Using Data to Figure Out Why Game of Thrones 8.3 Was So Bad
By: Adam Brownell
Tags: Game of Thrones, Data Science, Movies, Statistics, Analytics

I added a few columns to make my life easier, then scraped all deaths from the wonderful website https://deathtimeline.com/ plus added season 7 deaths to produce the starting data table. I was off to the races 🐴

The Episode column indicates if a character appears in that Episode. The above graph is fine, but let’s only look at only dead people, since that’s what we’re exploring. For dead people, I added a Death Episode column for which episode they died in, and MinPerEp, which is how much screen time they had over all the episodes they were in.

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At first I charted simply total screen time of all characters killed in an episode:

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It’s great to see major plot points + deaths can be captured this way. We can also see how absolutely insane the season 6 finale was — killing off a huge swath of major characters. It was WAY beyond the scope of other major death episodes, which all hover around 130–180.

** (One might argue that this score demonstrates that there were too many deaths in this episode, and at this point in the series this crazy death episode was just used to tie up loose ends and sUbVerT eXpeCtaTioNs…. but I digress) **

But there are few things that simply don’t satisfy me about deciding episode quality by screen time of deaths:

Ned + Viserys dying in the first season was arguably the most pivotal moment in the series. Here it is less important than the Wildling invasion, which I personally disagree with. Using raw screen time as a metric overvalues deaths that occur late in the show. Even if you are a middling character, if you survive until the end your death can be as significant as Robb Stark at the Red Wedding

So what if we viewed significance not as total absolute screen time, but the amount of screen time per episode? It would stand to reason that an important character would have extended screen time across the entire show. A character dying with 100min of total screen time in episode 10 should be much more significant than a character with 100min of total screen time dying in episode 50. Minutes per Episode could capture this relationship. That chart looks like this:

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This has the opposite effect — early deaths are heavily favored, making a significant later death much harder to achieve. You can almost see the exponential decay line of death value in the above chart.

You can tell this is a comedically unfair representation of Game of Thrones since Ned & Viserys are worth more than everyone who died in seasons 4,5,6 and 7 combined…

Clearly, there needs to be a smarter way to calculate Death Value.

From within my Min/Ep formula, I added a survivorship bonus parameter — essentially maintaining the value of Min/Ep but boosting later series deaths by softening the decay. Every character received 2min screen time bonus per episode survived. While this at first feels hand crafted and less objective, I would argue this can also be viewed as adding weight to deaths as characters progressed through both their own arcs and the stories arcs: even if their screen time does not increase, their extended involvement should naturally increase their significance. Below is my Survivorship Death Value Formula:

Which produces the following chart:

Switching up the color to keep you readers interested!! Image by author

This looks awesome — Ned’s Execution and the Tyrells sit as the most significant deaths of the show’s run, followed by the Red Wedding. It devalues Littlefinger’s Trial, which I would argue is a good thing since a singular semi-decent character’s death is way less of a pivotal moment then the others.

We are getting closer, but aren’t quite there yet:

The Red Wedding is undervalued. There is not way it is only as pivotal as the Wilding Invasion, and is dwarfed by Ned’s Execution, which many would argue should be close together The Will Dilemma

The Will Dilemma

To understand The Will Dilemma, take a look at the Dead List, sorted by DeathValue:

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First, we have Ned Stark — one of the most unexpected and major deaths in all of cinematic history. It triggered all the events of Game of Thrones, and converted millions to GoT fans — certainly deserving of the top spot. Next we have Catelyn Stark, the female lead for most of the early season taken at the Red Wedding, and then Robert Baratheon, the brash king whose death started the Game of Thrones.

Then, there’s Will.

He doesn’t even have a last name.

Here is his Fandom Page: https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Will

He appeared in the first 6 minutes of 1.1, and then was killed by a white walker.

Despite this tiny role in one scene, he ranks higher Stannis, the Tyrells, and even Robb Stark. Clearly something needs to be fixed.

In short, the Will Dilemma is our model’s tendency to overvalue unpopular characters. Yes, even Game of Thrones is a popularity contest.

But how do you measure popularity? Obviously I can’t go in and rank how important each character is, that wouldn’t be objective.

Instead, we can use the number of links to a character’s wiki page on the Game of Thrones Wiki as a yardstick for popularity. The more links and relationships a character has with others, the more popular + important they are. When we count the links and normalize them (scale them between 0 and 1), we get something like the chart linked. Anything above Anything over 0.34 is considered popular.

Game of Thrones Popularity Chart. Image by author

So important people like Walder Frey and Viserys Targaryen? Popular. No, names like Sylva Santagar have practically no popularity.

We can now rewrite our Death Value function as:

Or if you want this to look like a formula to pretend this is mathematically rigorous exercise:

Using this modified Death Value, we get:

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This looks really promising. Ned/Viserys reigns supreme as the most powerful episode, following shortly behind the Tyrell massacre. The Red Wedding, while still being somewhat undervalued, is clearly in a league of its own compared to Stannis and the Wildling Invasion.

Side Note: I used the character pages from the book characters rather than the show to calculate popularity. If you’re worried about this biasing the data, or creating improper value, I would argue that the book wiki captures the true internal popularity of the characters within Westeros rather than the external popularity within HBO. The richness of each character backstory and the sheer number of named characters in the book ensured that important characters were hardly affected by the popularity amplifier, and no ones were heavily punished.

Side Note 2: The above dataset does not include John Snow’s first death, because he didn’t actually die. No fake deaths allowed in my death calculations!

Intangibles in Death

There are several concepts to address that we simply could not account for using our Death Value:

The Hodor Effect: A minor character who has a powerful, meaningful death. Hodor, while playing a relatively minor role in the grand scheme of Game of Thrones, had an absolutely stunning death sequence that certainly is worth more than his measly 0.621 score. However ranking how “great” a death sequence was is far too subjective for this analysis.

A minor character who has a powerful, meaningful death. Hodor, while playing a relatively minor role in the grand scheme of Game of Thrones, had an absolutely stunning death sequence that certainly is worth more than his measly 0.621 score. However ranking how “great” a death sequence was is far too subjective for this analysis. The Littlefinger Quandary : A major character has a terrible or out-of-character death that ends their narrative arc. This is the opposite of the Hodor effect, and thus represents a need to reduce a character’s death score. Also too subjective for our analysis.

: A major character has a terrible or out-of-character death that ends their narrative arc. This is the opposite of the Hodor effect, and thus represents a need to reduce a character’s death score. Also too subjective for our analysis. Ygritte Hypothesis: A mid-season character who joins the team yet does not deserve to be devalued. Obviously Ygritte only appears to season 2, but should her death score start there? She technically was alive and simply did not have any screen-time during the first season, yet she receives a survivorship bonus for those episodes. I choose to consider all characters as starting at episode one but also receiving the survivorship bonus.

A mid-season character who joins the team yet does not deserve to be devalued. Obviously Ygritte only appears to season 2, but should her death score start there? She technically was alive and simply did not have any screen-time during the first season, yet she receives a survivorship bonus for those episodes. I choose to consider all characters as starting at episode one but also receiving the survivorship bonus. Master of Whispers (Offscreen) Bonus: Raw screen-time isn’t necessarily reflective of story impact. Sauron from Lord of the Rings only has 4 minutes of actual screen time through all 3 movies, but his influence derived from all references to him through the story. Perhaps next steps would be to count length of scenes in which a character is mentioned as screen-time as well.

Now, Let’s use this to talk about 8.3.