Photo via HBO
If you look past the disembowelings, mass slaughter, human flesh pies, and general rapaciousness, Game of Thrones is obviously an extended metaphor for global warming hatched by a sinister liberal elitist small council to sway an impressionable young audience to their PC agenda.Such, at least, is the contention of a coterie of perfectly reasonable, non-reaching, academically credible internet people who cite a 2012 paper by Dr. Charli Carpenter, which contends that, far from being mere bloody-minded entertainment, the television show is intended to "trigger public discussion about the dangers of global warming" (actually, the paper is perfectly smart, but you wouldn't know it from the videos and articles spread by venues hungry for the slightest amount of GOT content well after the end of the last season).Well, kudos to HBO for giving fans an in-universe reason to hope for global warming: It looks like filming the record-breaking fantasy series will have to wait until late summer—and air later than previous seasons—in order to accommodate the long winter announced by a white raven in the show's finale. This, on top of the recent news that seasons seven and eight would only contain a total of 13 episodes.The channel's president, Casey Bloys, announced Monday that, "now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing." Which is really no apology at all, because what are we supposed to do when we are literally waiting for the seasons to change (while there is still such a thing as "seasons")?At least HBO has given us The Night Of, to help pass the dark and terror-filled nights of waiting to come.Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, BOMB, and the New Republic.Read his other writing on VICE_ _here.