While in the real world, the science on climate change is, believe it or not, settled, in Westeros, we still don’t know why winter is coming—only that it is. While all of us are waiting for that answer (which may never come), there are a lot of memes to be shared.
This is a Google Trends graph. It measures how many times the same word or phrase has been searched over a given period of time. At 100, we have the peak search interest, and at 0 we have 0 searches. For most memes, we see one or two peaks, but this one climbs almost to the same point every year.
Why? Winter is actually coming.
It's hard to imagine a time before Game of Thrones was hated for heroically disappointing us all in its final seasons, and before that when it was first loved by everyone from bookworms to snow artists. But the original “Winter is Coming” post doesn’t actually feature Ned Stark.
According to Know Your Meme, it featured an owl, which was posted to Quickmeme in July of 2011. The following month, there was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia, prompting the first usage of this image.
It's an important moment in the history of this meme, because this is actually where we get the first instance of the meme’s top line.
Although it sounds like something Ned Stark would say, if you read George RR Martin’s original novel, A Game of Thrones, no one ever says “brace yourselves.” And if you watch the show, no one says it there either—only ever the house Stark motto “Winter is Coming."
The original meme is probably laid out slightly differently than you know it today, but by the end of the summer of 2011, new image templates were popping up all over Quickmeme, Reddit, and Tumblr, and users were creating and posting them everywhere—often under the title “Imminent Ned.”
In the same way that so many of us need to mentally steel ourselves for the days to be short and cold in December, online users were able to make jokes about whatever obvious, inevitable, and somewhat regrettable thing was sure to happen in their world.
Spoiler alert for the three people who don’t know yet, but because of the fact that Ned Stark dies at the end of the first season and book, all of this was in reaction to that very first year of Game of Thrones ubiquity.
Over the next 7 seasons, countless lesser Game of Thrones memes sprang up, but Winter is Coming had by far the most staying power.
Case in point: On November 2nd, 2018, Donald Trump referenced it, presumably to lend himself some needed gravitas in a tweet with the vague claim that he was about to sanction…something.
It may have seemed like a good idea to him, but someone should have told him to brace himself, because the negative reaction to this, ranging from confusion to mockery, was… strong to say the least.
And it even included viral criticism from the creators of the show. Especially because this meme has almost become synonymous with the fandom itself—which is to say, really big, and grave, but fun to be involved with.
No matter what you thought of the ending of the show there’s no getting around just how huge a phenomenon it was. And online, “Imminent Ned” was and continues to be as absurdly large as Ned Stark’s Valyrian steel greatsword.
When you play the game of memes you win or you die. And winter is still coming.
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