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​The Internet of the Game of Thrones

How a medieval fantasy show keeps turning the web into its own personal comment thread.

Spoilers, obviously.

Is Jon Snow dead? Probably. Is Jon Snow really dead? I mean, I don't know. Is Stannis dead? … Is today Father's Day? No.

Those are my own personalized answers to the autocompleted search queries Google might suggest to you today, based on what everyone else on the internet is looking for, if you were to tap out 'is_' into that flickering field. These are the questions plaguing our networked minds (notably absent: "is_there a god"), just as Game of Thrones' architects knew they would be. The web is a glorified Game of Thrones comment thread today, and everything else is just window dressing.

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The show is a cultural phenomenon, obviously, but it's a very particular breed—meticulously (maybe even cynically) custom-built to tantalize its audience and send them off tweeting and googling into the night. Game of Thrones wins the internet, over and over again, even as it loses its quality and depth.

Over seven million people (legally) watched the season's penultimate episode last week, and a lot more probably watched Sunday night's finale. Many of these people are culture producers, too, who make things for the internet to consume the next day, even if it's just a few tweets, a Facebook post, or a brief episode recap. But the pros kick it up a notch: Today, commentary on the happenings in Game of Thrones' Season 5, Episode 10 are the most-read stories on the web's most-read websites.

So while a typical respectable editorial homepage may be presented like this:

People are actually looking at this:

At time of writing, four of Vox's most popular stories were Game of Thrones-related, including the top three. Buzzfeed's most popular post is a rundown of a GoT fan theory, and three more are comfortably slotted in the top ten. Two out of three of Gawker Media's "trending stories" are about GoT. A discussion of the GoT finale was the most popular article at The Atlantic, a literary magazine founded in 1857. The show got an entire, dedicated feature spread over at New York Magazine. A straight-up episode recap even slid into the New York Times' vaunted "Most Viewed" list.

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Meanwhile, there is such a powerful spoiler avoidance culture for GoT that multiple guides exist on how to avoid info about the show's events online, written not just by blogs, but Pulitzer prize-winning newspapers.

So what gives? Why do website editors (like us!) feel compelled to produce an onslaught of GoT stories (many of which have been strategically planned, long in advance)? To begin, the fountain of traffic promised by a Big Event-assured episode like a finale is so formidable that just publishing a story with "Game of Thrones" in the title, with, either a provocative opinion affixed—as in, "The Problem With Last Night's" or "… Finally Goes Too Far?"—or promising to shed light on a key development with outside sources—the new entrant into the sweepstakes "Is GoT's X Really Dead?"—all but guarantees a page-view bounty.

The writers and readers of these materials are the people who Game of Thrones has ensnared more successfully than perhaps any other TV show. Those are the people who have created the internet of the game of thrones, and who have consistently fueled its growth, even over the course of what was by far the show's worst season yet (I'm far from the only one who thinks so).

But again—why? Yeah, it's popular. But it's obviously more than that; there are lots of popular things—things that more than seven million people, or 2 percent of the population of the United States, regularly watch or participate in. American Idol, for instance, was recently canceled after falling to a viewership of 11 million, and 75 million people watch NASCAR every year. So here's a theory, in three brief parts, of why a TV show set in a medieval fantasy world is tailor-made for the internet age:

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1) Its magical, escapist-but-brutal world is pointedly filled with ambiguities and grist for the blog mill. The "gritty" realism (read: endless parade of sexual violence and torture scenes) means that adults feel like they're not watching Hercules: The Legendary Journey, while the magical elements mean that nothing is ever set in stone. Characters can die and not be dead, and inexplicable events can be set into motion at any given time. That's why, approximately 38 seconds after the finale's credits rolled over Jon Snow's bleeding body, there were already dozens of articles published to the effect of, "Is THAT CHARACTER Really Dead?" (Often worded just like that, in an amusing attempt to placate both immediate GoT answer-seekers and spoiler-avoiders.) This universe of unreality is the perfect environment to situate a comment thread beneath, because there are no definitive, right-or-wrong answers, and ample, no, infinite, room for speculation. Each new theory amplifies the last.

2) Vast, vast intertextuality. There are not one, not two, but three texts that fans can pore over to discern the events in the universe of Westeros: The books, which provided the ur-text and groundwork for the show, and which are still considered "the authority" of what "actually" happened in GoT-land, the premium cable TV series, which many more people actually consume, and the real-world ecosystem of industry gossip, that reports on cast member departures, interviews with the showrunners, and on-set developments.

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None of the above, in a vacuum, are particularly novel. But the sheer expanse of each puts us into new territory; there is an immense amount of content for bloggers, tweeters, column-writers, and Facebook-posters to mine in there, information with which to proclaim "It didn't happen like that in the books" or "HE'S NOT REALLY DEAD." The basis of those latter posts, for instance, drew from interviews Kit Harrington, the actor who plays Jon Snow, had given in the past, paired the circumstances of his death in the books, and industry reports that he'd been in salary negotiations for season 6. That is a lot of investigative researching into an event that is entirely fictitious. But the three layers of mythmaking help render GoT into a mostly unsolvable interactive puzzle that can be rearranged into traffic-guzzling articles and endless debates on social media.

3) The "shock" value. Speaking of provocation, the final key to GoT's outsized relevance, for my money, is its propensity for "shocking" its audience. Sometimes, this is a "good" shock, like the meme-making Red Wedding, in which the unfathomable came to pass, and three favorite characters were killed off at the height of their powers. It was narrative genius, and made the whole world feel alive, brutal, and dangerous. Sometimes it's a "bad" shock, like the inclusion of a(nother) gratuitous rape scene this season. The good shocks tease the prospect of virality, and promise internet-savvy audiences a chance to participate in a wave of collective catharsis; the bad shocks tease thinkpiece writers who take offense to them, and pen protest posts—inevitably drawing a huge audience from GoT fans on both sides of the divide—and lend the show an air of taboo in the process.

The TL;DR is that GoT takes a vast, complex, and controversial world not beholden to the laws of physics or biology, inserts it into a vast, multi-tiered mythology that spills into and out of the internet, and bakes in the promise (threat?) of viral-ready events the audience knows beforehand will make them shake their heads and cover their mouths.

Like it or not, Game of Thrones is more than a TV show at this point; it's a cyborg force of nature, a lumbering entity whose pulse is kept alive, like a sad White Walker, by the web's excitable culture miners. Even if its plotting gets tiresome, its most likable characters are killed off, and its violence becomes more grating than exciting, GoT still offers a virtually endless supply of ore, and as long as viewership remains steady and the outrages keep piling up, they'll keep on building the internet of the game of thrones.