At this article’s publish time, it has been 348 days since August 27th, 2017 — the date that “The Dragon and the Wolf,” the final episode of Game of Thrones’ seventh season aired. It’s becoming clear that fans are desperately in need of an injection of new material to the canon, if only so they can have something new to debate and theorize about.
Spoilers for Game of Thrones season 7 ahead
Proof of this is in the latest “revelation” from last year’s season finale, found by Reddit users in the official script of the episode. It says that the recently zombified ice dragon Viserion was, in fact, breathing blue fire, and not, as another faction apparently believed, some sort of ice breath (via io9).
This question was already settled by episode director Jeremy Podeswa as soon as the episode aired in an interview with HuffPost: “The way I looked at it was, when the sept burned down, that was green fire, and so then the dragon is going to have some kind of blueish fire,” he said. “It’s certainly still fire — it has the ability to burn the Wall and melt snow. But it’s going to have a different kind of magical quality to it, because it’s coming from an undead dragon.” (That’s in addition to the common sense of using fire to break down a giant wall of ice, but I digress.)
The fandom has resorted to collectively poring over any new material for a crumb of fresh ‘Thrones’ news
In the drought of new Game of Thrones content, the fandom has resorted to collectively poring over any new material — be it a script, a leaked set report, or a hint from George R.R. Martin’s blog — for a crumb of fresh Thrones news, even if it’s something we already knew.
Part of the problem lies with Martin. The theorizing and guessing-game aspects have always been a big part of the fan community surrounding the A Song of Ice and Fire books. But Martin’s novels have been on an even longer drought than then extended break before season 8 (2,586 days at the time this post was published, but who’s counting?). Even the most dedicated fans will run out of new ways to look at the text eventually, and Martin’s kept us all waiting a very long time. Sure, the influx of new information from the episodes of the show, which has long surpassed the timeline of the books, has certainly helped, but even that seems to be dwindling.
Unfortunately, the final season of Game of Thrones is not slated until sometime in 2019, so we still have a long way to go before we get our next Thrones fix. At least we have 640 pages of not-The Winds of Winter to look forward to in October.