Editor's Note: This entry contains spoilers for Game of Thrones; read at your own caution.

About

King Joffrey Choking refers to a reaction image macro of a screen capture of the character Joffrey Baratheon choking after being poisoned on the American fantasy series Game of Thrones.

Origin

On August 13th, 2014, the Game of Thrones episode "The Lion and The Rose" aired on HBO.^[1] In the episode, the character King Joffrey (portrayed by Jack Gleeson) is poisoned and dies. Before dying, he dramatically clutches his chest and throat indicating that he is choking (shown below).

Spread

Shortly after the episode aired, people began using a screenshot of Joffrey choking and recontextualizing his expression for humorous effect. For example, on April 14th, Tumblr ^[2] user anneboleynsarchive-blog posted a series of screenshots from the episode and added the caption "these stills of joffrey look like someone just said something really offensive." The post received more than 69,000 notes in five years (shown below, left).

On April 19th, Twitter ^[3] user @kemaleksioglu tweeted the image with the caption "Aaa üstüme iyilik sağlık" (translation from Turkish: "Oh, good health." The post received more than 120 retweets and 500 likes in five years (shown below, center).

Several days later, April 22nd, Redditor ^[4] niall558 posted the image with the caption "Those shoes with that dress?" The post received more than 1,700 points (85% upvoted) and 370 comments in five years (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References