Lame of Thrones Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by The Harvard Lampoon

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover illustration by Isabel Gibney

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  This book is a parody and has not been prepared, approved, endorsed, or authorized by the author or publisher of A Song of Ice and Fire or the creators or producers of Game of Thrones.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: November 2020

  Published by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Interior art credit: Isabel Gibney and Nicole Araya

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-87367-6 (trade paperback), 978-0-306-87370-6 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935644

  E3-20200507-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Preface from the Author

  Jon

  Bland

  Dennys

  Cervix

  Malarya

  Jon

  Bland

  Dennys

  Jon

  Malarya

  Dennys

  The Nighty Night King

  Jon

  George R. R. Martin

  Malarya

  Lemme

  Dennys

  Cervix

  Beerion

  Jon

  Beerion

  LeBronn

  Jon

  Toast

  Eddddd

  Whoremund

  Ham

  Boats

  Dog Shit

  Pantsa

  Screw It: Malarya, Ham, and Beerion

  Epilogue

  Discover More

  Appendix

  About the Harvard Lampoon

  Also by The Harvard Lampoon

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  Preface from the Author

  Dear Fans,

  As I dictate this to you, I’m lounging in Cabo with my feet on the biggest pair of knockers they’ve ever seen. You gotta trust me on this, but these knockers make the knockers on the TV version of Game of Thrones look like the knockers in the book version of Game of Thrones.

  It’s me: George R. R. Martin (net worth: $100 million). If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have a TV. I have nine TVs—and that’s not even counting my tenth TV. I’m, how do I put this delicately, really goshdarn fucking rich now. Why is this? Well, let me tell you.

  It’s summer 1996, and I’m on the Strip. I open up my typewriter, make sure my ink ribbon is full, and realize my rampant, unrelatable obsession with fantasy is a nonissue. I should write a book about dragons, I think. I black in two months later, and somehow my fifteen-page pop-up children’s book about dragons has become a nine-hundred-page pop-up children’s book about dragons. Shit shit shit! Too long, George! Too long!

  Yada yada yada, my editor got rid of the pop-ups, made me add more human sex, cut two hundred consecutive pages that were just last names of all the barbers in the Game of Thrones universe, and that’s basically the first novel you’ve all come to know and love!

  Fast-forward 25 years. Fast-forward 100 more years. Now rewind 102 years. It’s 2019, and HBO has turned my book series into the preeminent softcore porn series. At this point, I’m rich as a mother-effing motherfucker. I haven’t seen the show in years, but my friends describe the episodes to me. Sounds pretty good. Sounds exactly like how I would’ve done it. But now they want me to finish off these damn books.

  Now look, I really wish I could end this series with a forty-five-slide PowerPoint, but fans always complain to me when I don’t wrap up each character’s story arc in a fulfilling way. Apparently, I introduced a character called “Trashbag” in the second book and never mentioned him again. I am accosted about the fate of this character on a weekly basis. Did you know I have introduced over three thousand characters in the novels who collectively have four thousand individual boobs with their own storylines? And as if I didn’t have that many boobs on my plate, imagine what would happen if I didn’t wrap up the character arc of the main guy in the books! The guy I killed. What’s his name? Tom? Tom Something? Tom?

  I have been told repeatedly that it’s taken me over a decade to write this book, and it’s likely that many of my fans have forgotten some of the plot points during that time. Personally, I have never read a preface or a prologue or an introduction or an author’s note in my life. I just skip to the book and deal with the ensuing confusion like an adult. For the sake of the children who read my dragon erotica, however, I will try to recap the plot as best I can. Jon! Dammit! That’s his name, not Tom. Oh God, did I write the whole book calling him Tom? Okay, if I did that, every time you see “Tom” just replace it with “Jon.”

  So yeah, Jon Dough is the main guy, yeah? What’s up with him? Ah, right. I’ve got to stop killing the main characters every time I get the itch. Speaking of which, Chauncibell, when you get a moment, fetch some more of my talcum powder. Okay, so Jon was the Bored Demander of the Night’s Crotch, which means he was basically in charge of the guys who defend the Trench. Of course the Trench is some sort of magical thing up north, built to keep out the Mildlings. Trench? No, was it a trench, it was… Yes. Yes, it was a Trench, must’ve been. The White Wieners and the zombos, they’re there too. Chauncibell, this is real talcum powder. Yes, I know I said “itch.” But do I look itchy to you? I am a model of cleanliness and health. When I said talcum powder I meant another mimosa. You should be able to anticipate my needs regardless of what I ask for. White Wieners and the zombos and they’re led by… the White Wieners and the zombos are led by…Come on, George, come on, man.

  The Nighty Night King! Right. And Jon saved all these Mildlings from him and brought them south of the Trench to Casablacka with the Night’s Crotch. Some of the guys in the Night’s Crotch got really mad about that and all stabbed Jon. Now he’s dead. Unless… it was all a dream! A dream? And there never was a Game of Thrones, and the little kid dreaming the dream went back to sleep and lived happily ever after?

  Wait, no, George, you’ve tried this before, and every time your editor says, “The dream ending will not appease fans. It’s a cop out. You will become poor again.” So here we go, what else, what else?

  There
’s this witch named Smellisandre. There’s also Jon’s huge best friend Whoremund, who is a Mildling. Not his other huge best friend, the fat book guy. Ham? Hamuel? Hamwell Tardy? Eddddd, my man, from the Night’s Crotch is there, and he thinks he’s Jon’s best friend too. Just let him believe that. And finally, there’s this smuggler named Ser Boats McSeaman who was trying to learn how to read and used to be second in command for Stankass Boaratheon. Basically those four people and also Jon’s direwolf, Toast, are all just sort of locked in this room at Casablacka with Jon’s dead body? What are they going to do about it? He’s dead, okay? Unless, no. Fuck. Did I already try the dream thing?

  Whatever, he’s dead right now. One storyline down. I really just want to apologize about how many characters there are, folks. That was, you know, I really went overboard with the characters. It’s too many. Okay? You all know Dennys Grandslam. She’s also the main character. Very pretty. Silver hair. I want to touch the hair. All she cares about is eventually sitting on the Pointy Chair and becoming queen of Westopolis, and so to help her do that, she freed the city of Submeereen, which is not actually in Westopolis, and she tried to install a government there by crucifying the former slavemasters and listening to individual complaints one after another in a pyramid. I don’t know, guys, I was high for most of the nineties. Anyway, she freed the slaves, and the old slave owners were mad. So mad, they besieged the city, and then Dennys got kidnapped by the Clothkhaki. Funny story, I came up with the entire Clothkhaki language by sneaking drugs into my butler Chauncibell’s food and recording the sounds he made.

  Now Peter Dinklage is running Submeereen with Ms. Andei (the translator) and Dog Shit (the Funsullied leader). Shit, Beerion. Not Peter Dinklage, that’s the… eh—whatever, copyediting will catch that before this gets published. Dennys’s dragons are locked up in a basement.

  Let’s go, I don’t know, north now. Bland Snark. Bland is the handicapped kid. What else is there to say? He has visions and is hiding in a huge old tree north of the Trench with a wise man called the Pink-Eyed Raven, who is teaching him to be better at having visions. Bland overcompensates for his broken legs by doing a lot of upper-body exercises. Is that true? I cannot remember if that’s explained in the first four thousand pages of the Game of Thrones series, but I remember wanting that to be true. If it’s not there, I’m just deciding now that it’s still canon. I declare it… true!

  Then there’s the main character, Cervix Bangsister. She was the queen of Westopolis until her husband died, so her son Jeffy became king, and then he died, and now her son Timid is king. She hates Timid’s wife, Manmeat Thighspell, because she gets to be queen instead of Cervix and also because she gets to have sex with Timid instead of her. Cervix is in King’s Landing Strip now and just got in trouble with the religious freaks there. The Beaky Buzzards, I calls ’em. Scariest cult any writer has ever written! I once got in trouble with a church, oh yes. A priest caught me impersonating him in the confessional booth. I heard forty confessions, and I wrotes ’em all down! Forty confessions is forty more intimate personal stories that I can turn into eight hundred more characters for me to use in me books!

  Anywho, Cervix won’t confess for doing incest with her brother, Ser Lemme Bangsister. God, the forty-five-slide PowerPoint ending sounds so tempting right about now. Why, George? Why all the characters? You just couldn’t stop could you. Introduced that dumbass character “Trashbag” just because you were bored and out of coke. You’re paying for it now, George, huh?

  Lemme got kidnapped and got his butt cut off. No, not his butt. Hahaha, could you imagine? How could I possibly have a character without a butt? That wouldn’t be hot at all. Hahaha, imagine that. A character without a butt? Preposterous! Lemme actually got his head cut off, and even though it’s been replaced by a prosthetic gold head, it’s put a strain on most facets of his life. Lemme also hangs out with my man LeBronn, the sellsword. If there is one character I can see myself in, it’s gotta be him. He, similarly to me, is just so sick. He’s so cool. He’s—he’s just the man. He’s the best character by far and secretly the main character. You’ll see.

  Okay, think, think, think. Characters, Georgie, characters. Uhhhh… Gorlon? No, that’s not one. Hmmmm… Malarya? Malarya Snark. Yeah, that’s one of them. Okay, she’s gross and loves violence. She’s way out in Blahblahblahvos training to be even better at violence. Her sister Pantsa is the spoiled, hot one of questionable age. Littledingle convinced Pantsa to marry Handsy Boytoy, that misunderstood guy with the dogs. Last we heard from her, I had her jump off a castle and not die by landing in a few inches of snow. Now she’s free, baby!!! Pantsa Snark is on the loose, everybody!

  Who else? Someone name a character. Anyone. God these mimosas are bottomless as hell. Yes, one more please. Chauncibell! I’m on a roll here, man, bring me my catheter so I don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom. I’m definitely forgetting at least half of the storylines. I feel like there’s a wizard or something? A teenage wizard with a unique scar, maybe? Or, like, a cat with a big personality? Ahhhhhh, screw it. You guys will figure it out.

  Anyway, I present you with the final book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying this handjob right now that I paid for with your money.

  Best,

  Georgie

  Jon

  This book sucks!” screamed Ser Boats McSeaman, hurling said book across the room. It could have been full of spells for bringing people back to life, but the lack of pictures and fun reading-comprehension questions made it unintelligible to Boats. Once again his inability to read had prevented him from reading. He was furious.

  Boats huddled over Jon Dough’s corpse. Knocks continued to pound on the heavy oak door that stood as the only defense between Jon’s allies and the traitors who had taken over Casablacka and killed their own Bored Demander of the Night’s Crotch.

  “Everything is pointless, and we’re all gonna die,” said Eddddd in his low monotone. Boats punched him clear across the room and into a corner, still angered by all the time he’d wasted trying to read the spell book.

  “Perhaps I can try one of my spells. I have seen dead men brought back to life before, and though my morale is low since I haven’t set anyone on fire in so long, there is a chance I can still help Jon” is what Smellisandre would have said if Boats hadn’t hurled three bookcases at her in the middle of the first word. Boats rampaged around the room, destroying every written word in sight. He even ripped a beam out of the ceiling because it sort of resembled the letter I.

  Whoremund, who had been sleeping off the fermented hog urine he drank not ten minutes before, was awakened by the sound of Boats ripping ten books in half at once with his teeth. Whoremund immediately joined in, savaging every book he could find without asking any questions. While Ser Boats and Whoremund ripped up every instance of the written word they could find, Smellisandre scrambled to her feet and raced to revive Jon before Boats noticed that she looked like a lowercase t if she held her arms out to the side. She took a deep breath and began:

  “O Fire Man,

  Father of all,

  Put down that beer

  And hear my call.

  You see this kid here?

  ‘Jon,’ I think?

  Please make him not dead.

  He’s starting to stink.

  So stick out your hip

  And swing your hair.

  Shake that rump like you just don’t care.

  Hand me the codeine, hand me the Sprite.

  Let’s go, Seahawks. Fight, fight, fight.”

  Toast, Jon’s faithful direwolf, looked hopefully at his master. But nothing happened. Smellisandre turned away and looked sadly at Whoremund and Boats. They looked at Jon, then at Smellisandre, then back at Jon, then at each other; then Whoremund looked at Jon while Boats kept staring at Whoremund. Then Smellisandre stared at the person to the left of her, who was on Whoremund’s right and was perpendicular to Toast. Who was the person?

  It was hopeless. Whoremund, Boats
, and Smellisandre started to leave the room when they heard a shuffling from behind them. They turned to Jon’s body and saw his chest rising and falling. This turned out to be a rat gnawing at Jon’s cold, dead ribcage underneath his shirt. Disappointed, they started opening the door when they heard a “Gosh, wow, I’m alive again! I really am!” But it was just the wind.

  As the three of them continued for the door, Jon suddenly whipped back into life with one quick breath, but Whoremund was the only one who noticed. Whoremund jumped and shrieked like a little girl. Everyone started laughing at Whoremund since it looked like he was freaking out for no reason. Eddddd laughed so hard, he peed his pants and then draped them over Whoremund’s face and called him a little pee boy. Smellisandre laughed so hard she gave Whoremund a wedgie and then burned a kid alive who was standing outside.

  “Gosh, wow, I’m alive again! I really am!” the wind whistled again. Jon shut the window so the breeze wouldn’t drown him out. “You guys, I can’t believe it! You brought me back”—Jon went in for one of his trademark group hugs but slipped on the blood from his wounds, slid across the room, and impaled himself on a sword—“to life!” he managed to croak before passing away.

  “Hahaha, miss me already?” said Jon to Whoremund and Boats as they tried desperately to keep the door shut and hold off the traitors. Smellisandre got up from where she was reciting her spells, hoping nobody noticed that she got so scared when Jon woke up again for the second time that she herself had peed in her pants a little bit.

  “Jon, you need to be more careful. I may not be able to bring you back again. I don’t know how much power I have here in the North, and without people to burn… people to burn… people… burn… Mildlings… burn Mildlings…” Smellisandre panted, her pupils dilating, a wild smile forming on her face.

  “The Mildlings! Of course, how could I forget!” yelled Jon. “They must be so worried without me!” Jon pulled Whoremund with him toward the door. “Whoremund, we must go see your people! They need to know that I’ve been brought back”—Jon kicked open the door and came face-to-face with his assassins, Asserhole Thorn, Fucknugget, and Orphan Kid, who had been waiting outside the room this whole time. Asserhole immediately stabbed him in the heart—“to life!” Jon managed to croak before passing away.