George R.R. Martin wanted this character’s name changed for Game of Thrones

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of characters in it…like, literally thousands. Somehow Martin manages to keep them all in his head, although it’s beyond me how he does it. He even recalls them all in enough detail to lament the early naming choices he made for some of them.

Or rather, one of them. Los Siete Reinos dug up an interesting appearance Martin made on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast way back in 2010, a year before Game of Thrones debuted on HBO. (Can you imagine a world where George R.R. Martin just casually guested on podcasts? It’s difficult for me to get my head around.) Galaxy’s Guide asked Martin if there was anything about his earlier books that he would change:

"There’s actually one thing under consideration right now. I can’t say too much about it, but that might impact… It’s very minor, though, it would be changing a character’s name, changing the name of a minor character for the television series, and if we go ahead and change that name, I might go back in the books and change his name in the books, as well. So in the later editions of the book, the minor character would have a different name. But it’s still up in the air whether we’ll actually do that or not. So that’s really all I can say about it right now."

HBO did end up changing the names of a few characters, usually to avoid confusion with other characters. Asha became Yara to avoid getting her mixed up with Osha the wildling. Robert Arryn was changed to Robin Arryn, probably to avoid getting him mixed up with Robert Baratheon. But the name Martin wanted changed stayed the same.

So who was it? Martin revealed the answer in a comment on his Not a Blog:

"The name change that was being contemplated (as mentioned in the podcast) was for Marillion, to avoid confusion with the band.HBO decided it was not necessary.The Marillion thing has annoyed me for years. So far as I knew at the time, I’d made up the name. It was never meant to refer to the band of the same name."

Marillion, if you don’t remember, was a bard who went to the Eyrie with Catelyn and Tyrion in A Game of Thrones. In A Song of Ice and Fire, he stays there and ends up becoming pretty important when Sansa returns to the Vale later on. In the show, he made his way down to King’s Landing, where this happened to him:

Eesh. So either way, he has a rough time. But he’s even less important on the show than he is in the books, so I can see why HBO didn’t think changing the name was that big a deal.

Also, am I the only one who’s never heard of the band Marillion? They’re an English rock band that’s been around since the 80s:

I wonder if they got a bounce from Game of Thrones.

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