How to get into Game of Thrones

If you've read all George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, you don't need this post. But if every proper noun in that past sentence was gibberish, you'll probably need a little help to get into HBO's latest epic series.

On your side is the wealth of fan created information on the internet about this beloved series of books. Some have too much information to be helpful, but others are just what you need to understand.

The most helpful site I've found is HauteSlide's Game of Thrones episodal family trees/relationship charts. This site lays it all out visiually, and gives you proper spellings of names to search for in Game of Throne's wiki. Here's the tree from episode one.

Click here to enlarge.

The tree grows as the episodes introduce new characters, showing marriages, murders, children, friendships, threats, everything, even things mentioned once in passing, during a distracting sex scene. How are people who haven't read the books supposed to keep up without these trees?

Keep these babies close by during the early episodes and all your confusion will melt away. At least any confusion brought on by character's relationships. Confusion brought on by gratuitous nudity and violence is just part of the series, and it doesn't appear to be going anywhere.

Your faithful watcher,

Alice