New subscriber special: Force Emily St. James to watch some bullshit

Hello, beloved free subscribers! We know we reach out to you pretty frequently with previews of essays that premium Episodes subscribers are able to read behind the paywall. (In fact, we've got one of those at the bottom of this post!) Today, though, we've also got another enticement for you: For a limited time, if you pick up a paid Episodes subscription, you can help shape the pop culture we'll be covering in the future. Sounds cool, no?

If you're already interested, great! Here's a big shiny button you can use to upgrade your subscription right now:

For those of you who want a bit more detail, though, here's how it'll work:

First, subscribe to Episodes' premium tier. (You can pick up either a 1-month or 12-month subscription – your choice! That said, an annual subscription is cheaper month-to-month and helps us with budgeting on our end.)

Then, using the same email your subscription is under, email episodesnewsletter@gmail.com a pop culture item you'd like us to cover at some point.

Guidelines here: you can pick any pop culture, but to put some boundaries on it, it shouldn't be much over three hours in length. (We'll also take a book up to 400 pages in length.) The work must be in English or have a readily available English translation. It can't be something we've covered at full essay length in Episodes previously. If it's a film or show, it should be readily available on streaming or disc. We reserve the right to reject a pick for any reason; if we do, we'll ask you to pick something else. You can specify whether you'd like Emily, Lily, or both to cover your pick.

Monthly subscribers can submit one choice; annual subscribers can submit three. You can submit the same thing three times to have better lottery odds or submit three different things. It's your call!

At the start of each month from now until further notice, we'll throw all these picks in a randomizer and write a full essay about whichever one it chooses! That essay will run on the final Tuesday of the month, so it won't replace any existing Episodes coverage.

And here's a heartfelt plea from our editor-in-chief, Emily St. James!

Hello, friends! It's a devastatingly hard time to be any sort of writer, and doubly so if you're a trans person. While I am extraordinarily fortunate in that I have a very diverse career, the fact remains that this newsletter is the only real income I have coming in when I am between TV jobs, as I am right now. If my writing has meant anything to you over the years, please consider subscribing. It would take some of the financial strain off of Lily and myself, and you would get some great cultural journalism in your email inbox on a regular basis. I really appreciate your readership over the years, and I hope you'll consider subscribing!

Sound interesting? You've got until November 1 to pick up a subscription to take advantage of it! Here's that button again:

(Sidebar: If you are facing economic hardship and want a complimentary subscription to this newsletter, email us at episodesnewsletter@gmail.com with "comp subscription" in the subject line, and we'll gift you one, no questions asked. You won't get any submissions to the drawing listed above, but you'll get everything else that comes with a subscription. All we ask is that you tell your friends about the newsletter if you like it.)

And finally, here's a preview of this week's installment of Emily's 26 Episodes series, on Game of Thrones' "The Bells."

Do you remember the spring of 2019?

With the final season of Game of Thrones airing as Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's initial arc, broke box-office record in theaters, that handful of weeks felt like the culmination of a decade when geek culture had become America's dominant cultural export. Yes, there were substantial downsides to that dominance, and I think it did lead to a certain over-simplicity in how we talk about culture, where we almost discuss it in the kinds of "winners" and "losers" terms we'd reserve for sports.

Even now, six years past the darkest depths of Covid-era lockdowns, the videos of people gathered to watch Game of Thrones episodes or crowding into movie theaters for Marvel movies feel like they're beamed in from another planet, more so than I usually feel when I look at videos or photos from the past. I am old enough now that photos from my childhood have started to look faded and strange, like I have forgotten how the world used to be. Yet the gap, somehow, strikes me as the widest when I look at something from immediately before Covid and something immediately after. A video from 2019 and a video from 2021 seem further apart than two years should suggest.

I do not want to suggest that I have started becoming nostalgic for the 2010s — far from it. That decade was as coated in awful stuff as any. Yet the inevitability of how our brains process traumatizing events has made the 2010s feel a little like the last time things were "normal," even as my conscious brain keeps reminding me that they were as abnormal as any era. (I don't know if you remember this, but we Americans elected Donald Trump.) And I am nostalgic for the ways I took control of my life in the 2010s, shrugging off a series of lies I had been telling myself my whole life to finally self-accept and begin transition. Indeed, I came out publicly just a few weeks after the Game of Thrones finale aired.

So when I say I've come to appreciate the much-hated final season of Game of Thrones — a season I excoriated at the time — I wonder if I mean that or if I just miss the time in which I was watching it. Or when I say that, do I just mean that I've come to appreciate the show's penultimate episode, "The Bells"?

Want to read the rest? You know what to do!