The Least Erotic Thing in the Seven Kingdoms

Someone had to make the Game of Thrones porn parody, and someone did. It’s called Game of Bones, put out by a studio called Woodrocket, and the first few episodes arrived with exactly the kind of anticipation a premise like that deserves—which is a lot. The execution arrived with considerably less.

The trailer alone is enough to explain why finishing to this requires either an extraordinary commitment to the bit or a level of desperation I can only salute from a distance. Cheap costumes, cheaper sets, and whatever was supposed to carry the thing—production value, chemistry, actual sex appeal—is absent from all of it. There’s a dispiriting gap between what this should be and what it is.

Which is genuinely baffling, because the source material practically does the work for you. Game of Thrones is already ninety percent sex, power, and bodies doing things to other bodies in candlelit rooms. Making a porn parody of it should be like scoring a penalty: nearly impossible to miss. And yet here we are.