About The Ed Sheeran Thing

If you're living under a rock somewhere and didn't realize it, Sunday night was the season premier of Game of Thrones. Now I could do an entire episode rundown discussing how I thought it was damn near perfect. I could talk about that great opening (which despite being completely telegraphed was awesome), Cersei's descent into insanity, the Euron/Jaime snark fight, Jon/Sansa, Lyanna Mormont (do we not all love her?) or the gorgeous shots of the castles and keeps of Westeros. But I'm not going to do that

I love a good table setting and seeing the pieces being moved into place. This episode did that just brilliantly. My former agent used to say the opening chapter of the "next" book always should have some summary to catch the reader up. Well D&D did that perfectly, giving us tastes of what was going to happen. There were some great moments in the episode, including a few that I seemed to like more than a lot of people on the interwebs. No, I'm not going to talk about Sam's shit duty (see what I did there), though technically it was a brilliant piece of technical film making. I'm talking about a certain cameo.

The interwebs went crazy at the inclusion of pop/rock star Ed Sheeran. People really seem to hate Ed. I don't. I kind of dig his music. I've reached that age where I'm kind of stuck in the loop of the same music over and over and Ed kind of fits in there. And the producers put him in what I thought was a great scene, one that did so much (besides featuring him singing) to make Arya's murder tour that much more difficult as we met what appeared to be a decent bunch of Lannister soldiers sharing a meal and offering Arya a seat and the first bite. You can see the doubt in Arya that the ideas of good and evil aren't do simple. But people didn't seem to notice that. They noticed poor Ed Sheeran. I guess that the heat got so bad, he had to delete his Twitter account.

I don't understand the hate for this. If you don't like his music or whatever, then good for you. But to hate him for doing a cameo on your favorite show then you are a petty, jealous little troll. I'm serious. We all wish that we had that level of fame where we could appear on our favorite shows or movies. Who cares that he did this? I've also heard that Mets pitcher Noah "Thor" Syndergaard  put in a cameo this season as well. How is this a big deal when it's been going on forever?

Star Trek has done celebrity cameos for years and years. And I'm not talking about guest stars...I'm talking background cameos. Freaking Iggy Pop, one of the coolest humans of all time, got put in make up to play a Vorta on DS9. (Okay, maybe that was an extended cameo, but you get my meaning.) There are whole websites dedicated to famous cameos in Star Trek shows and movies (not to mention the "before they were famous" appearances). Star Wars has done the same thing. There was a similar outcry when there was a rumor that George Lucas put N*Sync in Star Wars and even then I felt it was much ado about nothing. There have been senators in Batman movies, athletes in comedies (and tons of scifi) and even royalty playing starship crewmen.

We've become a society that does nothing but hate. We take our personal bitterness, anger and jealousy and blast it out into the ether. We aren't allowed to love the things we love anymore, just defend them. We want to tell people that they aren't allowed to love what we love because they aren't "real" fans. And I'm growing tired of it.

So, Ed Sheeran, if you read this. Welcome to the fandom. I'd suggest checking out Ran's board, creating an account and joining the conversation, we'd love to hear your insights, even if you're just a TV watcher. And if you'll indulge me...was the Lannister armor as uncomfortable as it looked? Thanks.