the spirit of a 12th century templar knight that died a horrific death due to torture that started haunting me after i found a sword in the middle of the woods: spaghetti once more, prithee?

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

Sansa trying her wedding dress (2 seconds before learning she's getting married)

"Harry Strickland had always been a genial man, better at hammering out contracts than at hammering on foes. He had a nose for gold, but whether he had the belly for battle was another question."

Following up The Blackheart and Maelys the Monstrous, we have... an ageing middle manager who is totally up for reclaiming his lost homeland... but marching makes his toes quite sore, you guys. I honestly love Homeless Harry, I feel like he's probably the character I'd act most like if I was in Westeros. I adore the whiplash of hearing all the legends of the golden company, Bittersteel, Maelys... and then meeting Harry. Thay said, his iteration of the Golden Company is a hell of a lot closer to conquering Westeros than any previous, so there's something to be said for unglamorous professionalism.

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.