Game of Numbers.

 Fantasy fans must currently be riding a tidal wave of smug bastardry.

 For years, fantasy fiction - dungeons and dragons and wizards and such - was the nerdiest corner of the nerd universe. Fantasy fans were the people that other geeks looked down on. I know more about X-Men than my own family, and have a "Billy and the Cloneasaurus" sticker on my man bag, and even I think fantasy stuff is lame.

 Then Game of Thrones came along, and everyone shut the fuck up. Fantasy fans could suddenly earn enormous respect from their peers for understanding the root causes of the War of Five Kings or the true parentage of the bastard Jon Snow. Everyone thinks GoT is cool. We're all part of the "fantasy fan" demographic now, whether we like it or not.

 I could go on and on justifying my reasons (that GoT is really a political thriller with fantasy overtones, that it replaces the childish black-and-white morality of Tolkein with myriad complex, grey characters) but no, I'll just bite the bullet and admit that I'm a total fanboy for a TV show that features dragons and shape-shifters and giants.

 With my love for Game of Thrones established, however, there is something that's really beginning to bug me: Just what fucking year is it, exactly?!

 I don't mean in whatever arcane and fictional calender the show uses. I mean mathematically.

 In recent weeks, we've been reminded, for example, that Jaime Lannister (played by spell-check meltdown cause and Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is meant to be several years older than his brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage.) A recent episode makes mention of Jaime being old enough to stand over his brother's crib as a child, which means he'd have to be at least five years senior. It's established that Jaime is 40, which would put Tyrion somewhere in his mid thirties. According to the spoilerific website "A Wiki of Ice and Fire", Jaime is in fact meant to be nine years older than his brother.

 Here they are next to each other:

 Admittedly, Jaime Lannister is renowned as something of a golden boy, so it makes sense that he should age extremely well. Also, the TV series has done well in casting Coster-Waldau, a man so attractive I actually think we should have him neutered just to give the rest of us a fighting chance of getting laid once in a while. Still, there is no way in hell I'm buying him being ten years older than his brother. (In reality, Peter Dinklage is a year older than his co-star.)

 This brings me to my next problem, the under-written Oberyn Martell.

 In the current series, Oberyn is introduced as being a Dornish Prince who suspects that his sister was raped and murdered by the enormous, psychotic Ser Gregor Clegane ("The Mountain That Rides") on the orders of the Lannister family. This is all well and good, except Oberyn Martell is clearly much older than the Mountain:

Pedro Pascal is 39, Hapfthor Johnson is 25.

 The Mountain raped and murdered Oberyn's sister during the last war, which was... when, exactly?!

 Prince Oberyn claims to remember Tyrion as a baby, meaning he, like Jaime, is around forty. The last war seems to have been about fifteen years ago, which would make Jon Snow, the bastard son of Eddard Stark, fifteen years of age. Which he clearly fucking isn't:

 That's a better beard at "fifteen" than I could grow any time before the age of twenty six. At around the time Jon Snow was born, the infant Daenerys Targaryen was smuggled across the narrow sea to escape the slaughter that befell the rest of her family. In the intervening fifteen-ish years she grew up to be a 27 year old actress, which is a neat trick:

The two biggest talents Emilia Clarke has.

 

 

 If the events of the last war were long enough ago that the younger actors are the right age, then then older actors are too young, and if the older actors are the right age then we're all under arrest for looking at a fifteen year old girl's tits just now.

 Or maybe I'm just over-thinking it.