Game of Thrones: Seven Years On – Part One

Seven years have passed since Game of Thrones ended. That feels like a strange thing to sit with – not just because of how the ending went, but because of how central the show was to an entire stretch of my life. I was a genuine super-fan for the better part of a decade, and this story crossed countries, seasons, and significant moments in my own life along the way.

These two pieces are my attempt to tell that story honestly – not just as a retrospective on a television show, but as a portrait of what it felt like to be inside a cultural phenomenon while it was happening, and what it felt like when it fell apart. Part One covers the beginning – the books, the show, and the years when Game of Thrones was genuinely extraordinary. Part Two covers what came after.

If you were there for any of it, I suspect some of this will be familiar. If you weren’t, I hope it gives a sense of what it meant – because I do not think we’ll see anything quite like it again.v

Eason’s, Cork, 2011

It started with a magazine. I was in Eason’s in Cork City – the proper one, the iconic one that had been there for years, across the road from Roches Stores – when I spotted a film magazine with the tagline “Game of Thrones: The Lord of the Rings Meets The Sopranos.” That was enough. I bought the magazine, and not long after I bought the first book.

It sat on my shelf for a few weeks. I was in the middle of first-year exams at UCC – Law and German – and there was no time really to dive into anything else. But the summer was coming, and as it turned out, I had plenty of time ahead of me.

That Summer

That particular summer was one of the last of what I think of as the endless summers – the kind you have before adult life imposes its structure. In the years that followed, there would be unpaid internships, summer camps, and the gradual accumulation of adult obligations. But that summer, in 2011, I had none of that. The recession was in full swing. Jaw surgery was on the horizon – I had an underbite that needed correcting, and the procedure was scheduled for later that summer.

Socially, it was not a straightforward time either. First year at UCC had not gone quite the way I had imagined. I was living at home rather than on College Road with the rest of my group, which created a distance that proved difficult to close. I had not really clicked with most of the people in my class. I had a couple of friends – Seán and Paul – but they were not yet the close friends they would later become. I had not really kept in touch with people from school, as I maybe should have… I had dived into my time at UCC, but I realised quite late that I had a lot of people I knew and were acquaintances with, but not really close friends. I was not unhappy, exactly. But I was not particularly connected either.

What this meant in practice was that when the exams finished and the summer began, I had nowhere particular to be and no one waiting to meet me. The days were genuinely open in a way they would never quite be again.

I watched the GAA Championships throughout the summer, the Tour de France every day in July – the Schleck brothers against Tommy Voeckler, Alberto Contador, and Cadel Evans – and I read.

The Books

One afternoon, shortly after my exams finished, I brought “A Game of Thrones” into the garden. It was Leaving Cert weather – 25 degrees, that specific Irish sunshine that arrives unannounced and feels vaguely miraculous. Eight hours later, I had not moved. I had read 400 pages. It was not simply that the book was gripping, though it was. It was that I had a whole empty day and nothing to pull me away from it – no message to reply to, no arrangement to keep, nowhere to be when the light changed. The book filled a genuinely empty space, and it filled it completely.

I have always been drawn to history – not any single period or region, but all of it: Greek, Roman, Mongol, Medieval, Celtic, the Second World War. What George R.R. Martin had built felt like the book I would have loved to write myself – a pick-and-mix of history and mythology, assembled into something entirely original. And unlike Tolkien’s world, which is luminous and morally legible, Westeros was grey. Nobody was entirely good. Nobody was entirely beyond sympathy. I was hooked.

That summer became defined by three things: the Tour de France, the GAA Championship, and A Song of Ice and Fire. My brother – three years older than me – picked up the books around the same time, and what followed was several weeks of reading side by side, debating, and trading theories. He tended to read faster than me. During “A Storm of Swords“, he was several chapters ahead, and I came to him wanting to talk through Robb Stark’s strategy. He told me to keep reading. A chapter or two later, the “Red Wedding” happened. I threw the book across the room. I went back for it a few minutes later.

My mother had noticed us reading and bought “A Dance with Dragons” – the newest one, just out – as an early birthday present for me. An enormous hardback. It is strange to think back on that moment now -before my jaw surgery, before Erasmus, before everything that came next -and to realise that no further book in the series has appeared since. That was fifteen years ago.

Christmas in Westeros

I had read all the available books before I saw a single episode of the HBO show. This gave me the knowing look – the Book Reader’s particular satisfaction of being several steps ahead of everyone watching the adaptation. Oh, you think that about Sansa? You’ll want to wait. That theory about Tyrion? I’m not going to spoil it.

We eventually bought the first season on DVD, around Christmas, as it turned out. My brother had already watched it on some dodgy stream somewhere, but I had been worried about viruses on my computer. We watched it over the Christmas period, and it was everything I had hoped for: Ned Stark, Robb Stark, the Hound, Cersei, Jaime, Jon Snow, Tyrion – above all Tyrion – and Daenerys. The world was grimy, lived-in, and completely believable. If I had not already been fully invested in Westeros, I was after that.

Season Two and the Forums

By the time Season Two arrived, I was not willing to wait months for the DVD. My friend Seán – Seání Kid – was working in the Students’ Union at UCC and told me about computer labs that most students didn’t know existed. This was before smartphones were universal, before everyone had a laptop, at the peak of Facebook’s dominance. Season Two was watched in a computer lab in Áras na Mac Léinn, and immediately after each episode, I was on the forums reading what people thought.

Being a book reader meant I had no spoiler anxiety. But what struck me was how good the online conversation was. People were respectful, the debates were sharp, and the theories were extraordinary in their reach and ambition. Game of Thrones was the perfect show for this kind of engagement because the books were not finished, and nobody had the complete picture. Not the show runners, not the fans, possibly not even George R.R. Martin himself.

The most famous theory was R+L=J – a speculation about Jon Snow’s true parentage that I encountered as early as 2011. When it was confirmed years later on screen, there was enormous satisfaction in the fan community. It was not fan service. The author had laid the breadcrumbs, readers had followed them, and after years of waiting, they were proven right. That kind of payoff – slow, earned, deeply researched – was central to what made those early seasons so extraordinary.

Following GOT Across Europe

“Game of Thrones” followed me through the years that came after. In Marburg on Erasmus, I had planned to watch Season Three with friends – it never quite came together – but the conversation was happening around me constantly, and since I knew the books, I was part of it regardless. I lent my copy of the first book to someone there and never got it back. It is somewhere in Romania now.

In Dortmund, a few years later, Season Six was underway – Hodor, the Battle of the Bastards, “The Light of the Seven“. Ramin Djawadi’s music from that season remains some of my favourite ever written for television. I unfriended someone from my programme after he posted a Hodor spoiler on Facebook – just “Hodor 😢” – which was, I maintain, enough. I barely knew him anyway.

On a trip to Strasbourg with fellow English teachers from the programme, we sat down one evening to watch the very first episode with someone who had never seen it. The jokes practically wrote themselves. The episode in which a child is thrown from a window is actually among the more peaceful episodes in this series. Enjoy the Starks while they’re all together.

The Tours

After my final exams in fourth year, my brother and I did the “Game of Thrones: Wall and Causeway Tour” from Belfast – my first and, as it turned out, only visit to Belfast up to now. It is a genuinely strange city in certain parts, with Union flags hanging from lamp posts on some streets that keep you at a particular kind of distance. But it is also a city of real history, and we spent time at the Titanic Museum – a building that tells you something important about what Belfast was and what happened to it.

But we were there for Westeros. The highlight was our guide, an extra who had actually appeared in the series. He had fought with Stannis Baratheon, served in the Lannister army, and been on set with actors we had spent years watching on screen. He had met Tywin Lannister. To us, he might as well have been an A-list celebrity, and we were quietly burning with jealousy the entire time. He was just an ordinary fella, clearly amused by our reverence.

Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge was genuinely impressive – you are truly out above the ocean there, exposed, and it is immediately clear why it was chosen as a filming location. One serious Irish gust of wind and you are in the sea. The Dark Hedges were exactly as dramatic in person as on screen. The Wall, however, was a disappointment – a quarry in the distance that you view from the side of a road, pointing a camera toward a pile of rocks and hoping for the best. Not quite what the brochure implied. The Giant’s Causeway, which was also part of the tour, needed no such qualification – it is one of those places that earns every superlative written about it.

We went again the following year – this time, a different tour entirely: the Winterfell tour from Dublin. The weather was apocalyptic – the kind of Irish rain that is less a weather event and more a personal affront. It destroyed my camera and, over the course of the day, killed my phone. But the Winterfell tour had something the first did not: the direwolves. The dogs who played Grey Wind and Summer are owned by a man in the North who brings them to meet tour groups. We met them. We patted them. They were magnificent animals.

Those dogs are probably gone now, as this was eleven years ago. Life is genuinely unfair sometimes.

We won the bus quiz on the second tour – my brother and I, the only real fans on board, which made the victory somewhat straightforward. The prize was a photograph with Jon Snow’s sword, which I maintain is a worthy prize for any quiz.

Afterward, watching the show, every time the Dark Hedges or Carrick-a-Rede appeared on screen, there was that particular feeling – the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, if you know it, from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Pointing at the screen. We were there. That was us. It added something to the watching that no amount of online theory could replicate.

The High Point

Looking back, Season Four was the peak – not just of the show, but of what “Game of Thrones” meant as a cultural moment. In the beer garden at the Franciscan Well in Cork, sometime around that period, after exams, with friends of friends – people I barely knew – the conversation would turn to Game of Thrones within minutes. Twenty minutes with a stranger about Tyrion’s trial, Joffrey’s death, and the Viper versus the Mountain. It was a shared language. You didn’t need to know someone. You just needed to have been watching.

I don’t think we’ll see something quite like that again. The way streaming works now, the fragmentation of content, the algorithm – all of it makes that kind of shared experience much harder to create. “Game of Thrones” in those early seasons existed in a specific window: appointment television, with weekly episodes, at a moment when nobody had the full story and the conversation was genuinely open.

That is where I want to leave Part One – at the high point, at the Franciscan Well, at a moment when “Game of Thrones” was bringing people together and the story felt as though it could go anywhere.

What happened next is a different story entirely. Part Two coming soon.

Oisin O Mahony Blog