Game of Thrones Big Battle Broke Another Record, Thanks to Arya Stark

This post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night.”

Maisie Williams might have worried that Game of Thrones fans wouldnt love Sunday nights epic battle episode, “The Long Night”—particularly a certain epic feat her character pulled off. But now it seems like those worries were completely unnecessary. If social-media engagement is any indication, fans were more entranced than ever by their favorite show: the episode is now officially the most-tweeted-about television episode of all time.

According to Variety, Sundays Thrones attracted more than 7.8 million tweets—breaking the previous record of over 5 million, held by the Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere. (The premiere also crushed previous ratings records.) This makes sense; as Game of Thrones fanatic Leslie Jones can tell you, this HBO drama is the kind of TV program that generates strong reactions every few seconds.

As promised, Sundays episode delivered a battle sequence for the ages; Variety clocks the fighting at 67 minutes. The episode was quite dark—both thematically and literally, prompting several fans to joke on Twitter about how difficult it was to see . . . just about anything. Another popular subject on social media was the episodes handful of deaths, one of which was particularly brutal.

But the real episode M.V.P. was Arya and her buzzer-beating save. The youngest Stark girls simultaneous rescue of Bran and murder of the Night King had people nostalgic, emotional, and, of course, relieved. The natural result? A veritable flood of memes. Sure, there were a lot of tweets about the episode, not all of them dedicated to Arya Stark. But even if theres no way to decisively verify Aryas role in this record-breaking Twitter siege, we at least know this: she certainly contributed her fair share.

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