Westeros, 1995

Sandor Clegane in a Simpsons t-shirt, Daenerys trailing ferrets like a 90s It Girl, Bronn in a three-stripe Adidas tracksuit. Mike Wrobel, the French artist who blogs under the name Moshi-Kun, took Game of Thrones and dropped it straight into the decade of dial-up and slap bracelets.

By the time that wedding went nuclear on television, the whole thing had already consumed everything. People who didn’t own a TV suddenly cared about Westeros. The books were everywhere. You couldn’t wait four years for the next season, so you read five hundred pages of George R.R. Martin in the original English if you could, then started again just to make sure it stuck.

Wrobel makes a lot of illustrations—Soprano, Vader, Gollum, the usual suspects from film and television. But the Game of Thrones series caught something different. Taking these bloodthirsty medieval characters and rendering them as children of the 90s works because the aesthetics are so violently opposed. A warrior burned half to death doesn’t wear a vintage Simpsons shirt. A dragon queen doesn’t trail ferrets. You look at it and for a second you’re laughing at the pure wrongness of it, but then something else happens. It just sits with you.

There’s something generous in the whole thing. He’s not saying Game of Thrones is silly, or that the 90s were great. He’s just holding them up next to each other and letting both things stay exactly what they are. Power and tragedy in Adidas windbreakers. That’s the joke and it’s also not a joke at all.