Twitter Reacts to Game of Thrones’s Infamous Final Season
Using our Sentiment + Theme Discovery narrative to identify how Twitter reacted to GOT’s last season
After binge-watching the last few seasons of Game of Thrones over quarantine, waiting for House of the Dragon to come out week by week felt excruciatingly slow at first. As convenient as it is to watch episode after episode on HBOMax, I did miss the upside of watching alongside the rest of the world and seeing everyone’s hilarious, ridiculous reactions on social media in real time — especially for season 8, the show’s chaotic and controversial final season.
You might remember a few blog posts ago, where our team used Love Island tweets to see what people thought about the new season. This got me wondering- could I use Resultid to do a deep dive into what people were saying about each episode of season 8 as it aired, and catch up on all of the Twitter drama I missed?
Using Resultid’s Sentiment + Themes narrative, I explored the overall sentiment and associated themes using a dataset of tweets about Game of Thrones over the running time of its infamous season 8. The Sentiment + Themes narrative lets you split up sentences in your data by sentiment (think Positive, Neutral, Negative), and then discover the underlying themes in each sentiment category. A similar process to what we did for our Love Island Tweets, but to take our analysis even further, we chose to organize our data by episode to identify how our themes changed over time.
In less than half an hour, I was able to understand 13,450 sentences and catch up on what the world had to say about arguably the most controversial season of one of the most beloved shows on television. Winter may have come and gone, but today let’s relive the ups and downs of season 8 one more time.
The Premiere To Episode 2
Anticipation and Praise
During the calm before the storm in the days leading up to the season 8 premiere, Twitter was buzzing with excited fans discussing their predictions, thoughts, and feelings about the upcoming season.
The week after episode 2 aired, it looks like the hype was still going strong, with a common theme being that episode 2 was many people’s favorite episode of GoT ever.
“That episode was pretty much exactly what I wanted to get from Game of Thrones: a show that knows exactly who its characters are and were and what they would be thinking at the [possible] end of the world.”
Episodes 3 to 4
Winter Is Here for GOT Production
“How to fix your TV settings for a rewatch of last night’s frustratingly dark episode of #Game of Thrones?”
By the middle of the season, you could start to see fans getting a little bit more critical about the way the season was going. Some still enjoyed watching the show and seeing their favorite characters come of age (raise your hands if you love Arya Stark ✋) while some seemed to just not be able to see what was going on at all. This is also a huge problem in their newest prequel series, House of the Dragon. Game of Thrones production, did you learn nothing at all from your angry fans? 😡
Another one of GoT’s most memorable and ridiculed moments was when they accidentally left a Starbucks cup in their FINAL EDIT! This was the point where fans started to get really mad. I remember hearing about the Starbucks cup and seeing the memes even when I wasn’t following the show at all. Sadly, in my own binge, I ended up never seeing the cup because HBO took this feedback into account and went back to edit out the mistake.
The Finale
Even The Mad Queen And Her Dragons Would Be No Match For These Angry Fans
As GoT started nearing the end, the audience seemed to be more and more split. Some people commended the show for its cinematography and said that some of their favorite moments of the show came out of this season.
Others were incredibly angry at how the season went, and even started petitions to reshoot the entire season to make it… well, not garbage. Honestly, I’m glad I wasn’t around at that time, because I know I would’ve been one of the hundreds of thousands of people to sign that petition out of desperation and ultimately end up disappointed by an awful ending to one of my favorite shows — too much of an emotional rollercoaster for me!
Typically, our app and our Sentiment + Theme Discovery narrative are used by professionals to identify the sentiments surrounding their qualitative data, and understand the themes behind them. This technique is great for understanding customer reviews, monitoring social conversations, or analyzing survey feedback. In this case, though, it was a blast understanding the context around all the memes, hidden references, and big moments of controversy as season 8 was coming out– all in less than 20 minutes! Almost 3 years after the finale, our app enabled me to sift through huge chunks of completely unstructured text data and get a cohesive idea of how people were feeling, what people were talking about, and how these attitudes changed over time. Whether you’re looking to make better business decisions from your qualitative data or looking to catch up on all the Twitter discourse you missed out on for your favorite show, Resultid is here to help!
