The tens of thousands of Game of Thrones fanfictions published across the internet explore just about every “what if?” question you can imagine and then some. Of course, Sturgeon’s Law applies to fanfiction much as it does anything. The only barrier to posting a story on AO3 or FF.net is creating a free account with an email address. But even once you filter out all the stuff that’s not quite readable, the thousands of works remaining cover an incredible range of ground: What if Rhaegar had succeeded in crushing Robert’s Rebellion? What if Daenerys had been raised as a ward of Ned Stark? Or Stannis Baratheon? What if Tywin Lannister had realized Arya Stark was his cupbearer at Harrenhall? What if Tyrion actually fought the Mountain himself in his trial by combat? And yes, all of these are fanfictions that exist in at least one, if not multiple, iterations.
All the fan theories ignored or downright incinerated by the series canon can be stubbornly brought to life anyway in fanfiction, from Bran messing with timelines with his Three-Eyed Raven powers to Ned Stark warging into a pigeon prior to his beheading (the latter, by the way, is a three-part series complete with art). The stories range from epic alternate histories of Westeros even longer than the A Song of Ice and Fire novels themselves to short and sweet fics imagining the day-to-day shenanigans of all the characters in a modern universe as told through text messages and group chats (a sizable fanfiction subgenre, believe it or not).
“the one true queen of westeros” (chillyravenart)
As far as what pushed them from just watching (and in most cases, reading) about Westeros to making fanworks, several fans also mention an attachment to a particular character as playing a key role. For Ashley, it was Daenerys from the very start. She actually resisted her brothers’ efforts to introduce her to Game of Thrones until she came across a clip of Daenerys tricking Kaznys mo Nakloz into giving her control of the Unsullied and the subsequent sacking of Astapor. “I was like, well that’s a bad bitch, I’m interested in this now,” she recalls. For Yasmin, it’s the entire Targaryen clan, while Allison loves Arya. “As soon as I started watching the show, I knew Arya was my favorite character,” she reflects. “She was bold and brash and completely different.”
But sometimes it’s not about forming an attachment onto one character so much as the dynamic between two — that is, the shipping. Shipping, when it comes to fandom, is no joking matter. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Bring up “Reylo” on social media and watch the battle commence (if you’re unfamiliar, it’s a Star Wars thing and boy oh boy do people have feelings on the matter).
“I think shipping happens for a variety of reasons,” says Meg, who started writing Game of Thrones fanfiction in late 2011 and has witnessed firsthand the considerable evolution of shipping culture within the fandom over the course of the show’s run. “Sometimes you like the way the characters interact in canon, for canon ships, like Ned and Cat, and want to see more of them. Sometimes you want to see a same-sex pairing for a character due to the chemistry they have with another character in canon or the subtext of the interactions they have, like Robb and Theon or Sansa and Margaery” — it’s worth noting that same-sex pairings (slash, femslash) are very common if not predominant in fanfiction for most fandoms — “and sometimes you just like a specific character and want to give them a happy ending so you just pick another character you like.”
So what (relation)ships are popular in the Game of Thrones fandom? As mentioned earlier, it’s changed significantly over the years. With the help of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I did a little time traveling through the history of the “ASOIAF & Related Fandoms” tag on AO3. On May 24, 2014—the earliest capture available—the most popular relationship tag was Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark (also known as Sansan), followed by Arya Stark/Gendry Waters (Gendrya) and Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth (Braime). As of June 5, 2019, the ranking now goes Jon Snow/Sansa Stark (Jonsa), Braime, and then Gendrya. Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen (Jonerys) comes in fifth.
Considering the perennial bridesmaids Gendrya and Braime are both relationships that were, at least briefly, realized in the show and have considerable subtext in the books—Gendry and Arya even have their own love song, after a fashion—Jonsa’s rise to predominance seemed a little hard to explain. I asked Meg if she could shed any light on the situation.
“As I remember it, it was hard to ship Sansa with someone ‘non-creepy’ from the books,” she says. “Most of the ships for her involved Sandor or Petyr Baelish, both of whom are significantly older than her, neither of whom are particularly nice to her, and, in Baelish’s case, was sexually abusing her. People literally just started writing stories where Sansa had a happy ending with one of the few “good” men in the series—Jon, Gendry, Podrick. I honestly think [Jonsa] became as popular as it did because Kit Harington and Sophie Turner displayed some rather unexpected, not very sibling-y chemistry when they reunited in Season 6. Suddenly it seemed to go from a niche ship to an explosion.”
It was then that the drama started—and Season 7 when things really took off.
Where Season 6 lead to the rise of the Jonsa, Season 7 brought a flood of Jonerys content. “When Season 7 of Game of Thrones ended, the Jon and Daenerys fandom exploded,” Ashley says. “And you had two years between the end of that season and the start of the next one where people were just thirsting for anything.” She and Frost were both part of the post-Season 7 Jonerys boom. While Frost had been a fan of the show and the books for a long time, she had not felt especially invested in any of the couples on the show until Jon/Daenerys came around—and that made all the difference. Much like Ashley and Todd, the cliffhanger ending of the penultimate season combined with the knowledge of the long wait ahead until Season 8 contributed to her starting to write fanfiction, but it was the Jonerys element that sealed the deal. “Season 7 was so short that there wasn’t time for any real development of the relationship. They were missing scenes of personal intimacy or even just conversations. So a lot of fics, including a lot of my writing, were ‘missing scene’ sort of stories that were like, ‘this takes place between this scene and this scene, because the show goes from this to that with nothing in between, so let me fill it in for you all.'”
While most shippers get along amicably even when their preferred pairings are fundamentally incompatible, once a fandom grows to a certain size and develops a robust shipping culture, Ship Wars—think a love triangle meets a sports match—become something of an inevitability. In the Game of Thrones fandom, Jonerys vs. Jonsa became the ship war.
Related Topics: fan culture, Fandom, Game of Thrones
