This fellow speaks in a brit accent!
So far I’ve seen four episodes of the second season of Game of Thrones.
It’s tough to describe how I feel about this show now. After an absolutely dynamic first season, the second is starting to falter just a tiny bit.
The reason? The accents.
In the first season, the accents were reasonably distributed. The continent of Westeros was basically like a gigantic United Kingdom. The fancy-pants folks in the ruling city of King’s Landing sound like they went to Eton, even of Tyrion Lannister sounds a little fake (Dinklage’s performance makes up for it). The people from the Vale are educated, and the people of Winterfell, they of the North, sound like they come from the north of Britain. Sean Bean sounds particularly credible. Everything sounds nice and comfortably British, as we imagine the characters in our Fantasy books might sound (although George rr Martin is American).
Across the narrow sea, the Dothraki speak a foreign language, and when they speak English (actually the common tongue, although we hear it as English) it is gutteral and in a vague Arabic language, which is what we anglophones hear as threatening. Syrio Forel, the Braavosi sword master who taught Arya Stark how to fight, sounds like Don Juan de Marco. So far, so good. In the first season, we see a believable world.
The second season begins. Theon Greyjoy visits his dad, Balon, Ruler (but not king) of the Iron Islands. Balon sounds like an educated brit. So does his daughter. People who live on the ocean, only to come to land in order to sleep in bleak stone houses, sounding like they got a first in Oxford? I don’t know.
Bonus shot of the wonderful Brienne of Tarth!
Daenerys Teagaryen, the Mother of Dragons, arrives at the gates of Qarth. Out comes the mysterious Thirteen, and their representative, dressed in pastel silks and dripping with gold jewelry, looking exotic as all get-out, sounds like a successful London barrister, even when he tells Daenerys that his name is too vastly long and foreign sounding for her to pronounce it.
Craster, the brutish, daughter-impregnating, baby-sacrificing savage from beyond the wall, sounds like someone hired from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Once the story really takes off, and Daenerys interacts with the residents of the Nine Free Cities, and the Slaver cities, and one of the other main characters gets to Braavos, and the Summer Island people appear, and then there are the creepy people of Asshai, the crannog people, the people of warm lands of Dorne, will all these people sound like they learned to act at the same school? Will it be a grand reunion for LAMDA and Guildhall? If that’s true, then ugh. It won’t be believable.
