"Game of Thrones: Season 7"

Oh joy, oh joy, it started again!

The best TV series I had encountered in my entire life is back again and it is the only series where I didn't get tired after initial first two seasons but it just gets better and better with time. There are some people who told me they just can't get into it and dismiss it for expecting its something about magic and swords, but its not like that at all - yes, its all happening in the fictional world, continents of  Westeros and Essos but if you can't accept something that has been created with such brilliant inspiration and imagination as George R. R. Martin's series of epic fantasy novels, well in that case this is simply not for you and you can go back to the same old detective/crime/car crash TV shows that we see all the time. I actually don't understand how can anyone dislike "Game of Thrones" because it is so gripping, fascinating and perfect in any way that once you get involved in all that plots and subplots that are happening on various parts of the empire, its impossible not to follow it with a religious zest.

I probably wrote this earlier and I will repeat it again - "Game of Thrones" is completely revolutionary and it became deservedly a world wide phenomenon because it changed the concept of invincible hero who slays armies and always comes out without a ruffled hair. In the world of Seven Kingdoms danger is constantly in the air, there are zillion of Byzantine-like intrigues and nobody is invincible - every single person might get killed just when you least expect it so it eventually became sort of huge roman arena with main characters fighting for survival. George R. R. Martin got inspiration for some real life historical stories ("Red wedding" actually happened in medieval Scotland, the idea of a great ice wall protecting the kingdom is actually Hadrian's Wall and so on) and if you think TV adaptations are excellent, you should try the novels - they are even better in a sense of having more characterisations and details, but for once I have no problem with this and love both novels and TV series. 

At first - I still remember my initial reaction - I found all of this too complicated. There were apparently hundreds of characters spread all over the kingdom and than we had completely another story happening in the other continent so I would get all fidgety every time Khaleesi came on the screen with all her Dothraki warriors and dragons because it seemed like unimportant subplot that just slows down the main story - but after a while I got it all, memorized who is who, got addicted to the story and even started to enjoy Khaleesi specially as it became clear that her story is not just a meandering but it leads to certain very important connections with the mainland. Because there are so many characters (and they are dying like flies all over the place) it seems that sometimes they drift in and out of the focus - there were times when we were very interested in for example, clever dwarf Tyrion Lannister, crippled boy Bran Stark, the eunuch spymaster Lord Varys or fantastic female warrior Brienne of Tarth (just to name a few) but than suddenly we don't hear anything about them for a while, because story changes the course into something else and we might glimpse them much later. Anybody remembers young blacksmith Gendry who in reality was King's Robert Baratheon real son? And what about exiled knight Ser Jorah Mormont who got that terrible disease and just disappeared afterwards? Vengeful Ellaria Sand and her daughters once appeared as potentially very important fraction against Lannisters and now we don't see them anymore. I could go on like this for a while, but I trust that creators of TV series understand all of this and will eventually connect all the dots at some point. Since until now there were only five of George R. R. Martin's original novels, the story continues without actually having literary background but it is clear that HBO producers know where they are going.

Having to wait a year for the new season mean that I was a bit anxious about will I actually remember where the story ended the last time around - as it happened, I had no problem with it at all, in fact as it season 7 started, the very first scene brought me back just where I needed to be and I enjoyed the first episode with a great passion, watching it twice and even re-watching some of my favourite scenes. I laughed out loud at  Samwell Tarly antics and shivered at the sight of The Night King and the White Walkers, loved to see all the familiar characters again and just wishing the episode was twice as long, so we could have bit more about ones we missed. I love this series so much that I could watch (and read) it all over again, from the start.