Here’s the list of the Top 25 Game of Thrones Season Three characters by number of lines, complied by Walter_Eagle:
1. Tyrion – 185
2. Jaime – 119
3. Daenerys – 93
4. Sansa – 87
5. Arya – 86
6. Cersei – 84
7. Tywin – 81
8. Jon – 79
9. Robb – 73
10. Margaery – 72
11. Olenna – 71
12. Thoros – 67
13. Ygritte – 65
14. Theon – 64
15. Joffrey – 63
16. Brienne – 60
17. Missandei – 58
18. Shae – 54
19. Melisandre – 51
20. Davos – 48
20. Gendry – 48
22. Varys – 46
23. Bronn – 45
23. Stannis – 45
25. Jorah – 44
25. Sam – 44
Catelyn, we’re told, ranks 40th.
1. Catelyn’s the line item that’s attracting the most attention, and rightly so, frankly. A POV character, and a Stark, and a major player in a pivotal Season Three storyline, with fewer lines than Bronn? It’s a bummer, for sure, and I say that as someone who’s both disappointed with how that character has been translated from book to screen — by far the weakest of all the main characters — and who tends not to be disappointed for the same reasons that the Catelyn stans are.
Personally, I’d have liked the Stark/Tully/Riverlands storyline this season to use her, not Robb, as its central character. For one thing this would map more closely to how the books handled it, not that that’s something I tend to care about overmuch. Mainly, she’s simply a more sympathetic character right now than Robb — certainly than show-Robb. Her internal struggle is more interesting to me than his is.
Granted, if you look at her material during this segment of the series, much of what she does in her chapters is internal. She tends to think about a lot of stuff for almost the entire chapter, until the final paragraphs arrive and someone tells her that something important has happened. That’s difficult to turn into compelling television. But the show’s obviously capable of concocting plot to keep a character at the forefront if they want, and I wish they’d done so here if that’s what it would have taken.
2. Look at the gender breakdown for this list. Women occupy five slots in the top 10 most prominent characters, and a majority of the top 20. I doubt that most of the top-shelf TV drams have anything even close to this level of gender parity. The Good Wife, I suspect, and maybe The Americans, and mmmmmmmaybe Homeland simply by virtue of its female lead, but as a sheer numbers game I think Game of Thrones comes out on top. And compared to Breaking Bad or Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men (however well Mad Men handles its core female characters)? Forget about it. Actually I suppose Downton Abbey has it beat, but even so. When we’re talking about how the show treats its women characters, this bears attention, and frankly praise.
