a grass fire sweeping towards it. I bet your boy Theon lit it, that scamp!

And what happens when ice meets fire? We get water, and as they often say, “water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink”, and if you replace water with “any information at all” then could not this poster perhaps be the perfect representation of water? It’s crazy how an almost minimalist poster strategy has actually created so much content, certainly far too much content for this humble writer to possibly get through. But i’ll give it a go! Sometimes when ice and fire come together it creates steam. That’s a fact.

It’s interest that one of the major components of this poster is a big hashtag — one might even say THE main component. We can do a lot with a hashtag, such as tweet about things. It’s such a good opportunity to get together and swap information about all the amazing theories that people are thinking up after seeing this poster.

Season 7 of Game of Thrones is coming. We just need to prepare for the incest. I know it's gonna happen ehhh?

— ShadyMac (@Honeyymac) March 9, 2017

In a way, is not ice and fire from the same elemental family? Is the ‘song’ in A Song of Ice and Fire about family members boning? I hope not.

But we should talk about the elephant in the room: when the hell is this crazy season dropping? In past years, they have overburdened us with specific dates. When this poster was released, all we discovered was that season seven was coming in ‘summer’. That seems overly vague, but then you think about Ned Stark’s crazy catchphrase “Winter Is Coming” and you realise it’s a sneaky wink. Summer too, is coming.

Or maybe we’re all being hoodwinked! Maybe we all think this is about Game of Thrones season 7, but the poster is saying “GOTS 7′: seven what exactly? What seven thing do we gots? Fans of the show might remember that the main religion of Westeros is worship of gods known as ‘The Seven’. A coincidence? I… I really think so.

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Game of Thrones is out sometime this year, I guess.

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Patrick Lenton is a writer from Sydney. He Tweets @patricklenton