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     Thanks for that!  It always bugs me when I hear a fantasy or 
science fiction character who seems to have been given an RP accent 
because that's all the director could think of to signal sophistication 
or gravitas.  Somehow the most obnoxious are the ones played by 
children.  Similarly with peasant characters in fantasy or science 
fiction settings who are given rural English accents because they're 
supposed to be medieval or something.

     I don't mind hearing English accents in Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, 
because those books seem like such products of English culture to me.  
On the other hand, the Elves, Dwarves and Rohirrim are not native 
speakers of the Common Tongue, so I would expect them to have L2 
accents.  I haven't seen or read /Game of Thrones/, but with American 
fantasy authors it just seems pretentious.

     An interesting contrast is the series /Firefly/ and its companion 
movie /Serenity/, which featured some Southern American accents to evoke 
the "space western" setting.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
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