At some point while watching Prens you notice something: nobody in this show has a normal name. Hasharia, Thenio, Kalesh, Envoy Sangu…
They sound foreign the first time you hear them, but a few episodes in you start thinking "no way." The production team never explained where the character names came from. So we sat down and came up with theories that have no official source whatsoever, and yet make a strange amount of sense. A quick note for readers outside Turkey: every one of these is a Turkish word in disguise.
Take the Turkish word for a naughty, unruly child, run it through a little palace etiquette, add two letters at the end and you get Hasharia. If the kid who broke windows in your street grew up to live in a kingdom, this is exactly what he would be called.
Calling him Denyo outright would have been a bit too on the nose. Luckily one letter got swapped, the whole thing was gently aristocratised, and out came Thenio. Same energy, more expensive spelling.
You start distrusting him before he even speaks. A couple of letters of the Turkish word for a backstabber were changed, it was adapted to a fantasy universe, and Kalesh was born.
This is probably the most obvious one. They took anarchy, added a dash of medieval sauce, and got Anarkhia. Just hearing the name tells you order is not going to hold for long.
This one really needs no comment.
This time it may not be wordplay but an actual source. There is a famous beard style named after the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck: the Van Dyke beard, a moustache paired with a pointed goatee. So when they were looking for a name for a pirate, taking inspiration from a beard is not a far-fetched possibility at all.
Is this really where these names came from? Probably not.
But that is exactly what we love about Prens. The universe of the show is so absurd that even the silliest theory can sound reasonable for a moment.
Which theory are you on? To argue about it and discover shows like this, piCue is waiting for you.
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