If you follow our weekly series the Black Guide to Game of Thrones, you know that the Starks (and all the people in the North) represent black people in the fictional Game of Thrones universe, and even though Jon Stark does not technically have our blood running through his veins, Ned and Catelyn took him in when he was a baby and raised him like their own, so he is our play cousin.
Which is an actual thing on black family trees. I am currently in negotiations with Ancestry.com to trace my play-cousin lineage, but they keep talking some nonsense about science and saying that’s not how deoxyribonucleic acid works, which seems pretty racist to me.
Anyway, even if Jon is mixed, he was raised in a black neighborhood by black parents, which explains his wardrobe. Black watchers know that J. Snow keeps a stash of cape-coats that Don “Magic” Juan would be proud of. In fact, if the much-anticipated nephew sex goes down in the final season’s final episode, I attribute his Auntie Daenerys’ attraction to him to how he stood on the cliffs of Dragonstone staring wistfully into the distance with his cape-coat blowing in the wind.
The costume designers for Game of Thrones recently revealed that the Jon Snow pimp-cape collection is actually just a sheepskin rug from Ikea draped across the shoulders, with a few modifications.
This all makes sense when you think about the ingenuity of black people. We can take nothing, turn it into something and make it great. We took chitlins and turned it into a Southern delicacy. Run-DMC took prison rules for shoes and turned wearing no shoelaces into a fashion statement. Black hipsters with bad eyesight took the inability to afford fashionable eyewear and made huge nerd glasses a thing. When the NYPD kept tasing black people uptown, we started calling the dance the Harlem Shake (the original one, not the one white people made viral on YouTube).
Since this revelation, Ikea decided to share with the world how to make your own J. Snow cape because, as James Brown and Superman teach us, everything is better when you wear a cape.
Now, whether you’re thinking of leaving home and heading up North to join the Night’s Watch, going to fight white supremacist White Walkers or just want to look like a pimp who has a stable of heauxs beyond the wall, you can make your own Jon Snow-inspired shoulder shawl. Just click on the link below.
Much success in the wars to come.