You may have heard: war is spreading in Westeros. Not just beyond the Wall, but also to an eighth kingdom: YouTube. And, as any bannerman or peasant would tell you, war is ugly. “It's ironic,” says Carmine. “The show’s about backstabbing and shittalking and scheming and the Game of Thrones community is also filled with that. It's a part of how toxic the community has gotten. It never used to be like this back in the day.”
Carmine, a fast-talking 25-year-old New Yorker who prefers not to give his real name (“it's very easy to find someone if you know where to look”), runs Red Team Review, one of the dozens of YouTube channels devoted to analysis, speculation and commentary on Game of Thrones. In an average week, after the show airs, he might upload, in order: \1. A swift breakdown of the trailer for the next show \2. A review of the show itself \3. An hour-long podcast he also puts on YouTube \4. A video on any news or theories that are attracting interest \5. A Q&A responding to comments on his review \6. A preview of next week’s show
From this, Red Team Review, which has more than 170,000 subscribers, might reasonably expect anywhere between 500,000 and a million views – a solid haul, but nothing compared to what is possible. Emergency Awesome, Carmine’s rival in the quick reaction-and-recap stakes, regularly gets over 1.5 million views for a single video. AltShiftX, a book-based analysis channel with an innovative PowerPoint style, can have upwards of a million.
Other less popular channels pursue everything from depth to length to sheer sensation. If you want it, you can almost guarantee someone will be making it, whether that’s compilations of Ser Merryn Trant’s appearances on the show (Kevin GT) or animated histories of the Iron Bank of Bravos (Civilisation Ex). And no matter how much they upload, the fans hunger for more.
“The other day we did a three hour livestream,” says Aziz Al-Doory, co-host of the Westeros History channel, “and there were people in the comment box talking about which livestream they were going to check out next. They just sat through a three hour live stream and they're completely ready for another. They just want to keep going.”
Al-Doory, a 41-year-old former professional poker player who runs Westeros History alongside his girlfriend Ash, is one of the Children of the Forest of the online Game of Thrones community. (“The godfather,” Carmine calls him.) He was on the message boards and the forums years before HBO’s showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who in this analogy would be the Targaryean conquerors), conceived of a series. At first, Al-Doory says, the show started a wave of podcasts. It was only after it became mainstream, around series four, that it made the pivot to video.
Whereas Carmine works as an antiques mover in his spare time, Al-Doory has been full time on Game of Thrones since 2015. Despite a relatively modest 29,000 subscribers, this year he expects to make $50,000 to $60,000, mainly through donations on Patreon. But although the popularity of the show on YouTube has been good for him – perhaps because of his paterfamilias status – others aren’t so sure. “I don't want to be a douche in saying this,” Carmine says, “but now everybody and their moms do it. The community has gone from like an open friendly type of thing to just fuck this person.”
There’s another, more existential, worry. As the show gallops breathlessly to a conclusion, what will happen when it ends? “Any Game of Thrones YouTuber would tell you that every Game of Thrones season is like spring time,” Carmine says. Now winter has come to Westeros, will it be long before it’s felt in the kingdom of YouTube?
Like the fictional world it follows, the Game of Thrones online community has a long, complex and contested history. But almost everyone agrees that the first YouTuber to realise what could be done with Game of Thrones was Danika Lee Massey, better known as Comic Book Girl 19. It was March 2013 and the Game of Thrones TV series, then two seasons old, was just starting to turn into the decade’s inescapable popular culture juggernaut. Comic Book Girl 19 was a popular YouTuber, known for her pink hair and snappy cultural commentaries. Then she released EPIC HISTORY: House Targaryen.
Looking back, the video seems endearingly quaint. There are no esoteric theories, no snark about “plot armour” or “teleportation”, just a simple explanation of Targaryen family history. But that video, and the follow-up on House Lannister, pushed Comic Book Girl 19’s monthly views from 286,000 to 1.7 million in just two months, according to social media analytics website Social Blade. Comic Book Girl 19 had struck YouTube gold. Trouble was, she wasn’t sure it was worth it.
The problem was the way people responded to Game of Thrones. Like YouTube Greyscale, it spread unstoppably, rotting the minds of anyone it touched. Comic Book Girl 19’s normally good-natured channel turned into a den of Thrones addicts, begging and screaming, for “MOAR GAME OF THRONESSSS!!!!” By Halloween, 2013, she’d lost her patience. Two minutes into a video on the obscure horror 1980s film, House 2, she told the Throners where to go.
“I’m sure a lot of you out there are probably confused,” she said, imitating a sneering whine. “You’re like, ‘Why is she reviewing House 2? Like, who cares? She’s not going to get a lot of hits from this. Why isn’t she doing the Baratheon video?’ Well,” she snarled, “I’ve got news for you. I’m not doing this for you. I love this movie and I want to talk about it. This is my show and I don’t care what you think.” She paused briefly, as if to collect herself. “Side note,” she added. “Go fuck yourself."
In just six months, Comic Book Girl 19 had discovered the truth about Game of Thrones: it’s not just popular, it’s compulsive. Everyone who makes videos about it realises the same thing. “There are channels who’ll occasionally dip their toe into Game of Thrones and they’ll say, ‘Oh shit, we've got something here’," says Carmine. “But you can really put your channel into a corner that way.”
To show what he means, he points to two consecutive videos by Nerd Soup, a culture YouTube channel with 122,700 subscribers that started out doing film reviews. One, a June 2016 post on the Han Solo movie has a bit over 5,000 views. The next, “Littlefinger Vs. Varys – Who Played the Better Game?” has 339,000. Since then, nearly everything they’ve put up has been about Game of Thrones. “It's a shame,” tuts Carmine. “It's really increasing their channel popularity. But what happens when Thrones is over?”
Carmine made his first Game of Thrones video in January 2014. It was called “Who Jon Snow's Mother is Part 1,” and instantly it pulled in several hundred thousand views. Since then, that topic has been done to death, resurrected, and done to death again – but back when he did it, Carmine says, it felt original. With the air of a tired veteran, he reminisces about kinder days, when the competition was less intense and theories were treated with the respect they deserved. But, for all his complaints, you get the sense he enjoys the commotion. When we speak, in mid-August, the very first thing he says to me is, “I think the better story would be all the fucking stupid drama. I'm in New York, so it's 5:47 a.m. here. The only reason I'm awake is because there's another Game of Thrones YouTuber bitching to me about Preston Jacobs.”
To get a sense of the intense passions stirred up Game of Thrones, you only have to mention the name Preston Jacobs. Just be careful when and where you do. “He's a banned topic in the largest Facebook community for A Song of Ice and Fire, which has well over 50,000 members,” says Al-Doory. “He's dishonest with the material. He just spins it a lot. He's like the National Enquirer.”
The hostility between Jacobs and the self-appointed guardians of the Game of Thrones community goes back to a 2014 disagreement over crediting fan art, an argument that briefly shut down his channel and led to Ash receiving rape threats. But at its heart it seems to reflect a difference in approach. Whereas some channels take the books and show more or less at face value, Jacobs dreams up ingenious, outlandish theories and wicked commentaries on their many shortcomings, delivering them through the mouths of a menagerie of invented characters. After watching these, I’m expecting Jacobs to be a cross between a jester and a hellraiser. Instead, he turns out to be a forty-year-old auditor for the US State Department in Frankfurt, Germany, who, despite making around $40,000 a year from YouTube, doesn’t want to go full time because “there's no job security”.
I ask him about the critical tone of his channel. “It's the curse,” he says, “you want to be original. But if I use my own personal voice and I was constantly negative the whole time it would be horrible sounding: I would just sound like a big Debbie Downer. So I purposely invited these characters where I could talk through them. I could have one guy do an angry rant and it's not me because it's a character. I can have one guy praise it and it's not me, it's a character. It's safer. It's an escape. It's a crutch in some way.”
The furore around Jacobs has died down in recent years, as people have got used to him. And, in any case, like the feuds of the Westerosi houses, the spat appears relatively benign compared to the real threat: the torrent of Game of Thrones clickbait now flooding across YouTube. Whether you like him or not, Jacobs is unarguably invested in the books and the show. These new videos exist to get views no matter what.
Read more: This is how much life insurance costs in Game of Thrones
“That’s the new thing,” says Carmine. “‘Is Ayra going to die? The theory about this character you don't want to believe!' That never used to be a thing.” The latest genre: spoilers. “There are now channels dedicated to spoiling the entire season,” says Carmine. “And they're doing surprisingly well, so well even my subscribers want me to get into it.”
Carmine says he is a fan first and foremost. But the recent HBO hacks seem to have made the temptation to jump ahead irresistible. On August 17 Carmine released a video about the leaked episode before it had officially aired. “Yup....sigh. This is Game of Thrones 2017 folks,” he wrote in the comments. He didn’t even enjoy the episode.
As ever with Game of Thrones, the causes of this shift are complex and interlocking. Part of it is the fervour of the fans – something the showrunners, without the books to guide them, appear eager to encourage, even to the detriment of character and plot. (When AltShiftX released a series of parody videos mercilessly mocking the show, it was hard to escape the sense he was just bored.) The YouTubers, however, identify a different reason for the decline. Like many creators on the platform, they complain that the platform is shifting its monetisation policy in a way that forces them to produce clickbait.
Last month, the hosts of the long-running Game of Thrones Academy channel released a video explaining that, thanks to the new policy, their earnings from the show had been cut in half. YouTube denies it has made any changes. Tel Aviv-based writer Gil Kidron and historian Itamar Harel had built up a following of 57,000 subscribers for their detailed analysis of the strategy behind the wars of Westeros. With little money coming in outside the Game of Thrones season, the pair expected to make their entire annual income during the two months of season seven, and had invested in new equipment as a result. Instead, they found that not all the videos had ads on a regular basis.
“We’re getting double the views and half the money,” Harel said. “Basically YouTube is saying to us, ‘You should aim for the lowest common denominator.’” After all the internecine squabbles, the true threat had revealed itself, just as in Game of Thrones. Kidron and Harel’s video was called “YouTube Monetization Policy Is Killing Us.”
Carmine isn’t sure what he’ll do when Game of Thrones is over. “It's kind of bittersweet,” he says. “You want to see how it ends, but you don't want the show to spoil the books for you. I want to still keep doing YouTube and hopefully my subscribers who are loyal to me will keep watching. If not that's fine. You know, life goes on.”
Jacobs, who uses Game of Thrones as a vehicle for his own madcap creativity, says he’s almost looking forward to getting onto something else. “I've been trying to write a book for a long time and I guess I've been procrastinating. I'd like eventually to direct people to a chapter of my book or start putting up on videos or something else, something where I create rather than just do analysis.”
Al-Doory is waiting for the next book and the promised spin-off shows. “Since we mostly cover the books and they take so long to come out, we still have a lot to do,” he says. “I think a lot of the people who made real friendships and connections will continue to exist that way. Surely there'll be a waning of interest – but the more someone was interested in the first place the more likely they are to stick around.”
Much of this future activity will take place on YouTube: after all, where else would it go? Even so, there is a sense that the flowering of creativity in response Game of Thrones is already drawing to an end. Neither the show nor the books is enough to sustain it alone; perhaps only a dual release could bring it back to life. And although YouTube will still be the place videos get uploaded, it won’t necessarily be the focus of conversation.
I ask Gil Kidron about the response to his video. “[YouTube’s changes] hit us super hard,” he says. “But thanks to that video and a lot of patron-only content we more than doubled our Patreon income, and since that income is reliable and steady, it has actually been a blessing in disguise. Now our commitment is mainly to our patrons, and that's a more specific kind of audience that we know, which makes it easier to give them what they want.”
Game of Thrones came from nerds – now it’s returning to them. But, somehow, along the way, something has been lost; which in a way is just as it should be. Now if only Benioff and Weiss could end the show with the same bitter pathos...
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
