... is actually J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, thousands of years after the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Via Lotr.Wikia.com
Sadly, Frodo didn't live long enough to enjoy all the boobs.

Crazy as it sounds, the geographic evidence is there. The Misty Mountains line up with the Narrow Sea, from its sharp curve in the north to the perpendicular T at its south. What are the Misty Mountains doing underwater? Well, according to Tolkien's official gospel of Middle-Earth, The Silmarillion, the Misty Mountains were subsiding at a crazy rate, either due to magic or too many parties of adventurers singing Led Zeppelin songs all over them. The Silmarillion also describes the god-like Iluvatar creating entire seas and continents at will a mere century before the opening battle from The Fellowship Of The Ring, so when you're talking in terms of millennia, it's not too much of a stretch to infer that the face of Middle-Earth morphed into Westeros while its inhabitants were busy inventing incest.

HBO
As well as the technology to drop about seven letters from everybody's names and start going by 'Jon' or 'Robb.'

Even the disparate regions of both worlds match up. The Shire is in the North, where the children of the forest (Hobbits?) dwell alongside face-having Weirwood trees (maybe the Ents finally went full tree). The "men of the west" remain in Westeros, Gondor is Dorne, while Rohan is in Essos, its riders having journeyed eastward and intermingled with the warlike Rhun to become the Dothraki. As for Mordor, it's right about where Valyria was until "the Doom" -- a mysterious, allegedly volcanic cataclysm which proponents of this theory insist was Mount Doom erupting one last time, probably launching smelted Gollum bits clear out into space.

New Line Cinema

HBO
Here it is erupting in the opening credits.

As further proof, some fans even spotted Gandalf's sword, Glamdring, forged into the Iron Throne.

Via io9
Yep. No other sword has ever looked like that.

Of course, eagle-eyed fans examining fiction's most murderous musical chair have also spotted swords from Kingdom of Heaven, a historical drama that stars Legolas as a 12th-century crusader. So maybe they're all time travelers.

For starters, she speaks 19 languages on the show, like some kind of fucking protocol droid. In the books, she's only 10 years old when we first meet her, yet she claims to have memories of her two brothers before they became Unsullied, which doesn't add up, because Unsullied training takes longer than she's supposedly been alive. She also has legitimate superpowers, in one case mentioning that she could hear slaves "scratching" on the city walls ... from a half-mile away. That's some Daredevil-level shit.

Tages-Anzeiger
Our demands that George R.R. Martin give an explanation for this didn't exactly go as planned.

Fans have the perfect explication for Missandei's quirks, however: She's secretly a Faceless Man, one of the order of creepy assassins Arya Stark has been interning for since season five. And Arya's experience adds credence to this theory. In Braavos, she meets a "little girl" who turns out to be 36 years old, which might explain how Missandei knows so many languages at her young age. In another scene, Missandei stands alongside a corpse (mirroring Arya's experiences in the House of Black and White) and comments that the dead man is "smiling," despite the fact his lips are completely burnt off. Even Arya's transition into a Faceless Man -- aka "no one" -- parallels how Missandei frequently refers to herself as "this one" -- something she struggles with despite her absolute ownage of linguistics.

If Missandei is indeed a Faceless Man, it could have enormous implications. To begin with, the Faceless Men descend from ancient slaves who killed their masters in a super-secret plot. Were they planning a similar insurrection at Slaver's Bay around the time Daenerys showed up and adopted Missandei? Do the Faceless Men support Dany's campaign against slavery, or do they view her and her dragons as simply another symbol of oppression? Are there more assassins planted in other Houses, ready to strike? Are you still deciding whether or not you can live with yourself after hearing "Missandei is a ten-year-old"?

HBO
Dammit HBO, can't we go one Sunday without a weird, regrettable erection?

There's a prophecy from the books which we have yet to see or hear in full on Game Of Thrones. It's about a legendary hero named Azor Ahai, a Christlike figure destined to return and save the world at its darkest hour. As the legend goes, Azor Ahai wields Lightbringer, a magical sword forged by tempering the blade in the heart of a captured lion and then, when that didn't work, plunging it into the heart of his loving wife, causing the steel to be imbued with "her blood and her soul and her strength and her courage."

The general fan consensus regarding who will turn out to fulfill this prophecy is that there is no general fan consensus, with theories ranging from Jon to Daenerys to one of the Greyjoy uncles who have yet to appear on the show. But hold on a second ... you know who "captured a lion" recently? Jorah Mormont, Daenerys's sworn protector and perpetual Facebook stalker.

HBO
"Look, he's even got a mane and beard for it."

Perhaps it's sympathy for Jorah's pathetically unrequited love for Dany that has fans hoping he's destined to be the hero of the entire story. Regardless, the theory's not without merit. For instance, in the books, Daenerys promises Jorah a really awesome sword, which fans suspect will be Brightroar, a legendary Valyrian sword lost somewhere in the nearby Smoking Sea. And dig this: According to the prophecy, Azor Ahai will be reborn amidst salt and smoke.

The bad news is that if this theory is correct, Jorah is going to stab the shit out of both Tyrion and Dany (Azor Ahai perfected his enchanted blade by killing his wife and his captured lion with it). Your mourning period may be cut short, however, as Dany's death wail will cause the moon to crack open and release an entire army of pissed-off dragons (a predictably Dothraki contribution to the legend) in time to save Westeros from the White Walkers.

HBO
Hopefully that'll fit in the budget, so we don't just skip directly to everyone talking about how amazing all those off-screen dragons were.

Things don't end much happier for Jorah. Fans speculate that his story would end with him fulfilling his father's dying wish by taking the black as the 1,000th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. Hey, it's not like he was getting laid anytime soon anyway.

Last time around, we detailed the (quite likely accurate) fan theory that a certain brooding, snow-caked bastard boy is much more than he seems -- that Jon Snow is in fact of royal blood, the secret son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. Well, according to another fan theory, not only is Jon Snow royalty, but he's also going to rain royal frozen justice upon Westeros from his perch atop a ginormous ice dragon. Kind of like the final scene of The NeverEnding Story, if Bastian and Falkor killed everyone in the fucking world.

If an ice dragon sounds like the whimsical subject of a children's story, that's because it is -- a children's story written by a certain prodigiously middle-named author, to be exact:

Luis Royo/Tor Teen
Wouldn't be out of place in a series that snuck in Harry Potter, the Three Stooges, and the fucking Dallas Cowboys.

Originally written a good two decades before the publication of A Game Of Thrones and republished in 2014 because Martin's publishers needed money to buy new pants after shitting their old ones over the tremendous success of the HBO series, The Ice Dragon recounts the tale of a young girl who befriends an ice dragon. But it's a totally separate book, right? What does it have to do with A Song Of Ice And Fire? Well, aside from the fact that the setting of the book feels an awful lot like Westeros, ice dragons do exist in the Game Of Thrones universe ... or at least, legends of them do. The World of Ice & Fire describes centuries of reported sightings of the beasts around the Shivering Sea, and Jon Snow on multiple occasions recalls the story of an ice dragon that Old Nan told him when he was a child in Winterfell.

HBO
Too bad she died before covering more of Martin's back catalog. Book Six could've had steamboat vampires and psychedelic murder cults.

Some fans even posit that the story Old Nan was telling was literally The Ice Dragon, like she was reading a copy of the book aloud to him. The theory goes on to suggest that the pond next to Winterfell's godswood is actually the hibernating ice dragon, which (spoiler alert!) melts into a pond at the end of the story.

So what does this mean for the plot as a whole? Well, fans speculate that once Daenerys's barely-tamed dragons make short work of the White Walkers, someone will need to keep said dragons in check. Enter a resurrected Jon with his similarly-resurrected ice dragon, a beast that dwarfs its fiery cousins and "breathes death into the world," which we hope is true, because it is metal as shit.

Tor Teen
Which is nothing less than this Dio album of a book jacket deserves.

It gets better. Some fans speculate that the ice dragon is hibernating within the Wall itself. When the wildlings' search for the Horn of Joramun -- a magical artifact said to be capable of awakening the giants from the earth -- finally comes to fruition, the Wall will crumble and Jon's icy new steed will awaken from its long winter's nap.

Time to bulk up the ol' FX budget, HBO.

At this point in his career, the only way you could spoil a film or series starring Sean Bean (aka Eddard Stark) is by revealing that he doesn't die. And that's precisely what some fans have set out to do with Game Of Thrones.

But wait! One of the biggest draws of the series is that it takes a gritty and realistic approach to the fantasy genre. And a plethora of YouTube reaction videos survive as evidence that we all clearly watched Ned get his melon lopped off at the end of season one. The creators wouldn't dare glue a dead character back together and bring him back to life, right?

HBO
"That's right! For example, I am a brand-new character who is totally alive!"

According to a theory by modern-day scholar and gift to humanity "cuntfungus_inc," they didn't have to. See, just because Ned's body didn't survive, that doesn't mean Ned didn't. Any fan of this series is familiar with the concept of warging -- entering the mind of another person or animal, as Ned's broke-legged son Bran can do. If this ability runs in the family, then there's a good possibility that Ned possessed it as well. Maybe his fear or misunderstanding of the power was why he was initially so reluctant to allow his kids to adopt direwolves as pets.

So if Ned -- possibly involuntarily -- warged into another being right as the sword dropped in his execution, whom did he warg into? Probably the person nearest to him at the time: tongueless executioner and vacant-stare specialist Ilyn Payne. It would've either been him or Joffrey.

HBO
Even a choice between this guy and Joffrey is no choice at all.

Think of the repercussions. Ilyn Payne is intimately trusted by the Lannisters, meaning Ned could take his new body anywhere in King's Landing and no one would ever question him on it, mainly because that would be pointless. Is Game Of Thrones about to become the ultimate undercover ghost spy tale? It certainly isn't the craziest way the show could go off the rails.

It's no secret that George R. R. Martin borrows heavily from history for his plotlines and characters. YouTube user TED-Ed even put together a nifty video detailing how closely Game Of Thrones follows the Wars of the Roses, sans a few dragons and plus an infinite number of bare asses:

You could spoil entire seasons of the show simply by brushing up on English history. But then, what about the dragons and the White Walkers? What about the magic and the resurrections and all the shithouse crazy that incessantly tumbles out of Melisandre's mouth? One theory states that in order to both better understand all that and to predict what might go down in the final two books, you should consult the Bible -- specifically, the Book of Revelation. (If nothing else, this could explain all the incest.)

The idea is that A Song Of Ice And Fire is a novelization of Revelation 12-19, aka the Biblical Apocalypse. It's like Martin read all those vague allusions to horsemen and dragons and decided to write up a straight literary adaptation. For instance, the Bible mentions a dragon with seven heads and seven crowns, which sounds a lot like the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros under Targaryen rule.

Kimon Berlin, Via Game Of Thrones Wiki
Some heads may have been lost in translation.

The archangel Michael? That's Robert Baratheon. The Beast with the number 666 is Daenerys and her dragons. The savior rallying the people behind his father's name is a resurrected Jon Snow-cum-Targaryen, and the "new song" he sings is "the Song of Ice and Fire," presumably to entertain himself as he "rule[s] all the nations with an iron scepter" ... or maybe an Iron Throne.

So, using Revelation 12-19 as our spoiler thread, what should we expect from here on out? A surprisingly coherent conclusion to Game Of Thrones, if you can believe it. Westeros will be hit by seven plagues -- we're guessing war, grayscale, the mean shitting plague that Daenerys encounters, and one or two venereal diseases will make that list -- until Jon shows up, "clean and white" save for a cloak "dipped in blood" (the Night's Watch cloak in which his brothers profusely aerated him). Then he'll lead "the armies which were in heaven" (the undead White Walkers) upon white horses (or maybe ice dragons) and defeat Daenerys's eastern forces with the help of the zombie corps. There's your final twist: The White Walkers turn out to be the resurrected righteous, Daenerys the power-hungry evil that must be overthrown. Sounds like the kind of shit Martin would pull.

Jacopo is the author of License To Quill, a James-Bond-esque spy thriller starring William Shakespeare and Guy Fawkes during the Gunpowder Plot, so please click here to own it now!

Deep inside us all -- behind our political leanings, our moral codes, and our private biases -- there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can't help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

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