Warning: Contains spoilers for this episode.
Now that Game of Thrones is back on air and fans of the show are reacting to the first episode of this season, The Red Woman, our data visualization team decided to do a quick analysis of how people are reacting to it.
The analysis involved running the latest thousand tweets for three of the most popular hashtags related to the show – #theredwoman, #jonsnow and #melisandre.
After some data cleaning, we performed sentiment analysis and classified emotions using a Bayesian approach. The script was written in R, which classifies the tweets into one of the six emotional states – sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, fear and anger. The next stage was classifying these tweets into one of the polarities – positive, negative and neutral.
Without further ado, here’s what Twitter users are saying about the show as of now.
Chart 1: #theredwoman emotional states word cloud and bar chart
An analysis of the hashtag of the episode’s title shows that fans were (delightfully) disgusted by the reveal at the end of the episode where Melisandre reveals her true self to the viewers by changing into a very old woman.
Fans are using the word “Gollum” (there are already memes being made to this end) to describe the character’s new look, and have even used words such as “corpse” and “hideous”. There is still fan concern about Jon Snow and whether he will be brought back to life, which can be seen with terms such as “dead” “raise” and “john”.
The bar chart shows that overall; most of the fans were in joy over the episode.
Chart 2: #theredwoman polarity analysis
A polarity analysis of the tweets shows that most of the reactions were overwhelmingly positive for the episode.
Chart 3: #melisandre emotional states word cloud and bar chart
The most talked about character in this episode, besides Jon Snow, was Melisandre. Some fans found the titular character, played by Carice van Houten, as “hilarious” while few talked about how “hot” she is, and some even used the word “cougar” to describe the character. But the most talked about scene of the episode was definitely trending with words such as “face”, “see” and “last scene” being mentioned the most in tweets.
Chart 4: #melisandre polarity analysis
A polarity analysis of the character’s hashtag shows that the tweets were almost equally divided into negative and positive. This is probably due to the fact that as with many other TV shows, there are some characters that the fans love to hate!
Chart 5: #jonsnow emotional states word cloud and bar chart
The most talked about character since the last season’s finale, Jon Snow, was also trending heavily on Twitter, with fans expressing sadness at the fact that they will have to wait another week to know if Jon is brought back to life or not shown by words such as “next”, “week” and “clarity”.
Chart 6: #jonsnow polarity analysis
The fact that Jon Snow’s dead body was given considerable screen time seems to have divided the viewers into two almost equally split categories when it comes to analyzing the polarity of the hashtag. On one hand, almost half of them seem positive, probably in the hopes that the character will be brought back and the other half seems unhappy that he was not brought back in the first episode itself.
We will be monitoring what the Twitterati is saying about the show for the next nine weeks as well. Stay tuned to our GoT sentiment analysis series.
Image Source: HBO
