Game of ... what the?

Friends, this week I had the enormous pleasure of watching the last few episodes of Game of Thrones season 3, while the strange business of our change of Labor leadership played out. You'll have all seen the blog posts, twitter feeds and new reports about the 'Rudd Wedding' and our very own game of 'whose-noble-nethers-will-polish-the-big-chair?'. I'm still REALLY CONFUSED about that situation. So instead of offering insightful political commentary, here's my top five reasons why Game of Thrones is better than real life.1. The women in Game of Thrones can and do take charge. At the beginning of series one, I thought we were in for some breathtaking sexism and gratuitous sexual objectification. OK, so we still have the gratuitous sexual objectification ... but those the tough girls of GoT win our respect too. Imagine if Julia Gillard had dragons...2. The smartest person in the show, Tyrion Lannister, is a dwarf (my sincere apologies — I would use the politically correct term if I knew it: person of small stature? Little person?). He confronts hatred and bigotry every day. Sometimes he overcomes. For a baddie, he's pretty damn good.3. Every conflict seems to draw our attention to motherhood as a subject. Good and bad, the mothers of GoT are lionesses. LOVE THAT.4. They are obsessed with lineage and blood. Every alliance is sealed in a blood pact (a marriage and a resulting kid). It certainly makes you think hard about a fundamental human need to assert kinship ... and bugger anyone else. I'm seeing a straight line here to the barbaric acts of GENOCIDE in modern history: kinship, racial theory, eugenics ...5. Nobody could miss the complicated subtext about freedom and slavery. The mother of dragons assembles an army of freed slaves, yet they serve her as their 'mother'. The girls of the court can only plot for power while they're kept in gilded cages. Even the baddest baddies, Tywen Lannister and Jaime Lannister reveal how they are TRAPPED within family expectations.Do you love Game of Thrones? Why?