HBO just wants Game of Thrones to trend on social media (no spoilers)

If you haven’t watched the latest episode of Game of Thrones, it’s okay there are no major plot spoilers here. Last season Game of Thrones (GoT) got rather boring for me and as someone who had painstakingly read all the books and its mostly wasted words, I was happy to see HBO condense the show and cut out all the rubbish. It didn’t. This season, however, things have been looking up.

Since coming back about three weeks ago, the show has kept users talking about its various plot twists and character explorations. We have delved deeper into the psyche of some the residents of Westeros and people are sitting up and taking notice. With every new episode GoT is pretty much guaranteed to trend on Twitter and cause a slew of articles on sites like Mashable and Buzzfeed. Truth be told, that is how HBO likes it.

This week’s episode most definitely has had the most controversy and chatter follow the thing that happened (see no spoilers yet). GoT by nature is violent and sexually gratuitous and all that is represented in the books as well so it made perfect sense that HBO would want to turn this into a television show. This is the HBO model, pretty much anything that HBO airs after 9pm is bound to be violent, filled with sex and bad language. We saw it with True Blood and we were okay with it then, why not now?

Somewhere between wanting to entertain us, HBO decided it would be best to shock us, it thought that it would be best to let its social media clout and finesse win out over the audience’s sensitivities. Many people have written about the thing that happened (beware there are spoilers) and how HBO has made harrowing issues in society seem commonplace.

I have come to terms with a certain level of grotesquerie from GoT, the books prepared me for most things, but the thing that happened in the latest episode — while very plausible by George RR Martin’s standards — is more HBO than anything else. The author also commented on the thing that happened on his blog (warning spoilers) stating:

“The scene was always intended to be disturbing… but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.”

Here is why

In today’s society of millions of TV shows with very little time to watch all of them, let alone love all of them equally, shows have to stand out and each season has to pack more punches than the last. As far as HBO is concerned, the show that gets tweeted about the most is the one that wins and by all accounts GoT is winning the war on television.

Right now for HBO it is about the hashtags. The show is structured such that each episode’s events so perfectly timed to end with major plot twists and shareable cliffhangers. #redwedding was a big hype for an episode that had very little to offer aside from a bloody massacre. #purplewedding gave the viewers more excitement and tweets to play with it and again, a major plot twist. The beauty of all this for HBO is the network doesn’t create the hashtags, it simply paves the way for viewers to let their imagination run wild.

Unlike RR Martin’s GoT, where no character or gender is safe and everyone will probably die if he has his way, HBO has decisively settled on cementing its shock factor by making its version even more misogynistic than the author’s.

I expect the forthcoming episodes of GoT will continue to shock and horrify viewers and they will keep twittering all around social media discussing how that scene was just so grotesquely inhumane and like always they will create hashtags to qualify everything. The thing that happened will probably happen again, because that’s the kind of show this is.