I Think About Ed Sheeran'southward Game of Thrones Cameo a Lot

I Think About This a Lot  is a series dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.

I of my favorite things in the world is fantasy. The loftier-level ballsy stuff: multigenerational, warring kingdoms, paranormal romance, male child and his dragon, daughter and her sword, elves, talking bears — heavy, heavy fantasy. I beloved many things about it, but every bit I've gotten older and life has gotten harder, I've found that one of the genre's virtually appealing qualities is that it allows you to lose yourself and then thoroughly in another universe. It is pure, succulent escapism, and not in the manner that video games and alcohol are. A well-crafted work of fantasy feeds you.

All of this is to say, in spite of its various problems, Game of Thrones was very much my shit. And given my attraction to the fantasy genre, you can imagine my stupor and despair when I was watching an episode and multiplatinum Grammy-winning global superstar Ed Sheeran showed upwards.

I retrieve it well. It was 2017: I was watching the season-7 premiere with a group of friends when Arya stumbles across a group of enemy soldiers. One of them is singing. I recognize that voice, I thought. No, they wouldn't have. (They did.) And there appeared Sheeran, sitting around a campfire with other soldiers and singing in a strangely self-conscious voice: "For she was his secret treasure / She was his shame and his bliss / And a chain and a keep are nada / Compared to a woman's buss."

"Whaaat," I screamed, "Is Ed Sheeran doing hither?!"

Arya approaches, "That'south a pretty song," she tells Sheeran's character, "I've never heard it earlier." He turns and faces the camera. "Information technology's a new one," he says, with a twinkle in his center. Get it? (I later learned the campfire ditty was chosen "Hands of Gold," and it is available on Spotify.)

And still the scene continues, condign even more cringey. Arya banters and chats with the Lannister soldiers, and it seems similar Sheeran's graphic symbol has said his piece until he awkwardly tries to butt into the conversation: "Worst place in the world" he quips, an unnecessary addition to someone else's description of King's Landing. After that, he holds out a dead squirrel on a stick to Arya, not helpfully merely in a foppish kind of way. And then he just stares at her.

His expression throughout is i of blithe amusement, every bit if he's making a joke of the whole thing. Even the soldiers in the bear witness seem a footling puzzled. I tin imagine them talking among themselves when he's gone to salve himself — "That guy was a piddling weird, no? Great voice, not bad voice. But there was something strange about him. Don't you think?" And it's not really Sheeran's mistake he was so out of place — he'due south this huge, recognizable star, and the scene was shot in such a way that information technology screams Look at this big celebrity cameo!

I went line-fishing once. Bored out of my mind, I began to think of the petty fish pond along pleasantly in their watery world when, all of a sudden, they get yanked out of it and thrown into some other, this one a harsh and uncompromising wasteland. I tin imagine it'south a dreadful feeling, and that is how I felt seeing Sheeran in this episode of Game of Thrones: like I had been swimming along in my sublime fictional universe before being plopped into a different, much less magical one.

Growing up, I swallowed fantasy content similar it was some kind of medicine for my disturbed adolescent soul — it was my greatest source of comfort when I found the globe also hard to cope with. When I got older, I started reading more than literature, merely I still came dorsum to fantasy in my greatest periods of need: a terrible breakup with a college sweetheart, my offset night spent alone afterwards moving to New York. My relationship to it is precious.

I wouldn't say I was in a desperate country when I watched what is now known every bit the "Ed Sheeran episode of Game of Thrones," but I'll tell y'all this: Information technology was my first month of life as a higher graduate, and the fact that season seven was premiering in July was about the simply thing I could be certain of. Then, about 15 minutes into the episode, this cameo happened, and suddenly the rich, expansive — reliable — universe of Westeros complanate around me and things looked shoddy and simulated.

It was fan service; it was another display of the showrunners' crappy writing; but more often than not it showed a lack of respect and understanding for the careful earth-building that needs to be maintained when you lot create a universe from scratch. These criticisms of the show, and of the cameo, are not unique: Sheeran famously took a ton of flak for it, largely for the scene's lack of nuance and its flagrant guest-star feel. But, for me, it was virtually more than than that.

Have you ever accidentally taken a sip of spoiled milk and then institute yourself unable to brand cereal without giving the carton a little sniff, convinced the aforementioned thing will happen again? It's kind of similar that. I still plow to fantasy for comfort, and, for the most part, it does the fob, but in that location's always a little niggling feeling in the back of my caput. I'll be watching or reading something, and I'k really getting into it, so a office of my encephalon says: Hey, girl, you retrieve that Ed Sheeran cameo?, and it all comes back. I'yard fishhooked back to my burning planet in my garbage country, and there's cypher I can do most it.

It doesn't happen all the time, merely in our current unpleasant reality, I've been thinking nearly Ed Sheeran in Lannister armor way more often than I'd bargained for. Luckily, though, in revisiting this whole thing, I found a fleck of common cold condolement afterward reading that Sheeran's graphic symbol — "Eddie," of course — was vanquished by dragon burn. Now that's storytelling I tin can go behind.

I Think Nearly Ed Sheeran's Game of Thrones Cameo a Lot