Imminent Ned / Brace Yourselves, X is Coming

About

Imminent Ned, also know as “brace yourselves, X is coming”, is an image macro series and snowclone template featuring the character Eddard “Ned” Stark from the HBO series Game of Thrones, a television adaption of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels. The image is used to predict or warn that a certain type of meme, post or phenomenon is becoming prevalent on the web.

Origin

The quote “winter is coming” is the slogan for House Stark of Winterfell, a noble house in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe. The slogan was the title for the first episode of HBO’s adaptation of the series Game of Thrones that aired on April 17th, 2011 and was used in several promotions for the series.

A Quickmeme page titled “Winter is Coming”^[1] was created in July of 2011. An image macro using an image of Ned Stark was posted after the east coast earthquake occured on August 23rd, 2011. The photo of Ned Stark was taken from an advertisement for the HBO series.

Spread

The “Imminent Ned”^[2] and “Ned Star winter is coming”^[3] Quickmeme pages popped up in August of 2011. Derivatives can be found on Reddit^[5], Memebase^[6] and under the tag “#imminent ned” on Tumblr.^[4] The series appears most often on Reddit, which also has a large Game of Thrones subreddit^[7] with 20,128 subscribers as of October 6th, 2011.

Notable Derivatives

Templates

Search

Search queries for “winter is coming” saw a brief spike in April of 2011, coinciding with the premiere episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

External Reference