A Bracket of Thrones
Creating a Tournament of all the best moments from Game of Thrones Season 4
Warning: There be spoilers here for the entire Game of Thrones television series. I will be avoiding spoilers from the books A Feast for Crows & A Dance with Dragons.
This year’s season season of Game of Thrones was arguably the most event driven season yet. The title of Todd VanDerWerff’s AV Club article sums it up quite nicely.
“Game of Thrones became a mixtape of big moments in its fourth season”
From the very first episode through to the last, we as viewers were treated to copious amounts of memorable scenes and moments. Brutal fights, inspirational / tragic monologues, grand battles and major character deaths made up for a technically impressive, crackingly good season of television.
Due to the scale of this season a few of my friends (who are passionate Game of Thrones fans), decided to breakdown all our favorite moments from Season 4. Rather than argue about who thought what scene was the best, we decided to create a bracket so we could include the rest of the Game of Thrones community in our friendly yet spirited arguments.
Putting a bracket like this together was a daunting task. This bracket would most certainly be judged by a passionate community of both television and book fans. The bracket needed to capture key game changing events as well as memorable show pieces that may not actually move the story forward but are amazing to watch nonetheless.
Since we had so much fun creating this bracket, I wanted to give some insight into how we made our picks and seeded them.
If you’d just like to skip ahead and get voting, head over to our “Look Back at Game of Thrones Season 4" bracket and pick your favorite moment from the season.
Finding Our Picks
Because Season 4 was filled with many great moments, we decided we could find enough great moments to fill a 32 item bracket. Our journey began digging through the great episode recaps over at Entertainment Weekly and skimming through episodes to remember some of the more specific events from the beginning of the season. Here’s the rundown of the memorable scenes / events we picked out in no particular seeding order.
- Oberyn’s Introduction
- Arya Kills Polliver
- Grey Worm & Daario
- The Hound & Chickens
- Snappy Dragons
- Jamie’s New Hand
- Bronn’s Sword School
- Have You Ever Tasted Crow?
- Bran’s Vision of King’s Landing
- Jamie & Loras Wedding Conversation
- Brienne & Cersei Wedding Conversation
- Oberyn & Tywin Wedding Conversation
- Joffrey Cutting off Sigur Ros
- The Little People Play
- Joffrey Torturing His Uncle
- Joffrey Dies
- Daario v. Meereen Champion
- Ser Dontos Gets His Gold
- Tywin Teaches Tommen (about Wisdom)
- Littlefinger & Olenna’s Murder Plot
- Ser Pounce
- Oathkeeper
- White Walker Babies
- Littlefinger is Responsible for Everything
- My Brother is Dead
- Hodor-Bran
- Attack on Craster’s Keep
- Braavos & The Iron Bank
- Drogon Eats Some Goats
- Tyrion’s Trial, Confession & Demand
- Hot Pie
- The Adventures of Brienne & Podrick
- Bronn is Getting Married
- Daario’s Butt
- Oberyn’s Speech: “I will be your champion”
- The Fall of Ser Jorah
- Aunt Lysa Learns to Fly
- Ramsay Legitimized
- The Mountain & The Viper
- Dark Sansa
- Giants!
- The Ice Scythe
- Jon Goes Beyond the Wall & has a Chat with Mance
- You Know Nothing Jon Snow
- Stannis Surprise
- Brienne v. The Hound
- Bad Dragons
- Cersei Tells Dad the Truth
- The Mountain & Qyburn
- “You Will Fly”
- Father & Son
- Valar Morghulis
Shortening the List
With 52 items in the list we were way over our 32 pick goal. Heading back down the list we decided to that we would need to combine some of the smaller interactions between characters into larger moments.
For Joffrey’s wedding, rather than break out the wedding into a series of conversations we whittled it down to two. Joffrey’s death being first and then “An Awkward Wedding” to cover all the small, yet very important character interactions.
We then decided on a single pick called “Dragon Puberty” to encompass all the bad behavior that Dany’s Dragons get up to over the course of the season.
Littlefinger has generally been up to no good the entire series so we felt it was fitting to combine both his sneaky schemes into one pick called “Littlefinger’s Plots” with a focus on the revelation that through his lies scheming he pretty much caused all the war and troubles in King’s Landing.
With 44 items still on the list, the next step was to start doing some cutting of some of the less impactful (redundant) scenes.
Big arguments occurred over cutting anything with Prince Oberyn. The fan favorite with the sexy accent from this season is wildly popular. However we did shave off some of his scenes and keep his two best moments (his monlogue to Tyrion and duel with the Mountain) in the bracket
As much as we enjoyed the new Daario, we dropped a couple of his scenes but kept his fight with the Meereen Champion and the subsequent bathroom break because it was simply a great scene for the character and Dany’s storyline.
A very hard cut for us (and something we are still arguing about) is Tywin’s lecture about wisdom to Tommen while Joffrey’s corpse was still fresh. With a heavy heart we dropped this conversation from the bracket as most of us agreed that it was not something that stood out for viewers of the television show and would probably get knocked out in the first round of voting.
Other cuts from the list included:
- Yara’s failed rescue of the artist formerly known as Theon Greyjoy — The torment of Theon by Ramsay is made clear on an ongoing basis throughout the season. We believed the acknowledgement of his misdeeds by his father Roose Bolton was Ramsay’s key moment, so we went with that instead.
- The Adventures of Brienne & Podrick — As much as we loved this odd couple, Brienne has a few huge moments in the bracket with Jamie and the Hound. Plus we absolutely had to make room for Hot Pie.
- Jon Goes Beyond the Wall & has a Chat with Mance — Stannis’ attack really eclipsed this great scene so we decided to leave it off the bracket. Plus Jon gets his moment with Ygritte.
- Cersei Tells Dad the Truth
- The Mountain & Qyburn
- Bronn is Getting Married
- The Attack on Craster’s Keep
Seeding
Now that we had completed our 32 picks it was time to finally seed them and get this bracket launched. With 32 available spots available in the bracket we broke down each corner of the bracket into a Groups of 8 and gave them the extremely original codenames of A, B, C, and D.
Based on fan reaction on Twitter, television recap comments, Reddit and our own gut feelings we made our best guess of the strongest 4 picks to reside in each of the four corners so you would not get something like “Joffrey’s End” going up against something like “The Mountain & The Viper” in the very first round of voting.
The first set of picks were…
- Group A: Chickens & The Hound
- Group B: Joffrey’s End
- Group C: The Viper & The Mountain
- Group D: Valar Morghulis
After picking these first top picks, we rinsed and repeat and found the next four.
- Group A: Arya Takes Names
- Group B: “I Will Be Your Champion”
- Group C: Father & Son
- Group D: Stannis Surprise
At this point I am sure you get the idea. Once we had everyone in their respective buckets we matched the picks up accordingly to avoid any extremely hard and controversial decisions in the first round.
If you got this far thanks for reading. The best way to see the final results of this epic undertaking is to check out the bracket itself and place your votes. We’re looking forward to see how people vote and hopefully cause some spirited arguments amongst our fellow Game of Thrones friends.
I can be reached on Twitter via @rustydingo or just shoot me an email adrianphi[at]gmail.com
