Game of Thrones fans think they've figured out what went wrong with the show in its later seasons - not enough talk.
The epic fantasy series, based on novels by notoriously unhurried George RR Martin, ran out of source material once they hit season six. Many fans have claimed the award-winning HBO series has been going downhill ever since, culminating in a final season reportedly so bad 1.5 million viewers signed a petition to have it remade.
It's all opinion of course, with some fans - horror maestro Stephen King among them - arguing the show was as enjoyable as ever in its final years.
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But one fan has now found a way to quantify Game of Thrones' decline in quality - the amount of dialogue per episode.
A user of coding website Github by the name of mrquart calculated how many words per minute the characters in each episode said - and the trend is stark (no pun intended).
Aside from a brief blip in season six, the number of words spoken per minute falls from around 60 in the first season to below 40 in the last. The infamously dark episode 'The Long Night' bottoms out at 15.
Despite the furore over the series' supposed decline in quality, its view count only went up - the finale setting an HBO record of almost 20 million legal views in its first 24 hours.
Season one only had a few million - so despite the show's quality perhaps being linked to dialogue, HBO appears to know many people just want to watch big fights.
Newshub.
