20. The Swords Are Ludicrously Detailed
For obvious reasons, swords are very important in the world of Game Of Thrones. While characters tend to live and die by their words, words never in fact killed a man, meaning that occasionally steel needs to be drawn. Combine this quasi-medieval custom with the fact that all the Great Houses (and some of the smaller ones) have their own bladed heirlooms, then the need for intricate weaponry becomes an urgent one, even before you take into account the Dothraki and all the other strange cultures across the Narrow Sea. To that end, they hired in Tommy Dunne for possibly the most awesome job ever weapons master. Dunne who started out in Braveheart, which should tell you all you need to know puts an incredible amount of effort into his work. He researches thousands of weapons for the show, looking up European, Egyptian and Mangolian weaponry and works with concept designer Will Simpson before cracking on with a design. He's usually left to his own devices, but when it comes to designing characters blades, he works in close conjunction with his superiors to make sure he gets it all exactly right. I don't need to tell you a lot of effort goes into this for instance Ned Stark's sword Ice needed to tell the story of the Stark household, so took three weeks to hand-forge the weapon with pattern-welding (something only used for the Valyrian steel swords to give them a better quality) and machine hammer-based etching. Pommels are also of huge importance for instance, both Jeor Mormont's Longclaw has a hand-carved wolf sigil sigil and Gregor Clegane's is modelled after old Celtic Irish Ring Swords as a reference to the Northern Ireland shoot. Yet his best accomplishment is the White Walkers' swords at first glance, they look like CGI ice, but that would be doing Dunne a disservice they're actually practical swords finished with acrylic resin, and if you look closely, you can see how the layers on the blade overlap in a snake-scale design. To my mind, making an ice curio into a fully usable sword goes above and beyond the call of duty, especially when you consider how little time Dunne had to design and make the darn thing. Bonus point in the first episode, Dunne plays the part of Robb, Jon's and Theon's barber. They actually refer to him by his first name, when they ask if he can 'shave him good.'