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An I-CON of Thrones (NYC area convention)


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I'm running the Game of Thrones/ASOIAF programming track at the I-CON scifi convention this weekend, in Suffolk County - outskirts of New York City.  New York Comic Con didn't have ANY GoT/ASOIAF programming this past year, I'm hoping to make up for that.

Elio has been supportive, GRRM tried to put a word in to his editor but that doesn't seem to have worked out.  Anyway, we've got 8 hours of lecture-style panels I'll be helming.

I made a little trailer:
 



Here is the website link, with panel descriptions:

http://schedule.iconsf.org/?s=thrones

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Best of luck.

And, maybe, next time announce the con here further in advance, so folks have a better shot at attending? (If I missed the announcement, apologies in advance.)

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Things were in flux for a while; I DID record them.  Updates soon.

The big surprise was....well, a major impact on medieval attitudes towards "Gender and Sexuality" is that they had an all-male priesthood.  Westeros, however, Faith of the Seven has a gender-blind priesthood.  Logically, this should lead to MASSIVE ripple effects in their societal model.  I've asked GRRM himself about this and he said it was an important question but would take a long time to explain why he chose to give their society female priests when the real Middle Ages did not.

Well the most surprising part was....during the "Gender and Sexuality in Westeros compared to the real Middle Ages" panel, NO ONE who hadn't read the books realized that septas are full priests - or that "the shame nun" Unella is actually *Cardinal* Unella of the Most Devout.  I mean, this was mind-blowing to them.  Six years into the show and they said they had no idea.  You'll see their reactions in the video. 

"Medieval Economics in Game of Thrones" was also good; I brought in some rare coins I have like a Roman coin to explain the difference between fiat money and commodity money (modern coins don't have precious metals in them, their value is abstract; medieval money had actual silver in it). 

The Costumes panel went pretty well (given that at the last minute I had to cut it down from nearly 3 hours to one hour by just focusing on the Seven Kingdoms themselves).....but, it was the first panel on Saturday morning at 10 am.  After St. Patrick's Day.  So it wasn't well-attended.  Though the costuming fans were quite impressed.

I had trivia questions on Sunday, gave out KFC chicken as prizes; 3 people had read the books, the others hadn't, and I tried to simplify the questions but they just kept going.  Like, one question that stumped even a book-reader was "which sword did King Maegor carry?"  Answer is Blackfyre, though they said Dark Sister (not a fair question maybe...he had Dark Sister THEN Blackfyre).

But the easy ones were like "name all seven Iron Islands", "name the major river that runs through the Riverlands" (the Trident) - they didn't get those.  Eventually it was like "name a dragon", and "name a direwolf", which still proved difficult. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I didn't report the convention sooner, because given how many "women in Game of Thrones" panels I was running, criticizing the portrayal of women in the TV show, I was worried that anti-books crazies would try to call in ahead of time to shut us down or cause trouble.  Now that the panels already went without incident, it's too late to stop for the future.

I recorded all the panels, please watch, comments welcome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JLINuOxJiY&index=1&t=4554s&list=PLxojMpX5XGoWb4yX5zeMvstlZnozOjiuK

 

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I'm glad your event went well.

 

FYI  there are far more anti-show crazies than anti-book crazies on this site.  or at least those of us that make it out of the show section of the board.   A lot of us haven't even made it into the show section.

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  • 3 months later...
On 4/1/2017 at 4:15 AM, Pebble said:

I'm glad your event went well.

 

FYI  there are far more anti-show crazies than anti-book crazies on this site.  or at least those of us that make it out of the show section of the board.   A lot of us haven't even made it into the show section.

What is this "show section" of which you speak, O Pebbly One?
The only valuable part of this board is the BWB section.
It is known.

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6 hours ago, DaveAx said:

What is this "show section" of which you speak, O Pebbly One?
The only valuable part of this board is the BWB section.
It is known.

I think it may be the Welsh bit.   ya know the alleged part the rest of the world thinks exists, but we will not be fooled by the conspiracy. 

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