PARASOCIALIZE

House of the Dragon ended and the fans are furious at the show, not the characters

NME on the backlash to season three. This is a fight about storytelling and everyone is using the wrong words.

FILED 25 SEP 2026 · 25d ago ·Due back 25 OCT 2026 ·BY NME
A climate protest in Washington DC, 2015. Re-fetched: the previous one was a pilgrimage site in the Philippines captioned as a public argument, which is the same class of error in the other direction.
This is the section photograph, not a picture of this story. A climate protest in Washington DC, 2015. Re-fetched: the previous one was a pilgrimage site in the Philippines captioned as a public argument, which is the same class of error in the other direction. · Johnny Silvercloud · CC BY-SA 2.0

This is a fight about a story and it is being fought with the vocabulary of a parasocial grievance, which is why it is so ugly. When a character does something you hate, a well-adjusted viewer says the writing was bad. A parasocial viewer says you did this to me. Both are in that thread and the gap between them is the whole argument.

Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.

The clerk's shelf - how this got here first

Living with Pennywise

VIDEO

Living with Pennywise ↗A whole video about the fact that horror moves in.

Sources

House of the Dragon 'most frustrating show on TV' after season three finale, say fans ↗

NME · 25 SEP 2026

Where this sits in the encyclopedia

Fighting about a stranger in a reply sectionA disagreement conducted entirely in good faith about a person none of the participants have met, using the vocabulary of a personal grievance.Doxxing the person, not the characterThe jump from disliking a fictional portrayal to locating and publishing a real person's address. The word had to be invented for a grievance that…Watching the repliesThe public performance of being at war with somebody, in public, for an audience, in a thread that never closes.

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