More fire than ice: how Game of Thrones’ use of color has changed over 7 seasons

After seven seasons, Game of Thrones has reached the point where dragons are burning people to crisps on one hand and the army of the dead is marching south on the other, making it hard to tell which way this epic battle between fire and ice will ultimately tip.

But in terms of its color, at least, Game of Thrones is more fire than ice — for now.

We analyzed the series’ use of color in all 67 episodes so far, capturing the screen every 10 seconds and averaging the colors in each image. We found that scenes where the average color is warm — that is, closer to red than blue — outnumber the ones with cold colors.

Westeros’s long summer, scenes from tropical-looking Essos, and occasional bursts of dragon fire have accounted for much of the series’ warm scenes. But as Game of Thrones’ main action shifts to the North and beyond the Wall, things have started to cool considerably. Season seven — which alternated between extremes of dragon fire and the icy North — was more cool than hot.

Hue is only one part of the Game of Thrones color story, though. The series has also seen a steady decline in its overall warmth and saturation, a seeming portent of the long winter the series has been promising since the beginning.

To illustrate these trends, we’ve generated an annotated, interactive color spectrum for each episode for you to explore. But first, some key data points.

The darkest episode of the series to date is “Blackwater,” the penultimate episode of season two.

The Battle of Blackwater Bay, between Stannis Baratheon’s fleet and the Lannisters’ King’s Landing army, is fought at night, which accounts for the episode’s permeating darkness. The entire episode stays in King’s Landing — with a brief cutaway to show Stannis’s ships making their way across the Narrow Sea — so there are no scenes from other locations to break up the color pattern. The only flash of color in this episode comes from the fluorescent green of the wildfire blaze that destroys Stannis’s fleet.

“Watchers on the Wall,” the ninth episode of season four, is almost as dark as “Blackwater.” Like “Blackwater,” this episode also centers on a nighttime battle, when Mance Rayder’s army of wildlings clashes with the Night’s Watch at Castle Black.

In contrast, the brightest Game of Thrones episode was the very first one of the series.

This makes sense: When the series opens, it’s still summer, and there are a lot of outdoor daytime scenes that contribute to the episode’s overall brightness. Scenes from the bright, warm Pentos, where Daenerys and Viserys Targaryen are living in exile, are a big contributing factor.

There’s a lot of episode-to-episode variation in colors throughout the series. So with that in mind, we’ve stitched together the average colors in every single one of Game of Thrones’s 67 episodes so far. The result is an annotated, interactive color spectrum for each episode that you can explore.

There are some loose trends we can pull out of Game of Thrones’ overall color story. But before going any deeper into the analysis, let’s back up a bit: To fully understand what’s going on here, it’s helpful to know how color is represented.

One of the ways to convey color in a digital image is by breaking it into its three properties: hue, saturation, and lightness. This is called the HSL color space.

When we name colors, we are usually referring to their hue. Red, blue, orange, pink, etc. are hues. Hue is measured in degrees, starting with red at 0 degrees, transitioning to cyan at 180 degrees, and then coming back full circle to red at 360 degrees. Colors in the top half of the circle are considered warm colors, and those in the bottom half are cool colors.

The second property, saturation, reflects the purity of the color by measuring how much gray is mixed in. Saturation of 0 percent is entirely gray, while 100 percent is the purest version of the color.

Lightness is the amount of white in the color. When lightness is at 0 percent the color is black, and when lightness is at 100 percent the color is white.

The human eye is not very adept at perceiving these properties independently. For instance, it’s easier to discern which color is lighter between two shades of red than it is to discern which color is lighter between different colors.

But we can examine subtle shifts in each property independently by ignoring the other two properties.

Here are three colors with their hue, saturation, and lightness values. All of them look muddy and not drastically different from one another:

But if we ignore changes in saturation and lightness by setting them to the same value across the board, we can see the hues more clearly:

And here is what saturation looks like if we ignore hue and lightness:

Using the methods outlined above, we analyzed the average hues and saturation for each episode and each season of Game of Thrones.

As Daenerys made her way toward Westeros over the first six seasons of the series, the show’s average hue shifted toward cooler colors. The saturation also dropped, resulting in bleaker tones as the main characters spent time in the dreary North, imprisoned in poorly lit dungeons, or battling in the dark.

Season seven’s hue was all over the place, oscillating between extremes as ice and fire clashed against each other. Whenever dragon blaze pushed up the warmth, the snow and ice of the North was there to counteract it.

As the season concluded, cooler colors took the upper hand.

While hue fluctuated from one episode to the next, however, saturation largely stayed put. The colors looked muted in a majority of scenes.

And one aspect of Game of Thrones’ color has remained consistent throughout the entire series: It has always been incredibly dark.

Game of Thrones’ seventh season was the series’ coldest so far, as well as one of the bleakest. It remains to be seen whether season eight will bring more fire or ice.