The good, the bad, and the ugly in Game of Thrones

The characters on Game of Thrones are multidimensional and ever-changing, but what happens when we categorize them by... beauty and goodness? That’s the really odd challenge that The New York Times recently gave to its readers. It asked fans to set aside the fact that Game of Thrones subverts traditional definitions of “good” and “bad” at every turn, and ignore that the majority of the show’s performers, as required by their line of work, are pretty much all above average-looking. But trying to distill seven years of story into a hot-or-not contest had one intriguing side effect: it revealed how audiences correlate being good with being attractive.

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones.

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