Little Known Facts About Game of Thrones
George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, takes place in one of the deepest, richest fictional worlds ever built. Westeros is a fully-realized fantasy realm, packed full of details that render it almost life-like.
But that kind of density can sometimes alienate a casual reader. After all, how can a humble fan keep track of a series that even the creator seems to find unwieldy?
Add in an endless stream of novellas, companion books, and maps released each year, and reading through the entire canon can prove absolutely daunting.
That's why we can all be glad the equally amazing HBO adaption, Game of Thrones brought the saga to an even larger audience. Already the series has won millions of hearts around the globe... and then proceeded to pierce those hearts like a dagger at the Red Wedding. Still, though Game of Thrones has been an emotional roller-coaster for many of its loyal fans, we always seem to keep coming back for more.
So while the next season may seem a winter away, we're here to tide you over with dreams of spring. Here are some awesome GoT facts:
Game of Thrones Facts
1. The Beginning
Martin has a love/hate thing with TV. Before Game of Thrones, he'd spent years writing scripts for the small screen... and complained often about the limitations of standard broadcasting.
A Song of Ice and Fire, meanwhile, was long considered too intricate and complicated a story to be adapted for the short format of television. But after the The Lord Of The Rings adaptions achieved critical success and (perhaps more importantly) box office dominance, Martin met with a host of producers eager to adapt his books for the screen. And since we've entered a Golden Age of Television, the time was ripe for Game of Thrones to conquer the ratings like Aegon himself conquered Westeros.Game of Thrones Facts
2. An Audience of Commoners
Up-and-coming authors are warned often ( and loudly) not to use similar-sounding names for different characters.
But George R.R. Martin has never shied from breaking the rules. The character names in A Song of Ice and Fire would put an elephant's memory to test. Was there any other way, though? With as many as 2000 named characters in the series, things were always bound to get a little messy.
So to avoid confusion, HBO insisted on renaming some characters in the adaption. For example, Yara Greyjoy is originally named Asha in the books, but was renamed to avoid conflation with Osha, the woman who accompanies Bran.
Similarly, Lysa Arryn's child Robin is called Robert in the books, but producers felt he might be mistaken for Robert Baratheon.
3. A Storm of Jons
Speaking of unconventional naming decisions in fiction, the Song of Ice and Fire series holds an interesting distinction: the most characters named Jon (or John, for that matter) in a single work of fiction. How many? According to Reddit user Mynotaur there's at least 22 mentioned in the first 4 books.
