TorrentFreak released the list of the 2011-2012 television season’s most pirated shows, and, in a shock to pretty much no one, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” took home the title by a substantial margin. Almost four million people illegally downloaded each episode from BitTorrent, which was not only a full million more than the second place show (CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother,” which makes sense because wait nope no it doesn’t), but also just 300,000 fewer than the number of people who watched the show live. There are a number of factors that play into this — it being awesome, HBO’s refusal to offer web-only access, programming delays on other continents, and the show’s younger, generally more web-savvy audience — but I have chosen to believe that it is due mostly to GIFs and weird perverts. In my defense, this is my answer to every “Hey, why did such and such a thing happen on the Internet?”-style question, but I feel like it’s an especially good answer here.
Speaking of “Game of Thrones,” “Parks & Rec” showrunner Mike Schur tweeted this idea out earlier this afternoon, and I swear to God I had like five heart attacks just thinking about it. A GIF of Ron Swanson slapping Prince Joffrey would probably grind the entire Internet to a halt, shutting down electrical grids across the world and triggering mass hysteria in the process. Worth it, I say.
