Peddle Your Trailer Tricks Elsewhere, Game Of Thrones

Look, it’s the trailer for season six of Game of Thrones. Watch it real quick. Did you enjoy that? I’ll tell you something, pals: I did not enjoy watching it, because I don’t like being toyed with.

This trailer is Extreme Bullshit, because it’s not really a trailer. The first minute unfolds like normal—it’s okay to admit that the “Wicked Game” cover had you feeling things—but the last 40 seconds are a calculated act of cruelty. All the interesting shots have been saved for this final stretch, but they are presented in a breakneck mishmash of contextless images that can only be understood (by people who have way too much information on their hands) after a frame-by-frame breakdown.

Trailers do this all the time, and I hate it! I can’t just watch the thing and get excited about what’s going to happen; I have to scrutinize each individual frame, or wait for some heroic blogger to do the work for me. That’s exactly what studios want when they make trailers like this. They want to turn us into obsessive fanboys who don’t make it home from work on time because we’re too busy trying to figure out if that dude with two swords has a three-headed dragon seal on his chest, meaning that he could be a Targaryen loyalist, meaning that the half-second portion of the trailer in which Two-Sword Guy appears could be a flashback to Robert’s Rebellion, which could mean that we are going to see a young Ned Stark fucking up some Kingsguard in season 6 ...

... or Bran Stark doing some kind of drugs/becoming a tree and traveling through time to meet the Night’s King, who may be his relative and/or a fellow tree-drug user?

Meanwhile, what’s going on in this frame???

Is that Arya being a dope assassin??? The people who make Game of Thrones probably want us to think a lot about this.

I just want to go home.

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