David Benioff HBO interview with subtitle 'While Dany kind of forgot about the Iron fleet'

Dany Kind Of Forgot About The Iron Fleet

2019catchphraseclassic

Published August 17, 2026

Dany Kind Of Forgot About The Iron Fleet is a mocked line from Game of Thrones writer David Benioff explaining why Euron Greyjoy's ships ambushed Daenerys Targaryen's dragons in the show's eighth season. Posted online in May 2019, it became fan shorthand for the show's late-season writing problems.

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Overview

Dany Kind Of Forgot About The Iron Fleet is a catchphrase pulled from a Game of Thrones commentary segment in which co-creator David Benioff casually says Daenerys Targaryen "kind of forgot" about the Greyjoy ships right before they blindside her dragons4. The wording landed badly with viewers already frustrated by the show's final season, and the sentence was clipped, screenshotted, and turned into a running joke about lazy plotting2.

The meme usually appears as a screenshot of the quote, often in the Mocking SpongeBob format with alternating caps, or as a supercut of earlier scenes where characters explicitly warn Daenerys about the same fleet she supposedly forgot3. Fans treat it as an on-record admission that the writers wrote themselves out of their own setup.

Origin & Background

Platform
HBO commentary (source) / Reddit r/freefolk (viral spread)
Date
2019

The line comes from HBO's "Inside the Episode" featurette for Game of Thrones season 8, episode 4, "The Last of the Starks," which aired on May 5, 20191. In the segment, David Benioff talks through the surprise attack in which Euron Greyjoy's fleet fires bolt-throwers from long range and kills the dragon Rhaegal, explaining that Daenerys "kind of forgot" about Euron's ships before they showed up4. Viewers who watched the featurette right after the episode singled the phrasing out and started sharing it as evidence that the writing team had stopped tracking their own plot.

How It Spread

On May 6, 2019, Redditor FireFissting posted a screenshot of the Benioff quote to r/freefolk styled in the Mocking SpongeBob format, and the thread pulled more than 9,900 upvotes in four days2. The subreddit, long a home for critics of showrunners Benioff and D. B. Weiss, adopted "kind of forgot" as a running punchline applied to every perceived hole in the final season4.

That same day, YouTuber Cian Gaffney uploaded a supercut titled "Dany forgot about the Iron Fleet" that stitched together scenes in which characters had explicitly warned Daenerys about Euron Greyjoy's ships3. Gaffney capped the video with the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme as a stinger, and the clip pulled in over 652,000 views within its first four days3.

In the days after, more mocking posts appeared across Game of Thrones fan spaces, still centered on r/freefolk, with users slotting different forgotten characters, weapons, and plot threads into the "kind of forgot about" template4.

How to Use This Meme

The format is typically used to mock a writer or storyteller who waves off an obvious plot hole. A common convention is to pair the phrase "kind of forgot about" with whatever object, character, or setup a story ignored, often as a Mocking SpongeBob screenshot in the style FireFissting popularized on r/freefolk2.

Frequently Asked Questions