A Song of Ice and Fandom

So I've seen it before, but I was recently re-linked to ThinkGeek's $30,000 Iron Throne -- made of fiberglass, really, but honest advertising never got anyone anywhere. It's mindbogglingly expensive for a site that mostly sells novelty pens and mugs, of course, and kind of cutesily packaged with well-meaning joking malapropisms for flavor text (I'm not sure they remember what the iron price actually is, but okay). But I laughed, it was ridiculous enough. Oh, ThinkGeek, what a card, that sort of thing.

Then I'm like: wow, geek culture has gotten commercialized. The "Iron Throne" is a good example of that, but so is all of ThinkGeek honestly, and San Diego Comic-Con, and io9, and... everything, really. This is a really obvious yesterday observation that lots of people have made so I am not trying to make a new observation here, just pondering my own personal experience with it in the form of A Song of Ice and Fire fandom and how the experience of being a "fan" has changed since the advent of GoT.

( I was about 13 when I first read A Game of Thrones. )