Westeros Goes Pop

Joffrey’s body was barely cold and The Warp Zone already had a Game of Thrones pop medley up on YouTube—characters from across the great houses singing their way through their respective miseries. It’s the kind of thing that makes the week between episodes feel marginally more survivable.

The production is tight, the performances committed, and the whole thing demonstrates a real working knowledge of the show’s emotional geography. Cersei’s grievances set to pop music land differently than you’d expect. American YouTube has always had a particular facility for this kind of synthesis—the infrastructure, the production values, the sheer confidence to make something ambitious on a Tuesday. The gap between that and what was coming out of European channels in 2014 was embarrassingly wide. Mostly still is.