These days, four out of five people seem to be deeply absorbed by HBO's Game of Thrones TV show. But there is a rarer breed of fans, those of us who have read the five novels in George RR Martin's ongoing series on which those tales of mediaeval murder and magic are based.
We like to think we're a bit special, with our superior knowledge about everything that the show holds. However, there are downsides, too. Here are seven reasons why it sucks to have read the Game of Thrones books:
1. Alienation from your friends and loved ones
You live a life apart from all non-GoT readers, marked out as other. You have privileged information and they know it. In every conversation in which the show comes up, you're treated with suspicion, as if you're likely to carelessly drop spoilers at every opportunity.
You begin to feel like a walking weapon, a bomb full of spoilers with a dodgy trigger mechanism that could be set off at any moment. It stands to reason that more than a few relationships have been torn apart by these titanic forces.
2. We hate change
They did what?! They left out who?!
To be honest, many of the changes made by the showrunners are perfectly fine, if not improvements on the novels. GRRM is not infallible, and season two in particular was a tighter piece of storytelling than A Clash of Kings.
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But inevitably your beleaguered mind will settle on the changes that most annoy you - omissions of your favourite characters or scenes, conversations that don't make it into the show, dropped story threads and a failure to worry enough about who Jon Snow's mother is...
And we're not sure we'll ever get over the absence of Arianne Martell.
3. Doubting your memory
A lot happens in both the books and the show. A lot. And no normal functioning human can be expected to keep all of that in their head.
What results is this unsettling feeling that you aren't recalling things properly - that things that feel familiar actually never happened in the books and that you've completely forgotten all your favourite bits, which just happen to have coincidentally been omitted from the show.
This only gets worse the longer the space of time since you last sat down with GRRM's novels.
4. Not getting the drama
This is another factor that only worsens as time goes on. As far as you're concerned, the Red and Purple Weddings and Ned's beheading happened years ago.
So when Twitter and Facebook explode with all the drama, you just roll your eyes and wait for them to get over it already. You think that's shocking, losers? Just you wait.
5. The increasingly messy timeline
Initially it was so easy to follow. One season per book. Even splitting book three into two seasons made sense, as the A Storm of Swords novel tends to be packaged in two volumes these days.
But now we've headed into the muddle of seasons four and five, threads are being pulled in from two (if not three) long books, as well as some events that haven't even happened in prose yet. Our sense of order has been utterly abused.
6. No one is safe from spoilers
Speaking of those new additions to the series, now the show has the temerity to be spoiling the books for us with events like Jojen Reed's death (though we totally saw it coming) and the birth of baby White Walkers.
Our smug ability to sit down and watch Game of Thrones with the sense that we pretty much know what is going to happen has been seriously shaken. And now it looks like the show might get to the end ahead of the novels.
7. We liked it first
We've been fans of Game of Thrones for decades, you dilettantes!
Bonus: A sense of superiority
On occasion, having read the books feels like being in a secret clubhouse. In conversations with book readers and show watchers, we have the opportunity to waggle our eyebrows and speak in veiled terms about events that haven't been seen on TV yet, almost but not quite dropping spoilers.
Essentially, we get to be intolerable. But have you seen the length of those books? We've earned it.
