Warning: Contains major spoilers for this episode (duh!).
In episode seven, The Broken Man, the two major storylines were the return of Ser Sandor Clegane aka The Hound (the episode title is a reference to him) and Arya Stark getting stabbed by the Waif.
Key findings from our sentiment analysis of Game of Thrones season 6, episode 7 –
The return of the Hound in the first few minutes of the show caused a sharp spike in the tweets as can be seen in the graph given below. The number of tweets then went down and picked up at the end when the Arya storyline started airing.
When analyzing the tweets made related to the show in the first 15 hours of the episode airing, we saw that the tweets peaked for the first hour after the episode aired and then fell sharply (since it was nighttime in the US).
Another interesting fact that we encountered was that after the US, the country from which we got the highest number of tweets was Peru. Apparently, the show has a lot of fans there, although how they are able to watch the show so soon is anyone’s guess!
The most popular hashtags for this episode (excluding the show’s name related ones) were for Lyanna Mormont, Hound and Arya. But a number of them also involved talk about the Miss USA pageant which was airing simultaneously on FOX.
The show is often charged with pandering to male chauvinist tendencies and various activists keep trying to stay a boycott of the show on Twitter. But a data analysis of the show with respect to words commonly associated with such campaigns (feminism, gender, empower, sexism, woman, women, objecti*, lgbt, gay, and so on) shows that the show’s fans do not seem to take this charges seriously.
This is certainly good news for HBO since it proves that no matter what a vocal minority says, the fans are sticking by the show and can distinguish between fiction and real life.
Deadwood star Ian McShane’s enterance (and exit) from the show got him 2,625 tweets and his fans were more concerned about a possible Deadwood movie.
Notable mentions
From the time the episode started airing till around June 7, 2016 2 PM IST, we analyzed 171,982 tweets related to Game of Thrones. This included text related to all the main hashtags associated with the show such as #gameofthrones and #got.
Number of original tweets: 91,257
Number of retweets: 80,725
Most popular characters mentioned in tweets: Arya and the Hound (25,760 ~15% of all tweets)
Most favorited from our list: https://twitter.com/GoT_Tyrion/status/739660342037352448
Likes: 3,033, Retweets: 1,903 as of June 7, 2016 5:28 PM IST
Most retweeted: https://twitter.com/OriginalFunko/status/739607772002586624
Retweets: 6,541, likes: 1,698 as of June 7, 2016 5:32 PM IST
Data size: ~750 MB of tweets with metadata
Come back next week to find out how Twitter users are reacting to the eighth episode.
Check out our sentiment analysis of Twitter users for the previous episodes here –
Game of Thrones s6ep5 – Our text analytics shows Twitter users can’t hold back the tears this time
Game of Thrones season 6, episode 4 – Twitter users united in joy over the big reunion
Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker, se6,ep3 – a song of Twitter and Python
Twitter explodes in joy over you-know-who’s return in Game of Thrones season 6, episode 2
Sentiment analysis of how the Twitterati is reacting to Game of Thrones season 6, episode 1
If you want to know what people are saying about your brand on the various social media channels, reach out to us for custom social analytics solutions.
Co-author: Shail Deliwala, Data scientist at Softweb Solutions
Image source: HBO.com
