Game of Thrones Is a Terrible Show

Languages in Game of Thrones

You know, it’s pretty sad when you make a fantasy TV show and the names of the actors are more interesting than the names of the characters.  Unlike Tolkien, whose hobby was inventing fictional languages, George R.R. Martin has little interest in linguistics and didn’t make up any languages for Game of Thrones.

The languages spoken in the show are the work of the talented language-creator David J. Peterson, and I think the few words Martin did create wound up hindering Peterson’s work more than they helped it.

In this section I’ll be talking primarily about words.  This means I’ll have to use an unambiguous alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet.  I highly recommend you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet if you want to write a fantasy story with unusual character names; this will save you a lot of trouble later on.

I’m also necessarily going to use some linguistic terminology, and if you’re curious what any of this means, there’s a podcast called Artifexian where you can learn all about creating fictional languages.

History of Fantasy Names

A huge part of writing fantasy is coming up with names for your characters.  This makes a lot of sense, as Tolkien was a linguist and wrote his stories in order to flesh out the languages he invented.  It’s hard to forget a name like Frodo Baggins /ˈfroːdo ˈbægɪnz/ or Aragorn /ˈarəgɔ(r)n/.

Tolkien created these names using elements from either existing languages like Old English or imagined ones like Sindarin.  “Frodo” means “wise” in Old English and “Aragorn” means “revered king” in Sindarin, a language Tolkien himself created.

Many fantasy authors since have tried to make up interesting-sounding names for their characters, and since most of them haven’t bothered to learn about how languages work, most came up with names that sounded more-or-less like English gibberish words.

George R.R. Martin’s method is to take a name—either pulled from history, ripped from Tolkien, or even picked out from a book of baby names—and “tweak” it. This is far from a bad method—I do this quite a bit, in fact—but it does require at least a basic understanding of phonology, which Martin clearly doesn’t have.

Words in Martin’s World

A lot of fantasy names are too much. They’re too difficult to pronounce. I wanted the flavour of medieval England. I took actual names we still use today, like ‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made ‘Edward’ into ‘Eddard’.

George R.R. Martin

The majority of names in Martin’s work are created either by changing the spellings of ordinary names we’re familiar with (the pronunciations may or may not change) or by making them up from scratch.

The latter are often the worst, as George R.R. Martin clearly didn’t bother making a consistent inventory of sounds for each language.  Here follows a list of just a few character names in Game of Thrones:

Don’t bother trying to figure out how to pronounce those names; the author didn’t bother to figure that out himself.  Considering how he pronounces them in interviews (and how the actors in the show pronounce them), there is little to no consistency in spelling or phonology.

Aerys and Daenerys

Martin appears to be in love with the ⟨ae⟩ digraph, which he uses pretty much everywhere.  In the Valyrian name Daenerys, ⟨ae⟩ stands for the sound [ə], whereas in other Valyrian names ⟨ae⟩ might represent [eɪ], [iɪ], [ɛ], or something else entirely.

And then he just had to respell the name Marjorie as ⟨Margaery⟩, but what’s the point of doing that if the pronunciation is exactly the same?  At least David Peterson had the sense to make ⟨ae⟩ stand for [ɑe] in all the words he made up for Dothraki.

Even the last syllable, ⟨rys⟩, is spelt the same but pronounced differently: /ɹiz/ in Aerys and /ɹɪs/ in Daenerys.  There’s almost no consistency here.

Although many real words are pronounced differently from their spelling, this always has a basis in the language’s evolution—the word ⟨book⟩ /bʊk/ used to be pronounced /boːk/ (with a long [oː]), for example.

These two names, on the other hand, were clearly created by taking the name “Ares,” changing the spelling, adding an optional prefix, and then deciding how to pronounce them.  This leads to Martin’s character names—and consequently his world—feeling artificial.

Old Ghiscari and Linguistic Colonialism

Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don’t have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spellings.

George R.R. Martin

Where do I even start with this quote?  First, Martin’s sounds and spellings are all over the place; there’s little consistency in High Valyrian names, and Dothraki names aren’t much better.

Martin clearly didn’t make any effort to craft realistic names or even to learn the difference between phonemic and phonetic sounds.  This is evident if you just look at how he described a language called Old Ghiscari, in which “zzzs” are supposedly “rolled.”

My best guess is that he’s referring to a voiced alveolar fricative trill [r̝], which occurs in some Slavic languages and falls somewhere between the voiced alveolar trill [r] and fricative [ʒ].  But when Tyrion says the “zzzs” are “rolled,” I can’t help but wonder: by what metric is he classifying them as ⟨z⟩?

On a slightly less humorous note, the Westeros Wiki page for Old Ghiscari has some distinctly racist undertones.  The wording seems very much in keeping with what I’ve read of the books, and I’d be very much surprised if these weren’t near-direct quotes:

Old Ghiscari is a guttural-sounding language, described by Tyrion Lannister as harsh and ugly and by Victarion Greyjoy as full of growls and hisses. “Zzzs” are rolled in the language. Its writing uses glyphs.

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Alright… that sounds like it was written sixty years ago.  And “glyphs”?  What exactly is that supposed to mean?  Last I checked, all writing systems use glyphs!  Maybe try being a smidgen more specific than the most all-encompassing term imaginable.

Old Ghiscari developed from the ancient city of Ghis in Ghiscar. The region was conquered by the Valyrian Freehold in five Ghiscari wars, however, and the Ghiscari people became slaves of Valyria. The Slaver Cities instead came to speak bastard Valyrian, High Valyrian corrupted and flavored with Ghiscari.

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Um… this talk of High Valyrian being “corrupted” and “flavoured” is making me uneasy.

A mongrel tongue, a blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian, is also spoken along Slaver’s Bay. Maester Kedry is fluent in this mongrel Ghiscari. The bearded woman of Yezzan zo Qaggaz’s grotesquerie speaks in a mongrel Ghiscari which Tyrion Lannister finds uncomprehensible. [sic]

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Well, that just got so much worse!  Bloody hell.  First there’s the phrase “mongrel tongue” used in reference to a creole language; the implicit racism is rather obvious.  And then we have the bearded slave woman kept by a rich collector of deformed people, described as incomprehensible due to her “impure,” “corrupted,” “mongrel” tongue.

To be clear, none of these things are illegitimate as subject matter.  The problem, as usual, is that the text of Game of Thrones never bothers to frame these aspects of its fictional cultures—in this case, racism, ableism, and a general disdain for those who look different from “the normal”—as the harmful bigotries they are.

Instead, the story consistently frames cruelty and inequality as an inevitable and even necessary part of society.

Nonstandard Spellings

If you look back at medieval times, no one knew how to spell their own names.  There are a lot of variations that we’ve lost.

George R.R. Martin

I’m not sure that’s the best way to put it.  Standardized spelling wasn’t invented till the printing press, which means that people who could write simply spelled their names however they wanted at the time.  The same person might spell their own name in dozens of different ways in the same text.  It’s not that no one knew how to spell their own name; there was no wrong way to spell anyone’s name.

And yes, there are a lot of variations we’ve lost, but Martin uses the same spelling each time.  This is, of course, necessary when writing for modern readers, but Martin’s use of nonstandard spellings is nothing but a distraction.

It results in lots of names that are—quite ironically—more confusing to pronounce than the likes of Thranduil or Denethor, for which Tolkien at least provided a pronunciation guide.

David J. Peterson

David J. Peterson appears to have been among the most talented people working on the show, as he was able to make fully-developed languages from Martin’s often-incoherent namepool.  According to David Peterson, Martin had pretty much no interest in the linguistic aspect of the story.  And believe me; it shows in everything Martin touches.

It looks as though Peterson had to go through quite a few hoops to make the Dothraki and High Valyrian languages what they are, and I feel like he would have had an easier time if Martin had, you know… actually bothered to learn how the human mouth works!

King’s Landing

The only things worse than George R.R. Martin’s character names are his place names.  Almost every Westerosi place name in Game of Thrones is just two English words squashed together: High-garden, Winter-fell, River-run, King’s Landing, and so forth.

The combination of Modern English place names and character names that are just tweaked versions of everyday names makes Martin’s world feel artificial, as though it simply sprung up ex nihilo a century ago.  Let me show you how easy it is to craft a more interesting and realistic place name than King’s Landing.

I started by looking up translations of the words “king” and “landing” in Old English.  One word for “king” was “brego,” whose genitive is “brega.”  For “landing,” I ended up with “hýþ.”

Now that we’ve got “Bregahuth,” it’s a simple matter of deciding how lazy people’s pronunciation of it has become over the years.  Let’s go with “Breguth” just to keep things simple.

And it really can be as easy as that, if you want.  You can create your own naming language, but even what I just did would be sufficient for most authors’ needs.  I’d attempt the same thing with “Winterfell,” but the idea that a place name would remain that unchanged for eight thousand years is so funny to me that I can’t even stop laughing long enough to try.

Dothraki

Luckily everyone else had the good sense to pronounce it [dɒθ’ræki], but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the author never gave much thought to any of this.  That would explain why almost every word he makes up looks and sounds terrible.

Ser

Martin also deliberately spells “sir” ⟨ser⟩, which the wiki explains is simply “a quirk of their culture.”  Because the people of Westeros just happen to have the exact same language and spelling system as the Americans do except for one word.  A lot of fantasy authors use “ser” as a unisex knightly title, but here it’s made clear that Brienne is the first female knight in Westeros.

What other purpose could this spelling possibly serve other than making things as confusing as possible?  At this point he might as well spell every word however the mood strikes him when he writes it; it’s more historically accurate, and it’ll only make this series slightly more confusing.

Game of Thrones vs. Attack on Titan

Set in a world where massive humanoids called Titans have reduced humanity to a single city, Attack on Titan’s cast of morally ambiguous characters have a high mortality rate and are often driven to shocking acts of violence.

In addition to being considerably more brutal, Attack on Titan has a lot of themes that are arguably more indefensible than those in Game of Thrones. From what I’ve heard, the manga’s author is also extremely problematic. But despite all this, Attack on Titan’s plot really is captivating and unpredictable the way Game of Thrones pretends to be.

The ending of Attack on Titan isn’t exactly some singularly brilliant conclusion or anything, but it’s leagues more interesting and thematically rich than the narrative disaster that is Game of Thrones’ grand finale.

I reread Attack on Titan a year or so later with a friend who was reading it for the first time, and in Stark contrast⁠† to Game of Thrones, knowing how Attack on Titan concludes didn’t make experiencing the story any less gripping the second time round.

Real Ambiguity

More specifically, Attack on Titan contains comparable subject matter and doesn’t always handle it with perfect narrative framing.  But in this area, a number of things set it apart from something like Game of Thrones.

The first point is that Attack on Titan arguably succeeds in withholding easy answers to its core themes.  Game of Thrones clearly tries and fails to do the same, and because George R.R. Martin is unable to interrogate his own ingrained biases, the result is a story that treats a lot of indefensible things as normal.

I want to draw attention to this concept, because it’s really important to why Game of Thrones fails here.  George R.R. Martin’s go-to excuse for the way he frames gendered violence and war crimes in his books is to say that “This sort of thing was normal in the Middle-Ages,” to which my response is:

So what?

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of these things are pretty common in our own world right now, and presenting them as normal and excusable in a story only creates the impression in many readers that they’re just a fact of life and thus not worth fighting to dismantle—whether the author intended this or not.

You know what really is a fact of life?  The fact that stories communicate, reinforce, and alter worldviews!  And nor does this stop being the case just because you’ve tricked yourself into thinking your writing is “objective.” Pretending you’re somehow free of bias only makes your unconscious biases more pernicious, not less.

By contrast, Attack on Titan doesn’t frame the horrible acts characters are driven to as “normal”; instead, the circumstances that lead sympathetic characters to commit atrocities are nothing short of world-shattering horrors.  This encourages readers to consider how human flaws and desperation created a scenario that escalated to ever-increasing tragedy.

By contrast, Game of Thrones merely keeps you wondering which character will die next. The problem is that, with the story over, we now know which characters survived and which didn’t. Without any deeper themes, there’s not much left to think about.

And what is this laughably stupid conclusion waiting at the end of George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus? Well, you’ll soon find out.

Attack on Titan’s Music DESTROYS Game of Thrones

Since I’ve already said Attack on Titan is basically Game of Thrones done well, it should come as no surprise that the music in Attack on Titan’s anime adaptation is likewise vastly superior to Game of Thrones, evoking a wide range of feelings through its energetic themes.

Attack on Titan’s score, composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, makes fantastic use of traditional orchestral instruments, choirs, and Gary Numan-esque sound design to form a palette that can move, stir, or terrify as the need arises.

The score makes use of memorable melodies that combine with the unique orchestration to complement the Attack on Titan anime perfectly.

Like The Lord of the Rings, the music in Attack on Titan is engaging because it moves through various feelings and timbres, whereas the monotonous sound of Game of Thrones drones on and on without ever varying its depressing, vaguely foreboding tone or developing enough to keep you interested.

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