American fantasy drama Game of Thrones concluded this week, but fact, fiction and fervour continue to stream in the real world.
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Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the Federal election where lead-up polls suggested, to Labor at least, that when you threaten to cut the jobs of thousands of people working in mining, and slash the franking credits of millions of shareholders, those people will still vote for you.
Interestingly those people voted for people who said they wouldn't do that to them.
A complex reaction that has given the Labor Party much to ponder during the rebuild.
So much was said during the campaign about the environment being broke, yet in the end people voted for the party they thought wouldn't send them broke.
This was probably more an endorsement for "keep the slagging simple" then telling the truth, because that's all Scomo and Josh Frydenberg said during the Liberal campaign - "Labor can't manage money" and Shorten was the "Bill Australia couldn't afford".
I can't remember what Labor's catchcry was except something about it being time.
Turns out it wasn't, which doesn't mean the reforms Labor proposed weren't ambitious nor enlightened.
Just that nothing seems enlightened when you don't win, and so Bill called time on himself.
Scomo said he never stopped believing in miracles and maybe Labor's positive approach was what he was referring to during his victory speech.
Labor should have gone with "Scomo stabbed Mal in the back, and so did Dutto and Tony and Mathius and the rest of the divided rabble, and even though Labor did the same thing, that was ages ago."
In Europe leaders gathered to work out ways to discourage terrorism on Social Media. US president Donald Trump led from the front by Tweeting: "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran."
Clearly what constitutes "terrifying" on social media just stepped up a notch.
Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif hit back with a pithy "Goaded by #B_Team, @realdonaldTrump hopes to achieve what Alexander, Genghis & other aggressors failed to do. Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone." "#EconomicTerrorism & genocidal taunts won't "end Iran" #bitwordy.
Not to be outdone in the belligerent if not convoluted comeback stakes, Alabama came out with a little taster for the third series of Handmaiden's Tale, enacting a law that bans abortion at any stage of gestation, with the only exceptions being if a woman's life is in danger, or a man falls pregnant. Whoa.
Make that Roe v Wade.
Last-ditch attempts by the Alabama Pro Choice lobby to get a ban on vasectomy were dismissed as being so ironic as to verge on impossible for a man to comprehend.
Clearly the world is full of surprises, so God bless Australia. As June looms, you could be forgiven for thinking winter is coming.
