Why is game of thrones so good

Martin has said before that part of his inspiration for what became the A Song of Ice and Fire series was asking himself what Lord of the Rings ' Aragorn's tax policy was following his triumphant ascension to king in the conclusion of Tolkien's series.

Such mundane detail, ranging from finances to provisions to meticulous descriptions of food, imbued Martin's world with texture and realism its readers could feel.

Further adding to that realism was the addition of the grittier and sexier realities of human life that Tolkien so often left out. Martin's characters had bowel movements, sexual appetites and complicated moral worldviews that made them all the more interesting. Such complexity was incorporated into HBO's television adaptation when it first premiered in and audiences only loved it more and more as those qualities grew.

There was a certain thrill in the violence and sex of the show, and because none of the characters in the expansive ensemble stood out as the show's one true protagonist , there became a hero for every viewer and multiple detestable villains, like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton, whose comeuppances were hotly anticipated. This allowed the show to build dramatic tension, provoke discussion and cultivate a growing fan base that took Game of Thrones from niche fantasy to must-watch television.

Many viewer found themselves tuning in purely to be in the loop for watercooler talk on Monday. Perhaps just as much fun as the show itself became the discussions about the show as massive moments like the Red Wedding or the Battle of the Bastards became cultural touchstones that made for interesting small talk.

This is because Game of Thrones, for all its grimness and brutality, represents a return of old-fashioned escapism. Game of Thrones invites you to join a world where you can solve your problems with a sword and saddle. The sword-and-sandals genre — and its cousin, the sword-and-chainmail medieval epic — often flirted with kitsch and camp.

It helps, of course, that Game of Thrones features many fine actors who make their characters so identifiable. Chief among them is Peter Dinklage, whose Tyrion Lannister is a silver-tongued devil with a prodigious capacity for wine, women and revenge scenarios.

Dinklage plays him as a Dirty Harry who keeps his hands clean, so clever is he at coaxing others to execute his will. Less well-known actors such as Maisie Williams as the plucky tomboy Arya Stark and Lena Headey as mistress of deceit Cersei Lannister also quickly established themselves as fan favourites. There is, at root, a primal appeal to this material. A member who had attended at least three major BWB meet-ups would be dubbed a lord. After five, a prince. And after seven, king. Butler has been to 16 Worldcons and about other Thrones -related conventions and ad hoc get-togethers, securing his kingdom, on top of his cheesesteak knighthood, a long time ago.

He will stay king until somebody removes him from his throne. Butler has visited a total of 12 countries and four continents to meet with his fellow bannermen, building an international social network worthy of an ordained world leader. Over the years, he has also watched in awe as Game of Thrones has exploded into an omnipresent piece of pop culture before his very eyes.

Eventually his colleagues at the airport even began discussing the show as a source of tourism. A ,square-foot attraction called the Game of Thrones Studio Tour will open in Ireland in spring Numberswise, the show is a prestige TV anomaly. It premiered in April to an average 2. The Season 7 finale broke a series record for ratings, drawing That year, HBO had about 54 million subscribers worldwide. Thrones is also the most consistently stolen show in the world. And after a handful of high-profile hacks and episode leaks in , its seventh season finale was immediately passed around by , people as soon as it was released online.

The series has inspired such impressive theft that media researchers have devised a patent-pending system to track the torrenting numbers and locations of its final season in real time. If we were to rely on numbers alone to determine the most culturally significant series in the past decade, this piece might be about The Big Bang Theory. The latter sitcom averaged about But the gradual rise of David Benoiff and D.

Season 1: 3,, Season 2: 4,, Season 3: 6,, Season 4: 8,, Season 5: 9,, Season 6: 10,, Season 7: 13,, Thanks to a following that has organized around the original book series since the early days of the internet, and a media environment that thrives on obsessive fandom, Game of Thrones the show has become a launchpad for careers, consumer products, and entire online ecosystems. Not to mention a particularly passionate subsection of coverage here at The Ringer.

The internet has spawned a hyperactive attention economy that has revolutionized both the content people consume and how they consume it. As on-demand streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Apple pour their riches into the entertainment arms race, both the budgets and standard of quality for television have been raised. At the same time, viewership data and recommendation algorithms have driven studios to make shows that are far more fractured and niche.

As tech corporations extend their reach to all entertainment, the same pattern is playing out for movies , music , and magazines. As a result, the overwhelming popularity of Game of Thrones has become rare in any genre.

In , Linda Antonsson was browsing her local bookstore in Gothenburg, Sweden, when she came across a paperback version of George R. It was the first entry in what the author predicted would be a trilogy titled A Song of Ice and Fire , and it told the story of several great houses volleying for power across the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, told from the perspective of a handful of compelling characters.

The book had debuted the previous year to little fanfare. But when she started reading it, she was hooked. When she finally scored a personal internet connection, she surfed from bulletin board to bulletin board, discussing everything from J. And the two had spent the past few years parsing the finer details of Middle Earth on Usenet threads, the precursors to online forums.

Soon they were stanning together. In , the internet was largely being used as an information-finding utility rather than a social network. But with the help of a few AltaVista searches, the two found as many Game of Thrones fan forums as they could.

And from poking around on fan forums dedicated to the Wheel of Time series, Antonsson had witnessed first-hand how clues and unsolved plot points had driven conversations. The wiki, which would be fleshed out a few years later, is made up of 23, pages of content and has undergone , edits since its launch. It has also inspired the founding of 11 foreign-language sister sites.

From observing the Wheel of Time fan forums, they were also aware that correspondence with authors was frequently lost on disparate online threads. That year they made their first point of contact with the author, to ask for permission to make the MUSH game. At the time, Peter Jackson was preparing to film the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and producers and filmmakers who saw potential in the fantasy genre began circling Martin for the rights to his story.

He demurred, convinced his tale could never be squished into a movie format. It began as a side project run on a dinky server at home as they continued to pursue their respective academic goals. But eventually, it would become the go-to source of analysis and information about the universe, its author, and everything in between. By the time Martin released A Feast for Crows in , he secured his spot as the preeminent fantasy writer of the decade.

His solution was to split Feast in two and tell the story for only half of the characters, rather than half the story for all of the characters. What may have been a frustrating publishing limitation for Martin was a near-maddening source of suspense for his growing fan base. After waiting five years between the third and fourth books, readers were still left to wonder about the fate of favorites like Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen. The next installment would come out in , an agonizing six years later.

And it was during these stretches of silence, when fans had no new material with which to occupy themselves, that they began to focus on creating their own.