Rest assured, there won’t be any spoilers in here other than an expectation of highs and lows in the show based on the text of the book.  If you’d rather have a virginal experience, I’d suggest clicking one of the links to the right and see what else I’ve put on this site and am now too embarrassed to even revisit.

Previously I generated some simple graphs modelling the positive/negative mood in stories. Basic stuff, but interesting and possibly eliciting continued explorations in text parsing and narrative structure (which, if you read anything I throw out, you’ll find entirely missing). I tried finding similar yet less frivolous examples of what I was doing, being sure the idea must have been explored thoroughly by others, and I did find many examples. If you’re interested at all, googling ‘automated text analysis’ will get you underway.

In any case, I was watching episode 9 of the HBO show Game of Thrones (based on the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin).  The episode was intense and left me thinking: “I’d like someone to tell me that things are going to be OK.” From what people were saying I had the impression that the story might not have any mercy on me. I’ve complained many times that writers should have more courage in this way, and now I am the victim of my desire.

If I’m going to keep following this show, I want to know that things are going to be OK in the end. I didn’t want anyone to unintentionally convey more than I wanted to know, but remembered the text parsing I had done and decided to run the script on the Game of Thrones book. I haven’t read it, but the show is apparently faithful to the book.

Note: the book is not in the public domain and I am not making any of the text available.

Story progression based purely on positive/negative word counts

The answer to “is everything going to be OK?” appears to be: “yes, sort of, yeah”. There are shiploads of dark and cruel things occurring from about 40% into the book, then a relief at 75% through before being hit again by what appears to be the most intensely dramatic part of the book, yet ending in a (hopefully) hopeful ending.

For further illustration, here are versions of the graph with counts per 25000 and per 10000 lines respectively rather than per 20000 above.

To see the below graph in full, click the image:

What this doesn’t show is whether things are going to be resolved in a satisfying manner. More specifically, and perhaps this is all I should have done, the parser doesn’t look for “and so Tyrion was the only surviving Lannister”.