I’m impressed. Not by the theory, which is standard dorm-room navel-gazing, but by the strategy behind it. This is a brilliant bit of global-warming propaganda by a progressive site aimed at low-information casual news consumers, the sort of people who may know little about climate change but know a lot about “Game of Thrones.” It’s the same idea at base as Obama sitting down for a “Funny or Die” interview with Zach Galifianakis in the thick of enrollment season for ObamaCare: If you want to win over an audience of apolitical twentysomethings, you need to hit ’em where they live. That means pop culture and it means video. Come for the GoT, stay for the curiosity-piquing warnings about the dire threat from rising sea levels. In a way, it’s Vox at its Vox-iest, leveraging something ostensibly politically neutral — like, say, the label “exploratory journalism” — to steer neutral readers towards a left-wing agenda. You may not like them, but they ain’t stupid.

As for the theory, I’ll leave it to those who watch the show to dissect it in the comments. Seems straightforward enough, though — the zombies are climate change, mercilessly advancing on a collection of nations consumed by their own petty squabbles, with some leaders refusing to admit that the zombies even exist. Only by collective action can they turn the tide. (Any Vox analysis of any television show will end with that same lesson.) The thing is, that’s also basically the plot of “The Walking Dead.” There are no outright zombie-deniers in TWD, but that’s because it takes place at a different stage of the zombie onslaught than GoT, after civilization’s been overrun rather than before. Even so, in every episode there’s some moment where the characters let their guard down by assuming the zombies are much further away than they really are — an evergreen progressive complaint about short-sightedness towards global warming — and they end up paying for it. Whaddaya know, that’s two highly popular shows about the left’s pet issue, or so lefties might tell you.

Then again, both shows could also be allegories for income inequality, with the zombies representing the dehumanized working class and Rick’s gang, or the lords of Westeros, representing the one-percenters whose civilization will be overrun. Or maybe both shows are allegories for the state of the Democratic Party, too confident in its hold on power and dangerously riven by conflicting interests while the horde of cannibal Republican voters descends. That’s the thing about the zombie genre — zombies can represent almost anything, a fact exploited by George Romero in his own versatile uses of symbolism (zombies as a satire on consumerism in “Dawn of the Dead” and as a commentary on exploitation of the lower class in “Land of the Dead”). They’re the Moby Dick of modern American culture. Which makes me wonder how many more “Game of Thrones is like ________” clickbait videos Vox might have in the chute, waiting to go. I’d be up for a “Game of Thrones is like amnesty” hot take. Starring Jeff Sessions as Tyrion Lannister, maybe?