These new Game Of Thrones season 8 pics look like the title sequence to a heartwarming '90s sitcom

Sometimes it feels like waiting for new information about the final season of HBO’s Game Of Thrones is like watching a giant block of ice melt during a live internet video: Long, thankless, and at the end, all you have is a puddle of disappointment, and some questions about where all the flamethrowers went. HBO does its best, of course, gradually dripping out new content about its blockbuster show’s big finale without giving the whole game away, but sometimes you end up in the metaphorical sinkhole, i.e. a whole bunch of pictures of the show’s cast of admittedly attractive people, smiling generically at each other while presumably standing somewhere in the vicinity of a dragon.

In fact, we half-suspect that this latest content drop is HBO’s quiet love letter to all those internet innovators who love to take gritty, violent shows like Thrones and recut their footage into fake introduction sequence for cheerful ’90s TV. Like, look at Nikolaj Coster-Waldau up there: Doesn’t he look like a dude ruefully smiling at his wacky family of incest wives and murdered/suicided children?

Or get a load of these fun folks, sharing laughter and love in Winterfallin’:

Meanwhile, Cersei Lannister is apparently stuck in a very different, more somber-looking drama, possibly better suited for UPN, or maybe even Fox: I Have A Crown Now, But I’m The Only Person Alive In My Part Of The Show.

Game Of Thrones returns for its final season on April 14.