House Of The Dragon Names That Make Me Want To 'Dracarys!' Myself

House of the Dragon is nearing its Season 1 finale, which makes now the perfect time to step back, survey the freshman series as a whole... and complain vociferously about how its characters spell their names.

I'm aware that my gripe is pretty much a non-issue for those who don't write about the Game of Thrones prequel. And that's cool! I recently spent many minutes engrossed in a Q&A about beekeeping, a hobby in which I have no interest, involving an insect I spent summers actively trying to avoid. We can all benefit from a peek into what fills each others' brains, is all I'm saying.

So while I really have loved being back in Westeros, and ahead of the season-ender (see finale photos here), I feel the need to share a few ways that the fantasy drama has caused me to curse at my keyboard over the past nine episodes.

I'm also very aware that some of you are already formulating rebuttals for the comments section, long and impassioned essays involving the phrases "High Valyrian" and "it's an entire language, you idiot" and "if you actually loved George R.R. Martin and every single thing he created, this wouldn't be an issue." True, true and probably true!

Now that that's sorted: Below are my pre-finale musings about the show's sometimes-challenging character names. You know how knitters gather for stitch-n-bitch sessions? Scroll through the list below, and consider it my contribution to the Caraxes-n-carp (Meleys-n-moan? Balerion-n-bellyache?) discussion. And I'm sure we'll all have more to say after the finale airs Sunday at 9/8c on HBO.

Not Carl. Not Karl. Qarl. I'm very happy for Laenor and his boyfriend and their covert happily-ever-after, but I'm even happier that their getaway means I probably won't have to type this name again.

Identical twin knights who are, at first, distinguishable only by their facial hair and a single vowel at the start of their first names? Nope, nope, valar mor-nope-lis.

The princess herself is a flawed badass and probably my favorite character on the show. And her name, on its own, is not the issue. But its close proximity to the name of her cousin...

... has been the cause of so, so, so many strokes of the backspace key over the course of these 10 episodes.

(Yet, for whatever reason, the spelling of "Rhaena" gave me no problems. Huh. Weird.)

I know I should be used to this, after years of writing about Daenerys (and one season of writing about Jon/Aegon), but that extra "a" in nearly every damn Taargaaryaen and Taargaaryaen-aadjaecent name? Enough aalraeady. (Sorry, Aemma. R.I.P.)

What Aegon did to his serving maid is horrifying and inexcusable, so I won't heap extra rancor on her by pointing out that that "y" is doing the job an "i" would've been perfectly capable of doing.

Another innocent victim of the fight for the Iron Throne, another needless swapping of a letter for swapping-of-a-letter's sake.

So you're going to give the palace gossip-turned-Master-of-Whisperers, whose physicality plays a large part in his outsider status at court, a first name that is ONE LETTER DIFFERENT from Game of Thrones' palace-gossip-turned-Master-of-Whisperers, whose physicality plays a large part in his outsider status at court? (Lord Varys, for those new to the realm.)

I have no beef with Rhaenyra's second oldest son, only with his nickname: Luke. Oh, so NOW we're going with typical/modern spellings? For the love of the Seven, why is this kid's nickname not spelled "Luc?" This is the one, very tiny instance in which something like "Lewk" or "Leueake" would've... if not made more sense, been more in line with the rest of these batty spellings.