Hello and welcome to Queer's Fiction, the podcast where we talk about how queer history is handled in the media.

My name is Eli.

And I'm Jason.

And today we're talking about the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones.

Now Jason, I can't help but notice that this isn't actually a history TV show, a book series.

So why on earth are we doing this episode?

So, yeah, secretly I've sabotaged the podcast.

Now it's a media podcast entirely.

No, the real reason... How fitting of you, given the topic, I guess.

The real reason is that Game of Thrones represents an archetype of a type of media,

and that is the sort of historical fiction, which is to say, as most people I feel are aware

at this point, Game of Thrones takes a lot of inspiration from the War of the Roses and from specific historical time periods and places.

There's clear inspiration there.

And so, yeah, I think it's interesting to talk about the ways in which authors depict

queer people in their historical fiction in terms of what it represents about their views of those time periods

and also just our general cultural views of those time periods.

Also, on a less intellectually legitimate note, people keep requesting that we do media that just

isn't historical at all.

So we were asked to do Love Simon and we were asked to do disobedience and I don't know,

there's been a few others.

And so I guess this is us kind of like dipping our toe into the water of not talking about something that's strictly

historical and if people seem to like it maybe on very special occasions we'll do so going forward

...