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  #1288  
09-24-2012, 03:06 PM
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Bullet Magnet
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Having the characters use modern English slang (like when one of the characters said he was "fucking" some girl) completely breaks the fantasy and just plain sounds stupid. And they do this a lot. I honestly think the show would be much better off if it were stripped of its profanity.
That's a very strange complaint. Fiction is a product of the time, and that includes language. It's already rather odd that Englishness (and occasionally Scottishness) is the go-to accent and culture for medieval fantasy, especially since most of medieval history happened outside of England. And that a fantasy world probably doesn't have even have English as a language anyway, so everything is a translation. If you're going to leave arbitrary words untranslated, where do you stop? Just at swearing can work, but it is very jarring and often fails. Firefly succeeded with "Gorram," clearly a corruption of "god-damn," and otherwise did all its cursing in Mandarin. Battlestar Galactica's "Frak," only just worked, largely due to it's similarity to "fuck" and its immediate adoption in normal conversation by fans of the show. Or me, at least.

But just as jarring is winding back the clock on the evolution of language. If we're going as far back as the world of Game of Thrones would suggest, we're talking Chaucerian or earlier, which is effectively unintelligible.

Where do you draw the line, in the knowledge that most of your audience won't care or will be alienated by such efforts anyway?
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