Kit Harington Blasts GAME OF THRONES Season 8 Fan Petition for Remake: “How Dare You?”
Kit Harington isn’t holding back when it comes to one of the most infamous fan backlashes in TV history. Years after the final episodes of Game of Thrones aired, the actor is opening up about how the viral petition demanding a remake of Season 8 with “competent writers” hit him on a personal level.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Kit Harington addressed the 2019 petition that exploded online shortly after the HBO series wrapped up. What started with a modest goal of 15,000 signatures quickly snowballed into more than 1.8 million people calling for a do-over of the final season.
“That genuinely angered me,” Harington said, pointing to the massive effort put in by the show’s creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. “Like, how dare you? Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media.”
For Harington, the timing made the backlash even harder to process. The actor, who portrayed Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, revealed that he was in rehab when Season 8 premiered.
When he returned to the outside world, he was stunned by the intensity of the criticism, especially after everything the cast and crew endured to bring the final chapters to life.
He recalled that one major battle sequence alone required 55 straight days of filming, a brutal stretch that pushed everyone involved to their limits.
From Harington’s perspective, the petition ignored the human cost of production and reduced years of work to a punchline. Online outrage, he suggested, flattened a complicated creative process into something disposable.
At the corporate level, the noise didn’t move the needle. HBO executive Casey Bloys addressed the petition back in 2019, making it clear that the idea of reshooting the season was never on the table.
“There are very, very few downsides to having a hugely popular show, but one I can think of is when you try to end it, many people have big opinions on how it should end,” he said. “The petition shows a lot of enthusiasm and passion for the show, but it wasn’t something that we seriously considered.”
Season 8 became a lightning rod for criticism, with fans and critics alike calling out everything from it’s writing, story choices, and dark visuals from bad lighting that made scenes hard to see.
The backlash reached meme status when viewers spotted a modern coffee cup left in a medieval fantasy scene, a mistake that quickly went viral and became shorthand for the season’s perceived sloppiness.
Years later, the debate around Game of Thrones Season 8 still hasn’t cooled off. Everytime another popular show comes to an end, recently Stranger Things, fans hope that the creative teams don’t “Game of Thrones it.”
For Harington, the petition crossed a line, turning passionate fandom into something that felt personal and dismissive. But, at the same time, long time fans felt burned by the show.