__WARNING: This piece contains spoilers for the most recent episodes of Game of Thrones as well as spoilers for Dexter, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and Breaking Bad, which have been redacted for your convenience with black bars. You can toggle spoilers on at your own risk by clicking the button to the left or highlighting. IF YOU CAN SEE THIS SENTENCE, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE THE SPOILERS.__Following Game of Thrones' now-infamous Red Wedding episode, people were–what's the phrase?–crazy pissed. Upset at the shocking end to the season's penultimate episode, and the deaths of several favorite characters, fans of the show railed on social media with an endless stream of "Thanks for nothing, Game of Thrones" and "I may be completely done with Game of Thrones" tweets. It seemed as the show might be facing a blood-letting of its own, at least in terms of losing fans.
But will it? Probably not. As @RedWeddingTears—the Twitter account that has been comprehensively retweeting the brokenhearted missives—noted at the end of everyone's very rough week, "A true #GoTfan, no matter how much they may complain or threaten to quit, will never stop watching @HBO @GameofThrones."
And they're right. As upset as fans get over character deaths and other big shockers, they don't really cause viewers who truly love something to leave it forever (that usually comes thanks to poor writing or acting). Anger tends to rise to the top on social networks (and inspire retweets), but despite the furor from viewers who are "so mad at the writers of Game of Thrones for doing this to me," chances are that they'll still come back for more.
>'On each side of the political divide, there's a good 10 or 15 percent of the electorate that says, 'If the other guy wins I'm going to move to Canada!' – Well, generally people don't move to freakin' Canada.'
Matt Rosenberg, Taykey
"If you think about it, probably on each side of the political divide, there's a good 10 or 15 percent of the electorate that says, 'If the other guy wins I'm going to move to Canada!' – Well, generally people don't move to freakin' Canada," Matt Rosenberg, the vice president of marketing for advertising firm Taykey, which monitors social media traffic, told Wired. "I think this is one of those, 'I'm never going to watch again because I was shocked and disappointed and how could they!' And then, you know, it's part of your life, you're a fan you've been watching for many seasons – you're going to continue to watch."
But Rosenberg and his colleagues at Taykey—which does helps deliver targeted ads for clients by tracking Twitter, Facebook, and comments sections, amongst other channels—were still curious about how online reactions to the Red Wedding deaths compared to other shows that have lost significant characters. So they looked at deaths on Dexter (Maria LaGuerta), Mad Men (Lane Pryce), Breaking Bad (Mike Ehrmantraut), and Downton Abbey (Matthew Crawley).
Using Taykey's proprietary measurements, they found that positive online sentiment for shows takes a big dip after a death, but almost always bounces back. (In the case of Dexter the sentiment actually increasingly grew more positive the month after the death episode aired... Sorry, LaGuerta.) But they also found that the volume (the total online chatter around the show) of social media conversation around Thrones in the week following "Rains of Castamere" was louder than it was for any of those other shows.
"What we found was that the Game of Thrones conversation this week [was] almost 4x the top conversation around the other shows," Rosenberg said. "If you stacked the other shows and combined them, you would not reach the top of the curve for Game of Thrones."
In addition to the high volume of conversation, there was also a lot of negativity hurled at the episode. Using Taykey's proprietary scoring system, the show's overall sentiment dropped to a score of three (zero is neutral) after the Red Wedding episode from a previous high in the low 20s. It quickly rebounded, only to drop again following the somewhat heart-wrenching and finale (Jon Snow? Ygritte, how could you?!), which saw 48 percent negative sentiment on social media. Based on the data for previous character deaths, Rosenberg estimates that love for the show will recover. Even before the finale, many of the users posting tweets like "I'm so mad at the writers of Game of Thrones for doing this to me" had transitioned into to "Game of Thrones season finale!" in a week's time.
The actual numbers of viewers aren't going down either. Thrones, which has been generally growing in viewers since the Season 3 premiere, saw viewers rise from 5.2 million for "Rains of Castamere" to 5.4 million for the season finale, according to Nielsen. Nor did ratings suffer when Lane died on Mad Men. 2.4 million people watched that episode, and according to Nielsen 2.7 million returned the next week – the show's highest finale viewership. Breaking Bad? The show lost a few viewers after Mike's death – down from nearly 3 million viewers to 2.8 million – but it still didn't dip drastically below the show's Season 5 average of 2.6 million viewers.
The fact of the matter is when it comes to television, absence makes the heart grow fonder and sometimes losing the generally well-mannered British guy only makes us appreciate Don Draper (or Joan, or Roger) that much more.
And that's good news, because on Game of Thrones the deaths aren't likely to end just because the latest season has. Ready the "valar morghulis" tweets now.
