'Angered' Game of Thrones star Kit Harington reacts to Season 8 viral petitions years later: 'Level of idiocy..'

First, Stranger Things fans convinced themselves Netflix was hiding a secret Episode 9 called Conformity Gate. Then the servers crashed, timelines melted, and the internet collectively decided: the finale cannot possibly be this final. The main protagonist, Eleven, who has been suffering for five seasons, cannot just...die.

If this energy feels familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before — all hail the original fandom meltdown blueprint: Game of Thrones.

Few would deny that Game of Thrones was once a fantasy juggernaut, the kind that dominated group chats, office lunches and entire Sundays. But as the show caught up with (and sprinted past) George R.R. Martin’s books, the cracks started to show. And when the finale finally landed: Chaos. Outrage. Think-pieces. Rage-posting as a lifestyle choice.

A petition demanding the final season be rewritten by 'competent screenwriters' pulled in nearly two million signatures, proving that if there’s one thing the internet loves more than dragons, it’s collective fury.

That rewrite, of course, never happened. And years later, Jon Snow himself — aka Kit Harington — finally weighed in. In a New York Times interview, the actor didn’t mince words, calling the backlash “genuinely angering” and, frankly, idiotic. He revealed that he was in rehab when the show’s final season premiered. Emerging from treatment, he was stunned by the wave of criticism, especially given the massive effort he and the production team had poured into it. He recalled one battle scene alone took 55 straight days to film.

“Like, how dare you?” he said. “Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media," he said.

HBO CEO Casey Bloys, who was the network’s programming chief at the time, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 that while he and the GOT team were aware of the fan petition demanding a reshoot, they never “seriously considered” acting on it.“There are very, very few downsides to having a hugely popular show, but one I can think of is when you try to end it—people have big opinions about how it should end,” Bloys said. “The petition shows a lot of enthusiasm and passion for the show, but it wasn’t something we seriously considered.”

Season 8 faced criticism on multiple fronts, from the handling of its female characters to lighting and cinematography. Yet the most viral moment came courtesy of a lone Starbucks cup, accidentally left in a scene, which sparked a frenzy across social media.

That brings us neatly back to Stranger Things. From petitions to phantom episodes, fandoms haven’t changed — they’ve just upgraded their delusions. When an ending doesn’t hit, the internet doesn’t process grief quietly. It invents conspiracies, crashes platforms, and waits for a secret episode that was never real.

Winter may have ended, Hawkins may be quiet — but fandom outrage? That’s forever.