WesterosCentral Memes Were The Real MVP Of House Of The Dragon Season 3

Despite the girls fighting on-screen and behind the scenes over creative liberties taken in the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, its third season was top-notch television in my book. I could wax poetic about how the second season of any show is historically a slump, how the poison drips through in its incestuous family drama, or how Sir Christian Cole finally gave me a reason to throw something on the grill. Instead, I wanna celebrate by going online and checking out all the memes. 

Like its predecessor and spin-off, House of the Dragon’s real selling point is that it's a soap opera where the whole house is mad and treats their dragons like high-fantasy dog fights. It’s why Saturday Night Live alumni Leslie Jones became a social media icon with her hilarious live reactions to Game of Thrones season 8, treating every episode like new gossip at a funeral, and it's that same spirit the fandom has been so fun to take part in. I, too, am not immune to the predilection for rubbernecking at some tea that’s not mine on a weekly basis. 

Suffice it to say, remembering exactly what happened in the two-year interim between its second and third season—and the confusion over who is loyal to the Habsburg blonde babies with the same damn namesake on “Team Black” and “Team Green”—was a trial and a half getting back into season 3. Thankfully, a parody Twitter account helped make sense of it all by taking the show’s baked-in sports analogy to its logical conclusion: NBA memes. 

NBACentel is a Twitter account best described as The Onion or DiscussingFish of sports news. The account—a spoof of the real news aggregator account “not affiliated with the National Basketball Association,” NBA Central—posts about athletes, taking the piss out of them with spoofs of what they said during a post-game press conference, the status of their contracts, or trash talk on the court. Often, NBACentel posts are mistaken for the genuine article, leading followers, celebrities, and players alike to admit to being “Centel’d.” 

As with any successful joke on the internet, House of the Dragon has its doppelganger of NBACentel, dubbed WesterosCentral. Named after the central setting of author George R.R. Martin’s epic, the parody account, which is “not affiliated with the Iron Throne,” has amassed over 143,000 followers by cracking the same type of jokes about the HBO show. Every week, I’ve beelined it to Twitter to check out what new assortment of memes WesterosCentral has concocted after House of the Dragon’s ten-episode season. Without fail, WesterosCentral got a good laugh out of me, regaling House of the Dragon’s ensemble like an all-star playing at the NBA Finals, highlighting their characters’ triumphs, double-crosses, and fumbles in sports-nomenclatured memes. Here are some of my favorite posts of the season (spoilers, duh):  

There’s nothing more beautiful than the internet being used the way it was intended: seeing the collective consciousness gang together to razz a television show everyone’s watching on a weekly basis. Seeing it happen with House of the Dragon’s third season, with folks taking the highfalutin and occasionally dense lore of Martin’s books down to Earth in the most “imagine a cheeseburger” way possible through sports analogies is worth all the gold in the Seven Kingdoms, and I look forward to seeing everyone in 2028 for House of the Dragon’s fourth and final season to meme again.

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