Long Enough

I remember refreshing for this trailer. The fourth season was coming in a few weeks, and HBO had finally dropped the first real one. Game of Thrones had everyone gripped by then—the show where nobody was safe, where power shifted like sand, where you couldn’t predict who’d make it to the next episode. We’d all been waiting through an endless off-season.

Nothing crazy, just footage from the new season cut the way trailers always are. Wars, chaos, the usual. But everyone was parsing it frame by frame, trying to see what was coming. Would Daenerys actually make a move on the throne? What about Cersei—was she finished? Joffrey was still around being awful. Margaery was playing her angles. The rest of us were guessing, spinning theories that would probably be dead wrong.

The waiting felt eternal in that pre-streaming, weekly-episode way. You couldn’t just binge it. You had to sit in the uncertainty, the speculation. Everyone had someone they thought would end up with the thing, and most of those people were wrong. That was kind of the point of the show—your favorite was probably already dead.

I don’t remember exactly what happened in season four anymore, or what I was sure would happen. But I remember that specific flavor of anticipation, the feeling that something major was about to shift, that the board was about to get turned over again. The trailer was just an excuse to psych yourself up for the wait.