The Game of Thrones Characters that Fans Love to Hate

Which Game of Thrones character inspired the most hatred among the fans? Cersei? Ramsay? Surely Joffrey and his sneers must have earned him the title, right? And how about the reverse: which characters were perennial fan favorites? Tormund? Arya? Pod the Rod?

I found myself asking these questions recently; in July, I finished watching through the series for the first time. Luckily, Thrones fans have not been shy about sharing their feelings online. In particular, three subreddits—/r/gameofthrones, r/asoiaf, and /r/freefolk—have archived discussion threads for all 73 episodes with thousands of fan comments.

So I scraped a bunch of those Reddit comments (300,101 to be exact) and ran them through a sentiment analyzer. I searched them for sentences that mentioned prominent characters and analyzed those sentences as well. The end result is a big heap of sentiment scores that allow us to see (roughly) how fans felt about a character at any given point in the series.

The rest of this essay will try to figure out which Game of Thrones characters won over the fans and which ones made themselves unforgivable. But first, let’s cut through the jargon: what is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment Analysis: A Primer

Sentiment analysis is a technique for understanding whether a piece of text expresses a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. For this project, I’m using VADER, a sentiment analyzer specifically designed for interpreting social media content, like Reddit comments. VADER takes in a sentence and then calculates a sentiment score between 1.0 (most positive) and -1.0 (most negative). For example, here’s how VADER scored two real Reddit comments:

In the first comment, words like “happy” and “proud” led to a positive score. Likewise, in the second, words like “death” and “scared” resulted in a negative one.

This project goes one step further by calculating a sentiment score not only for each comment, but for each sentence that mentions a significant character. Here’s how VADER scored two sentences that mention Cersei:

The scores turn out as expected: VADER gave a positive score to the sentence praising Cersei and a negative score to the one wishing her an agonizing end. But sentiment scores don’t always line up so neatly with the way human readers interpret a sentence. Many factors contribute to a sentence’s final sentiment score, and a positive or negative rating doesn’t always mean what we think it should mean. For instance, take a look at two more sentences that mention Cersei:

VADER classified the first sentence as a positive one for Cersei because of words like “better” and “truly”, but us humans reading the same sentence would more likely conclude that it reflects negatively on Cersei. We would also probably count this as a positive sentiment for the unnamed “she” in the sentence, but a computer can’t assign a score to a character if she isn’t explicitly mentioned.

And in the opposite scenario, VADER gives a negative rating to the second sentence, but we can clearly see it’s a glowing compliment—and not for Cersei the character, but for Lena Headey the actor. Sentiment analysis can’t tell the difference between a sentence about a character and a sentence about something unrelated that happens to mention the character. For this reason, comments praising actors or bashing the writing in Season 8 will muddy the waters when we try to look at sentiments for individual characters.

However, even with individual sentiment scores that can seem hit or miss, sentiment analysis is still a useful technique in the aggregate. Looking at the average sentiment scores of many comments or sentences can tell us a great deal about trends in fan reactions. Before diving into individual characters, let’s step back and get some context on Game of Thrones as a whole.

A Look at the Big Picture

To better understand how fan reactions to the show changed over time, let’s chart the average sentiment score of the comments for each episode.

Overall, fan sentiments toward Game of Thrones trended negative over time. With a mean score of 0.002, Season 5, Episode 3 marks the last time that average sentiment was positive. The trend line also tanks significantly after Season 8, Episode 3, which makes sense: fans questioned the episode’s murky lighting, and criticism of writing choices and a misplaced coffee cup only continued from there.

Negative scores don’t have to mean ire at the showrunners, though. Sharp drops in average sentiment also tend to occur at key plot points—I’ve labelled some above, but you can probably pick out more just by looking for steep dives into negative territory. The infamous Red Wedding in Season 3, Episode 9 is the most obvious example of how fans’ collective shock and grief can affect the average score for an entire episode.

This overall trend will serve as our baseline for comparison. Now let’s get to the fun part: examining the reactions to individual characters.

The Breakdown by Character

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Average Scores

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Who Did Fans Love Best?

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Who Did Fans Hate the Most?

[WIP — more coming soon.]