Elissa Forrester

"A letter to my children, when they come of age.

To Ethan, Talia, and Ryon, who are growing up faster than this mother can imagine.

From the first time I met Donald Trump, I never liked the man. He was foreign – the clothes he wore, the accent he spoke, no one had ever encountered them before. Even his behaviour was foreign. He straight up lied to Duncan and myself about being famed around the smallfolk for making deals.

Northmen, at least, would see through his lies and execute him on the spot. But I was raised a child of the South, and in Ser Donald I saw unmatched political intrigue. The man would spew lie after lie, creating a fantasy world that he had us believe was real, and rumouring the real world to be illusions. And in an age where the Starks had been deposed of by their treacherous bannermen, I knew honour and honesty were not enough to see House Forrester survive Winter.

I apologise if I was not able to protect you from his influence. Perhaps it is better that I do not. Our house survives because we are strong. The cold of the North breeds a strong people. And I believe that you, my children, are strong too.

You have learned from Trump the art of the deal, how to channel the support of the angry and disgruntled majority into unstoppably shrewd and bold political moves. You have learnt from Sanders how to be compassionate, and fight for a future to believe in. You have even learnt what not to do, with Hillary Clinton.

My dear children, I implore both the old gods and the Seven every night that you learn these lessons well.

Iron from Ice."

Gwyn Whitehill

From the diary of Gwyn Whitehill.

Hillary Clinton is a straight-faced liar. She lied about who she was, and where she came from. She would do anything for power. And she cost my entire family their lives.

I don't know what possessed Father to listen to her about international relations, but it was a mistake! Her policies were a disaster!

I owe my life to Bernie Sanders. He turned around the devastating war that that woman had brought about, and brought lasting peace to our houses. It's a dream come true. Marrying Asher. Forresters and Whitehills united as family. Living in Highpoint with Asher. Loving each other without the fear that we'd bring our families to war.

I just thought Father would have been there, to wish me well. I don't know if you'll ever approve, Father, but in my dearest memories, you're there. You smiled like you did before Mother died. You gave my hand in marriage to Asher – and wished us both all the best as Lord and Lady of Highpoint.

And I'll always remember everything Bernie told us. I'll tell the White Wolf too. I'll always feel the Bern.

Elaena Glenmore

You know Arthur, the first time I met Trump, I was worried that I was speaking to him rather than Rodrik. For a while, I thought the rumours that Rodrik survived the Red Wedding weren't true after all. Trump was good at rallying people, I'll give him that. He did build the wall, and won us the Battle of Ironrath.

But he was not the lord House Forrester needed. He was not the man whose shoulder you could lean on in the cold. He was not the leader people stood behind in winter. Donald Trump, wherever he came from, was more a Lannister than a Stark, except that he wouldn't pay his debts.

Rodrik, especially with Sanders's guidance, will be a better leader than Trump ever would. He will lead us through the winter. He will fight the White Walkers and win, win, and win. I believe in my husband. I believe in the future.

House Forrester and House Glenmore will survive. And then, we will create a future to believe in.

Gared Tuttle

Donald Trump did what we had to do to win. I know it wasn't pretty. But the Boltons won by some ugly methods too. I'd rather win ugly and live, than lose pretty and die. The Twins taught me that, Uncle.

To be honest, I was scared to death when he sent me to poke at twenty Whitehills with a stick, through Ironrath's gate. But he knew what he was doing. The man could tell the Whitehills wouldn't stop till they'd have our heads. I can stand behind such a man.

I think his only mistake was that he took too much control. Donald started out as the man Lady Forrester appointed to take care of all business. He ended up doing duties that only a lord ought to do. Bernie was better in that regard. Donald had great talk, but Bernie actually knew what a lord should do, and taught Rodrik how to do it. He didn't try to become lord himself.

He'll be missed, but so will the Don.

Rodrik Forrester

"A letter to my father. May the old gods read this to you.

I'm almost your age when you became Lord of Ironrath now. I remember your stories of how my grandfather, Thorren Forrester, seized the river valley from House Whitehill, and died at the Battle of the Trident fighting for Robert Baratheon.

I feel so old, yet so young, Father. So much responsibility. But I've since grown into it. I have a man to thank for that. His name is Bernie Sanders. If you taught me how to rule, he taught me what to rule for. Bernie Sanders inspired me to bring a revolution to the North. And it begins with the fight for peace, equality, and justice, for everyone. Smallfolk and lords alike.

So many people have walked in and out of my life. So many friends fell at the Twins, and during the war. So many allies betrayed us. But we Forresters are as strong as the ironwood. We will prevail, Father. An ally of ours, who goes by the name Trump, has vastly strengthened the defences of Ironrath. Thanks to his wall, we overcame the Whitehills, and we will overcome winter too.

Iron from Ice.

Rodrik."

"Sanders repeatedly batted away questions about how his campaign would proceed in the all-but-certain event that his rival, Hillary Clinton, wins enough delegates Tuesday to claim the Democratic nomination."

"Sanders wasn't ready to say that the campaign against Donald Trump, at least, was now more about Hillary Clinton than about him."

"...all eyes were on Mr. Sanders. Would he be generous or petulant? Would he let go or keep battling? At almost every turn, he was grudging toward Mrs. Clinton, passing up a chance to issue the kind of lengthy salute that many, in and out of the Democratic Party, had expected and craved.

"'It's a blown opportunity to build bridges that are going to be extremely important in the fall,' said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, both Democratic and Republican. He worried that Mr. Sanders was becoming 'a grumpy old man.'"

Bernie Sanders shook his head. He beat off the drowsiness that he had nearly succumbed to. Iron's wrath. Swords. Fighting. Forresters, forests, for... For what? What? What was he thinking? This was no time to be imagining a child's fighting fantasies. He roused himself to his feet, and took out his phone.

A few messages had popped up on the Bernie Sanders Staff group. His speech had reassured his staffers to a small extent. But it was undeniable that they had lost a tremendous amount of momentum from losing New York, and now that they seemed to have lost California... was the nomination out of reach?

Millions of people have campaigned, donated, and voted for us, he typed. We are not going to let their sacrifices, hopes, and dreams go to waste. We're going to fight all the way until Philadelphia. He tapped the send button, and paused.

Bernie Sanders felt a distinct recollection of words he had said to the working class people of some far-away land, whose houses were built of wood instead of stone. They had empty cellars, barren farms, rough roads. Their smiles as they cheered. Cheering what? What were they cheering?

Bernie closed his eyes and struggled to recall. The more he struggled, the more the words seemed to elude him. He opened his eyes and shook his head in disappointment. The messages from his staffers became more positive, to his relief. Somebody began talking about how cold it would be in Philadelphia. Cold, wondered Bernie.

Ice. The word suddenly came to his mind. Ice. Ice... Iron!

"Iron from Ice." Whispered Bernie Sanders involuntarily.

It was so quiet in Hillary Clinton's HQ that you could hear an email being deleted.

Hillary Clinton's campaign party, if you could call it that, was in very low spirits. They were not short of "spirits", but even drink couldn't overcome the depressing mood. Boxes of used wine bottles from Guinness were piled up so high and wide, the pile stood over six feet and took a minute to circle around. The senior staff had enclosed themselves with Hillary in a separate room, where a shouting match was taking place. Most of the staffers had retired to their homes, having spent the evening in states of anticipation, thrill, shock, disbelief, and finally fear. Others had joined the supporters at Javits Centre to cry, hug, and wail.

Hillary herself had been screaming in rage. She yelled profanities, screamed obscenities, pounded furniture, assaulted staff. She first threatened John Podesta, then Robbie Mook, both of whom were her campaign managers. Podesta left after Hillary took a vase and struck him in the head with it. He would head for Javits Centre, where the victory party was being held, and tell Clinton's supporters to go home. It had taken hours to calm her down. Bill Clinton's rebuke of her campaign's failure to reach out to the white working class in Pennsylvania, which had just been called for Trump, only made things worse.

"If we take Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, we could still win!" shouted one staffer.

"If we don't take even one of them, we lose," retorted another. In one corner, Hillary had been sobbing on the phone so bitterly as to be incomprehensible. The caller, supposedly an old friend of hers, could barely make out Hillary blaming James Comey's emails for her defeat over the thrashing and tears. Now, she was resting by one corner, tear-stricken and defeated. The arguing over the remaining states, and whether they might all turn blue, at an impasse.

"Hillary, it's the President." A staffer crept close and extended the phone to Hillary from as far as he could. Hillary Clinton took the call, and placed the phone to her ear.

"Barack, I'm," Clinton shook her head and grimaced as she held back a sob. "Losing... to that deplorable bigot..."

"Hillary, you have to concede." said the President of the United States. In his white office and cushioned leather chair, Barack Obama shook his head despondently.

Clinton made her choice. She stood up, and grabbed a staffer who was wrangling with a colleague over the office phone.

"Just give me the phone." She bit back the tears as she spoke. "I'm calling him."

It was over. Decades of dreaming, one and a half years of campaigning, speeches, debates, and tweets had ended. The 2016 Presidential Election had concluded with a single sentence. Donald Trump grinned when he heard Hillary say, "I'm calling you to say that I concede." A few minutes later, the Associated Press projected that he had won Wisconsin, and thus won more than 270 delegates.

Now, the Donald was the President-elect of the United States of America. And he was relishing it. It had been a great night to be Donald Trump. Aside from a brief moment where he'd apparently fallen asleep and had to be coddled back to Trump Tower. But that had been an hour or so back, and his family and staff reassured him that he'd only been winning states in the brief period that he had been sleeping.

His VP, Mike Pence, finished his speech – having thanked his family, the American people, and most importantly, Trump himself.

"USA! USA! USA!" the crowd chanted. Trump nodded and waved.

"Thank you. Thank you very much." He said. The boisterous, victorious crowd finally calmed down.

"Sorry to keep you waiting!" He stretched his very small hands out magnanimously. The night sparkled with lights, red caps, Republican shirts, and the sound of victory. Some shred of his mind sparkled with the memory of selling wood, rallying smallfolk, building walls, walls. Building. Then it flashed out of mind and memory. There was something to build, and that was a better America. For all of us... the billionaires at least.

"Complicated business, complicated business."

AN: Dear reader,

This marks the conclusion of Donald Trump Edition: How Telltale's Game of Thrones should have ended. This note will cover analysis behind the purpose of this story, and its rather troubled development. Don't worry – no plot is written here, so if you skip this, you wouldn't miss a thing.

I was first inspired to write this story as a reply to the titular game from Telltale, which in my opinion wrote itself into a corner. It started out well, but restricting choices, forcing protagonists into making naive decisions, and consistently underwhelming the military strength of the Forresters affected the plot.

Worse, its final chapter left practically no conclusion at all. Cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger had been the staple of the story throughout all its six chapters. But the Forresters stood a very plausible chance of defending Ironrath. There is a good reason that walled strongholds are extremely difficult to take by assault – oftentimes even 3 to 1 ratios in favour of the attacker can be beaten. Telltale massively underappreciated this fact, screwing over the Forresters by allowing the Whitehills to teleport on top of their own wall, the Forresters somehow not using their wall to attempt any of the tactics mentioned in the previous chapter, or at least putting up some semblance of a fight.

Even GRRM himself killed only one main character in the first book. In its first season, Telltale has killed 4 protagonists(Gregor, Ethan, Mira and Asher/Rodrik), countless minor characters like Lady Forrester, the traitor in between Royland and Duncan, and left the survivor between Asher and Rodrik close to death. The writer in me felt indignation, and picked up his pen.

An appeal to indignation was common to many people this year, it appears. For the past year or so, Donald Trump has been laughed at for his presidential campaign. Yet it is unappreciated that he is winning. And that he is willing to do anything in order to win. That single quality("We're going to win and win and win so much, you'll get sick of it") qualifies him to lead the Forresters. Trump, more so than any other candidate, would do the underhanded deals that the Forresters had no guts to do. And those deals would be the ones that eventually saved the Forresters. That is ultimately why I chose the Don as my main character for the first few chapters.

So, the story. When I began this fanfiction, the only thing I knew was that Trump was going to do funny things and piss of a lot of people, and he'd still leave the negotiation table on the winning end. Preferably with a Forrester victory at the end, of course.

So I limited the exploration of Westeros a lot. It was the only way to maximise the interactions the characters would have with each other – by concentrating them around Ironrath. Telltale's story had four protagonists at any one time being followed. Throughout the series, it felt as if their numbers stifled their development. Gared was essentially put through a suicide mission at the Wall, then being asked to betray it – all for two bastard children with magical powers, and nothing else. Mira's role at King's Landing remained ambiguous throughout the series, but seeing her death, especially knowing her influential position as Lady Margaery's most favoured handmaiden, was disgusting. Morgryn betraying Mira came out of nowhere, and Margaery's lack of intervention was pathetic.

My logic was that one chapter covered one episode, hence I ought to only have 6 chapters. I think I was reminded when I was writing Episode 4 that there had to be a sudden and stark turn of events in order to make the story reach its climax. There also had to be mechanisms to explain how Trump's teleportation worked, some form of opposition to Trump, and a more climatic final battle than the Battle of Ironrath in the game.

This was when I introduced Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton into the story. Sanders and Clinton served different roles. Sanders represented an alternative vision for both the Forresters and Whitehills, and indeed all of the North. He contrasts Trump's dark dog-eat-dog worldview. Clinton is the warmonger – the one who catalyses the war between the Forresters and the Whitehills. Her many flaws as a presidential candidate is also the reason I used her character as I did. Much like in real life, Clinton ran for president/head advisor to the Whitehills for the sake of becoming president/power, not to institute change like Sanders. Ultimately, she only did what she did for her own self interest.

The presence of all 3 main presidential candidates was untenable because with only 2 houses involved in the war, I'd sideline one candidate. Somebody would have to go. I chose Trump to die first, even though we know Sanders ended his campaign first, for character development. Trump hogging the spotlight in my writing was so pervasive, that all the other characters in the story were reduced to mere audience for his jokes. Trump's death also added to the tension between Forresters and Whitehills, and ultimately what started the Battle of Ironrath. Most importantly, Trump's death outlined the mechanism for teleporting between Westeros and the USA.

The mechanism, in my mind, changed. I initially thought it would be the most significant moment of their campaigns being the second at which they were teleported away. No time passes in our world, however, while months and even years may pass in Westeros. Remember, I still thought Clinton would be president. So the ending for Sanders was the same, but Clinton would be texting her Wall Street donors as soon as she was confirmed to win the election, asking how low they wanted their corporate taxes to be. Trump would've been teleported away at the second presidential debate, right before he says to Clinton, "That's because you'd be in jail"(in response to her saying, "This is why Donald Trump should not be president of our country"). Sanders's moment was significant because California was the last hope he had of winning the Democratic primary. Clinton's moment was significant because nobody would trust her anymore after that moment(I don't recall whether this was before or after the Podesta leaks and Comey emails). Finally, Trump's moment was significant because this was his final insult, before the voters swept him in the election and voted Clinton.

But since Trump ended up being president, changes were needed.

Instead, the candidates were teleported at the brink of defeat, or Trump's case, victory. Trump was teleported during election night – during the brief period when it was reported that he had retired to his apartment with his wife to "take it in". Hillary was teleported a few days before the election, after the second Comey email clearing her of suspicions. Sanders's teleportation date does not change. All 3 candidates are addressed in the epilogue awhile after being teleported back, for storytelling purposes.

It's at this stage that I address why Trump helped the Forresters.

I personally see a great many parallels between the Forresters, and working class whites who voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers. The Forresters were a proud house in the North, respected for their only trade of making Ironwood shields and ships. They lived in rural areas, and worshipped the old gods.

Over many years, the Forresters watched as their religion became a minority amongst men in favour of the Faith of the Seven. They watched as the Andals and their culture replaced that of the First Men. Then they were humiliated at the hands of the Lannisters, a rich house in the South, in the War of the Five Kings. They watched as their own lords were killed and replaced by the Boltons, brutal men whom they had to serve by duty, not out of their own wishes.

While the parallels are not exact, they do exist. Trump's white working class voters have watched on as their views on religion became a minority in favour of neoliberal thinking. They watched as immigrants, Latinos, Hispanics, and blacks, and the neoliberals they supported replaced that of the white conservatives. Then they were humiliated at the hands of the Obama administration, whom they blamed for outsourcing jobs to China so that goods could be cheaper. Goods that would serve mostly liberal, high-income cities more than them.

Finally, they watched as the conservative party they supported became not just conservative, but so far-right that it was willing to sacrifice its own voters for profit.

And then came Donald Trump. Given what we know about the Forresters, and Trump's voters, I feel strongly that they would have supported him. Trump is actually left of Clinton on certain issues like unions and jobs. That was what the silent majority of his voters actually wanted, and thus why his support was as unshakeable as it was. Why else could he have made every possible blunder in the book, and still become President of the United States? Because his message was the right one. My belief was that his perceived concern for the common citizen was why he won so many votes.

But he isn't the only one of his kind. Bernie Sanders experienced strong support from the same working class white group that won Trump the election. This leads me to conclude that he would also have won the support of the Forresters.

Moreover, Sanders was the candidate best at rallying young people to his cause. As much as Game of Thrones is a story about politics, it is also about the younger generation of Starks and Northern lords taking over the reins from their fathers. Gwyn Whitehill offered the perfect opportunity to turn the conflict into a win-win situation. A Whitehill-Forresterpeace, sealed by Asher marrying Gwyn. While I know this is an ideal situation almost too far-fetched to exist in Westeros, I do think it is very plausible that Gwyn could have ended up in control of her House. If all the male Whitehills died in war against House Forrester (a very likely outcome), then Gwyn would be the natural successor. And she would have had no reason to continue the war.

Moreover, in the game, Gwyn helps a gravely wounded Asher get up from where he has fallen in a secret cutscene (if you choose to call off the assassination attempt on Ludd's life). She says," Asher. We have to hurry. I saw what you were trying to do. They wouldn't listen to reason. We will overcome this." This strongly suggests that Gwyn is very much a dove.

Sanders comes into this by being the one who brings peace between the two warring houses. Just like how he avoided trading attacks with Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in real life, Sanders chooses to end conflict and focus on the larger picture of fighting the White Walkers. In my alternative reality, the Forresters(both Rodrik's and Asher's branches of the house) are well-prepared for winter. They have a new king in the North. And they are rebuilding.

I think the Donald did a pretty good job in Westeros. Let's hope the same is true in our world.

Iron from Ice,

Lucky Sea