Brace Yourselves, Winter is Coming

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About

Brace Yourselves, Winter is Coming, also known as Imminent Ned, is an image macro meme featuring the character Eddard "Ned" Stark (played by actor Sean Bean) from the HBO series Game of Thrones, a television adaption of George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire. Its phrasal template "Brace Yourselves, X is Coming" can be versatilely used to forewarn or proclaim the impending arrival of a highly anticipated event, a product or an internet meme.

Origin

In George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the phrase "winter is coming" is prominently featured as the motto of House Stark of Winterfell, a noble clan renowned for its fortified ancient castle. It was also used in the HBO series Game of Thrones as the title of the pilot episode, which aired on April 17th, 2011, as well as for several promotional trailers and posters.

An image macro featuring a photo of an owl and the phrase "winter is coming" (shown below, left) was submitted to Quickmeme^[1] in July 2011, but the phrase didn't take off until it was paired with an HBO promotional portrait of Ned Stark (played by Sean Bean) later in August that year. The earliest known instance using this image (shown below, right) surfaced shortly after the U.S. East Coast earthquake on August 23rd, 2011.

Spread

Throughout 2011, Game of Thrones continued to climb in viewership and ratings and so did the prevalence of the image macro series on Reddit, where the subreddit^[7] for the show had gained a large following of 20,128 subscribers by early October 2011. On Quickmeme, numerous entries dedicated to the series emerged in August 2011, most notably Imminent Ned^[2], Winter is Coming and Ned Star Winter^[3] is Coming. Outside of Reddit, there is a fan site for the TV series under the domain WinterIsComing.net and similar image macros can be found on Memebase^[6] under the tag "Winter is Coming" and Tumblr^[4] under the tag "Imminent Ned."

Trump "Sanctions Are Coming" Tweet

On November 2nd, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted an image of himself with the words "Sanctions are coming" in the Game of Thrones logo superimposed over him (shown below). The "sanctions" in question are supposed to be against Iran, as the White House Twitter account qualified, "President @realDonaldTrump is reimposing all sanctions lifted under the unacceptable Iran deal. The U.S. is reimposing the toughest sanctions ever on Iran, targeting many of the corrupt regime’s critical sectors."^[9]

Reactions to the tweet ranged from confusion to mockery. Many who saw it were unaware of what Trump was referencing. User @swin24 tweeted "Against who/what?" (shown below, left). User @ditzkoff tweeted "I'm starting to question whether we are a grown-up, adult country," gaining over 190 retweets and 1,400 likes (shown below, right). Reactions to the tweet were covered by Daily Dot.^[10]

Various Examples

As of June 2012, there are more than 1470 posts related to the phrase on Reddit^[5], nearly 20,000 aggregated instances on Quickmeme and at least 1,330 likes on Facebook.^[8]