HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

max, did you ever see that tv show Borgia? It was interesting in that the actors were from all over and accents varied widely

as if this show gives a fuck about accents when they have two separate families where nobody has the same accent

^^^ yeah that is endlessly amusing to me

it gives just enough of a fuck that its bizarre that it doesnt just actually give a whole fuck

it rubs the lotion on its skin

this is why Aidan Gillen's ongoing meta-commentary on the essentially arbitrary nature of the accents in Game of Thrones is so ingenious

Now I wish McNulty would make an appearance

he was their first choice for Mance Rayder!

Not to derail too much, but I recently saw the film Grand Budapest Hotel, and one thing I appreciated about it was that even though it was about some imaginary eastern European country, they made absolutely zero effort to give the various actors some kind of pseudo European accents. American actors spoke with American accents, British actors with British accents, etc. I was struck by how unusual it is for a movie to do this and how compelled directors are to impose some kind of accent logic that rarely holds up under scrutiny.

Accent logic in Thrones is o_O not because people from Dorn speak with really obviously Spanish accents and people from Winterfell have vaguely northern accents (on the whole), but because people who grew up in the same town or even within the same family have wildly different ways of speaking.

Did I ever tell you guys about the weird little daydream I had about Tyrion Lannister looking at a picture of himself and remarking faintly 'Peter Dinklage...'

Not to derail too much, but I recently saw the film Grand Budapest Hotel, and one thing I appreciated about it was that even though it was about some imaginary eastern European country, they made absolutely zero effort to give the various actors some kind of pseudo European accents. American actors spoke with American accents, British actors with British accents, etc. I was struck by how unusual it is for a movie to do this and how compelled directors are to impose some kind of accent logic that rarely holds up under scrutiny.

It's just the way Lubitsch used to do it

That reminds me of universal monster films where they didn't even establish a proper time and region, I quite liked that mishmash. Although Draculas Daughter has some Scottish characters played by Americans who give up very early even trying to maintain an accent.

i know it's been discussed before - but were there hints of Littlefeather's Scottish-ish(?) accent before this season?

Was there a logic to it coming on in force now? Like now that he's out of King's Landing he can speak freely? But then he grew up with the Tully's, and none of them talk like that.

i think the actor just has a hard time with accents seriously.

Aidan Gillen is Irish.

should have just stuck with his Wire accent

I would be game to see more of the Wire cast on this show anyhow.

Lester particularly

Snoop.

"How my hair look, Bran?"

I love Annie from Treme to be in this. Maybe she'd dress the same as when she played violin in Jethro Tull.

let's change the thread title to Accent Talk

Could be a Talking Dead-style aftershow, all the latest accent rumours and fan theories about accents.

"How my hair look, Bran?"

― Call the Doctorb, the B is for Brownstein (Leee), Friday, May 9, 2014 12:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

I got the weird shadow ghost thing, you got the king's guard, it's all in the game, yo

I think the accent thing is deliberate ("acting!"), that he's tryna get in deep to the LF character and that he's just made a hash of it because his motivations are known only to him

or he just sucks. but srsly, it's not even remotely the same, you'd think someone would've delicately pointed it out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHIykid21j4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

I never thought he sounded English in s1 though? It just sounded like a more neutralised version off his natural accent (he doesn't have a really strong accent though).

Easily his worst accent moment was this scene at 2.19, awful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4bOa_WD0nE

I'm just curious - would some Britishes like to break down all the different characters accents

max did, pretty much a year to the day
http://gawker.com/what-is-going-on-with-the-accents-in-game-of-thrones-485816507

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yeah I'm going to call bs on that article

Roose Bolton is a northman through and through, but uses an actorly RP accent as played by Michael McElhatton, who's Irish.

lolno

It's just a vaguely threatening version of McElhatton's normal accent, no?

pretty much

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1xxqPE4I4g

not mention of Conleth Hill AKA Varys who is a proper Nordie in real life

he and Michelle Fairley are from the same small town iirc

One of my favorite claims is that the actors in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" apparently hail from such radically different places in Asia that for Chinese speakers it was like watching an American movie where one actor had a Boston accent, another Texas, another New York, etc.

Michelle Yeoh's Mandarin is unintelligible in CTHD.

oh there's also Jack Gleeson who's from Cork (but bears the mark of his south Dublin schooling) and plays Joffrey as a generic English posho

One of my favorite claims is that the actors in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" apparently hail from such radically different places in Asia that for Chinese speakers it was like watching an American movie where one actor had a Boston accent, another Texas, another New York, etc.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, May 9, 2014 5:54 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what an unimaginable scenario

trying to picture a movie where one actor has a boston accent and another has a new york accent and the cognitive dissonance is just too much

If they're all supposed to be from the same family, then it would be disctracting.

Yeah, sorry, I meant like in a movie where it would stick out for no reason.

One of my favorite claims is that the actors in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" apparently hail from such radically different places in Asia that for Chinese speakers it was like watching an American movie where one actor had a Boston accent, another Texas, another New York, etc.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, May 10, 2014 5:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

There is way more linguistic variation in China, to the point where two people can be from different towns only separated by a few miles, but will be mutually unintelligible to each other

like actually truly unintelligible or like "naive midwesterner hearing a really, really thick scottish accent for the first time" unintelligible

Truly unintelligible

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_Chinese

Min is usually described as one of seven or ten groups of Chinese dialects but has greater dialectal diversity than any of the other groups. The varieties used in neighbouring counties, and in the mountains of western Fujian even in adjacent villages, are often mutually unintelligible.[2]

Of course these days everybody understands basic Mandarin, especially the young kids

But most people still speak their local dialect first and Mandarin second

It's changing though w/ the younger generation and I think more & more parents are emphasizing Mandarin

There was a study that showed that linguistic variation increased as you went South in China

That's because Southern China is extremely mountainous and it'd be hard to make it from one village to another w/o hiking many days & c

People'd stay in their lil villages and talk to each other and make up cool new words

The North is all relatively similar like Dongbei people have their own 'dialect' but it's pretty much the same as Mandarin

That's cause all that separates Dongbei and Beijing is a big flat plain that you can gallop across!

i wanna chill in the mountains and make up cool new words

there was once a Coen Brothers movie set in a part of Arizona that was seemingly inhabited entirely by people from Kentucky