New Chart Shows Game of Thrones’ Words Per Minute Declined With Each Season

Even though the series finale aired a week ago, the discourse around Game of Thrones‘ final season is continuing to evolve — partially thanks to an interesting bit of data. A chart shared by Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson has made the rounds online, which tracks the average number of words per minute throughout each Thrones episode. The data, which was charted by Github user mrquart based off of OpenSubtitles.org, reveals that the number of words per episode decreased pretty significantly over the show’s run.

According to the chart, Thrones‘ debut season had around 60 words per minute, which gradually decreased to under 40 words per minute in the final batch of episodes. Somewhat-unsurprisingly, Season 8’s “The Long Night” was by far the lowest in this data, with around 15 words per minute.

As Robinson and other Thrones fans have clarified, this isn’t necessarily an indication of the later episodes’ quality, but it does provide an interesting bit of data about the show. There are also a few different factors around the latter seasons that could justify this change, both in the fact that the show surpassed George R.R. Martin’s source material in Season 5, and the increase in bigger battle scenes later on in the show.

With or without this data, it’s hard to deny that the eighth season has courted quite a lot of controversy, with over a million fans petitioning for HBO to remake the final episodes.

“There’s no way for [co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] to have landed this plane in a way that would have made everybody happy and they’re not out to make everybody happy,” HBO programming president Casey Bloys recently shared. “I think they did a beautiful job. You just have to accept that not everybody is going to agree with the choices. I’m paraphrasing Tim but basically for show this big, and this epic and this sprawling, they [Benioff and Weiss] have to make choices.”

Thankfully, fans will have another (and much wordier) way to experience the conclusion of Thrones, as Martin still has yet to complete the series’ final books.

“How will it all end? I hear people asking,” Martin recently shared on his blog. “The same ending as the show? Different? Well… yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes.”

“I am working in a very different medium than David and Dan, never forget.” Martin continued. “They had eight hours for this final season. I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3000 manuscript pages between them before I’m done… and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I’ll add them. And of course the butterfly effect will be at work as well; those of you who follow this Not A Blog will know that I’ve been talking about that since season one.”

What do you think of this data surrounding Thrones‘ words per minute? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!