How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dragons
Working in the Game of Thrones content mines killed my fannish feelings for the franchise. Here’s how I got them back.
I never set out to be a journalist who wrote about TV, Game of Thrones, or fandom at all.
As a budding reporter, I thought I had town council meetings and municipal investigations in my future; eventually, perhaps I could level up into national coverage. Instead, fandom was my ticket in. I was part of a generation of fannish writers and creatives who grew up on the internet, cutting our teeth in now-defunct forums, archives, and social media platforms. My experiences in fandom led to writing articles about my own fandoms—especially Game of Thrones. From 2013 to 2019, countless fans read my work after tuning in every Sunday to watch what happened next in HBO’s lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF).
This was the era in which fandom was rapidly mainstreaming. The huge success of Game of Thrones alongside franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe coincided with the normalization of fans gathering online to talk about the things they loved. For journalists who were also fans, we found ourselves in the unique position of being able to write about fandom spaces without being voyeuristic or making fans the butt of the joke. After decades of genre television being culturally framed as niche and nerdy, suddenly the most engaged and the most casual viewers aligned, ensuring that a show once described as “just tits and dragons” became the biggest show in the world.
The audience’s appetite for more writing about GoT was insatiable—which meant, for a strange, surreal time, job security. “[T]here will never be another phenomenon like Game of Thrones,” Kevin Nguyen wrote for The Verge in 2024. “There are various theories why—the fracturing of monoculture, the binge model, the fact that there’s too much TV, the fact that it sucks now, TikTok—but it also means there won’t be another Game of Thrones moment for journalistic outlets.” We were past a digital media golden age; we had survived the first wearying cycle of pivots to video, layoffs, pivots to algorithms, re-pivots to video, and downsizing. The enshittification of the internet, chilling censorship, AI slop, the death of Google Search, and a dramatic increase in layoffs were ahead of us, but for the briefest time, I worked near the epicenter of the biggest show in the world, and the sky was the limit.
