What it's like to ignore Game of Thrones for 8 years, then binge through it in 5 weeks

The New York Times

New York Times critic at large Wesley Morris experienced Game of Thrones as a "bystander" for eight years before he decided to dive in and begin watching the HBO series on April 3, 2019. "For a month, my diet included three or four episodes a day," he writes. "Some days I watched more, almost entirely in my living room and on a television set. Often the credits rolled with me, by myself, saying '(expletive)' or '(expletive)' or simply nothing because when, say, a wedding suddenly becomes a blood bath, you can’t talk because you can’t breathe." Morris adds: "It had been fun to experience Game of Thrones as a bystander. The things that reached me about the show really stuck. I knew the meaning of 'Hodor' before I’d ever seen the character himself. I’d heard about the dragons and the zombies. I knew that somebody saw fit to hire Jason Momoa to plant a flag of molten hotness. The aforementioned blood bath, dubbed the Red Wedding, sounded bad. (It was actually so much better than that — a nightmare achievement in horror-movie terror.) I had been watching the show secondhand and sometimes only because it was on at somebody’s house....In little more than a month, I absorbed the show’s abysmal cruelty and rousing bellicosity but also its ethereal tenderness, gallows wit, and thrillingly robust sexual hunger." Morris goes on to explain the difference in watching Game of Thrones without the weekly hubbub between episodes. "What delighted me about my initial weeks with Game of Thrones was how private the experience was," He says. "...I read criticism about the show listened to podcasts and watched videos, all of which could be as entertaining as the show itself. But I never had to suffer disappointment or resentment. I never underwent the urge to have a take. I was just excited — because the show could do that to you. But once I was caught up with the rest of the planet and ready to watch the third episode of this final season (the notoriously underlit White Walker massacre), where did that leave me? Standing around the proverbial water cooler, getting exclamatory, emotional and aggrieved about, say, being denied a shot of Daenerys’s face as she commits mass murder. And yet I still feel kind of apart. Five weeks is enough time to achieve familiarity but probably not enough to become a true fan. Hence my chagrin. There are no restraints in a binge, but there can be some guilt."