Game of Thrones might have ended in 2019, but its influence will live on for a lot longer. We don’t just mean in the world of pop culture, either. We mean it will literally live on thanks to all the children named after people from Westeros. That includes babies whose parents dubbed them either “Daenerys” or “Khaleesi” before the final season, when their namesake turned out to be a murderous war criminal. That’s probably a great lesson on why you shouldn’t name your child after a fictional character before their story ends. But what about an iconic (and problematic) toy that’s been around for more than 60 years and just got a wildly popular big screen apologia? Some expecting parents are clearly considering doing just that. Online baby name searches for both “Barbie” and “Ken” have gone way up thanks to Greta Gerwig’s smash blockbuster.
According to People, the baby name site Nameberry has reported a whopping 603% increases in searches for “Barbie” since the film arrived in theaters on July 21. During that time searches for “Ken” have also shot up by 293%.
That doesn’t mean 600% more “Barbies” will be joining the workforce in 20 years, though. Just because an expecting parent looks up a name doesn’t mean they’ll choose it. And it’s easy to have a big percentage spike if normal searches are relatively low to begin with. But it does mean we’ll probably be seeing at least a few more Barbies and Kens in the future than we would have without the film.
For now “Barbie” barely cracks the top 1,900 baby girl names. In a role reversal from Barbieland, however, “Kenneth” is a lot more common. It sits just outside the top 100 names for boys.
In the meantime Nameberry Editor-in-Chief Sophie Kihm tells People Barbie remains a predominantly Amish name, a fact that we’ll be thinking about on our death bed. (We will not be worried about Ken while taking our final breath. At all.)
Something tells us “Khaleesi” from the hit HBO series probably wasn’t very popular with the Amish. And not just because they waited to see what happened to Daenerys in the end.