Furious 'Game of Thrones' fans are trying to 'Google bomb' the show's 'bad writers'
Hell, it seems, hath no fury like scorned Game of Thrones fans.
Not content with starting a petition to have the divisive season eight of the show remade, they're now hoping to brand show-runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss on the internet.
The helmsman are currently the victims of 'Google bombing', in which the image of an individual – or in this case individuals – becomes a number one search term.
The term in their case being 'bad writers'.
In short, its hoped that when anyone types 'bad writers' into Google, the first result will be a picture of Weiss and Benioff.
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And the campaign, which started in GoT Reddit fan page r/Freefolk, is picking up momentum, with the pair coming up as the third result at the time of writing.
“Bad Writers. Upvote this post so it’s the first result when you google Bad Writers’,” read the Reddit post, though now the results on Google link to news stories on the campaign itself.
Such campaigns hope to subvert the Google algorithms by making the search engine connect a usually unconnected picture with a certain phrase.
Per The Verge, and rather less politely, other angry fans have also tried to have the search terms 'd**kheads' and 'dumb and dumber' link to their pictures in other heavily up-voted Reddit posts.
There have been many notable examples of Google bombing in the past.
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At one time the search ‘miserable failure’ led to the biography of President George W. Bush, while the term ‘idiot’ brought up images of Donald Trump.
It's just the latest manifestation of the frustration felt by many fans over the direction the show has taken in its last ever season.
Spoilers may lie ahead...
First, some complained there wasn't enough action from the get-go (though others deemed episode two, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, to be one of the best episodes ever), then the Battle of Winterfell was almost unwatchably dark in some places – in terms of lighting, rather than tone.
The pacing of the show has become notably rushed and careless in seasons after which Weiss and Benioff overtook novelist George R.R. Martin's source material, and many have questioned the decision to truncate the final season in favour of six longer episodes, instead of pacing it all out over 10, as with the previous series.
But it was Sunday night's climactic episode, The Bells, which has divided fans almost irreparably.
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Though it's been fore-shadowed that would-be ruler Daenerys could become 'the Mad Queen', following in the footsteps of her homicidal father, Aerys II, fans were left bereft at the plot twist, which saw her torch King's Landing, murdering thousands of innocents.
Many feel that fore-shadowing the event was no replacement for decent character development, and that it speaks to misogyny, in that a woman scorned – she was rejected by her lover Jon Snow – will always act irrationally, and cannot be trusted with power.
For the show-runners to betray Daenerys's character in this way has landed disastrously among much of the show's fandom.
To the extent that – at the time of writing – almost 300,000 people have signed a petition calling for a 'remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers'.
Let's just say that the series finale, to be broadcast on Sunday in the US, and available from the early hour on Monday morning in the UK, has an awful lot to do to steer this wayward ship around.