We’re a fickle bunch, we Internet commenters. That’s the message you get when looking at the swing of community attitudes to Game of Thrones‘ favourite (and previously favourite) characters, over the course of the just-finished fourth season of the show. (warning: spoilers!)
Image credit: AFellowOfLimitedJest, Imgur
Compiled by Reddit user AFellowOfLimitedJest, a giant, multi-page spreadsheet charts the rise and fall of the popularity of flair — a kind of badge that users can assign themselves, displayed after their usernames whenever they comment on Reddit’s /r/gameofthrones (TV show) and /r/ASOIAF (books) subreddits.
The two subreddits’ flair lists let users display their allegiance to any of 214 noble houses, characters or groups in the series. The spreadsheets and graphs chart the rise and fall of the amount of /r/gameofthrones user flair for some of the show’s big names over the course of the fourth season of the TV show, from April 6 to June 22 — it’s basically a big popularity contest.
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To anyone who has watched the show, especially the later half of the season, the results won’t be surprising. House Martell had a huge bump in popularity for the (lamentably short) screen time of Oberyn Martell, played by Pedro Pascal; presumably Martell’s devil-may-care attitude and frankly awesome battle against The Mountain (Gregor Clegane, whose house flair also became more popular thanks to his brother The Hound) had a big part in that. Stannis (the Mannis) Baratheon had the next highest jump in new flair, while House Targaryen took a big dive.
The rise and fall of flair throughout the season very roughly lines up with the screen time, speaking parts and actions of newly popular characters, and with lesser-featured groups and characters falling in popularity (with Daenerys being the exception; clearly people just don’t like her). Of course, the stats aren’t entirely empirical and scientific; strongbad3689 suggests that a fall in flair for any house could just result from more new subscribers to the subreddit.
The folks on the /r/gameofthrones and /r/ASOIAF subreddits discuss the changes in their flair in entirely different styles, too; the book-readers are calmly discussing the implications of the changes in flair and the literary reasons behind them, while the GoT-watchers are jesting back and forth about Stannis the Mannis. [Reddit / Imgur]
If you could pick (or already have) GoT flair on Reddit, who would you stake your allegiance to? Let us know in the comments below.