Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin teases the destructive power of the dragons

On Game of Thrones, we’ve seen the destructive power of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, most notably in “The Spoils of War,” where Drogon flash-fried half the Lannister army without breaking a sweat.

Good times.

Anyway, we have yet to see a display of that kind in the Song of Ice and Fire books, but speaking to news.com.au, author George R.R. Martin made it sound like it’s only a matter of time. “I have tried to make it explicit in the novels that the dragons are destructive forces, and Dany has found that out as she tried to rule the city of Meereen and be queen there,” he said. “She has the power to destroy, she can wipe out entire cities, and we certainly see that in Fire and Blood, we see the dragons wiping out entire armies, wiping out towns and cities, destroying them, but that doesn’t necessarily enable you to rule — it just enables you to destroy.”

Fire and Blood, Martin’s fake history about the Targaryen dynasty, is out on store shelves now, and is packed with all kinds of dragonlore. “If you read Fire and Blood, you’ll know there’s definitely a bond between the dragons and their riders and the dragons will not accept just any rider,” Martin explained. “Some people try to take a dragon wind up being eaten or burned to death instead, so the dragons are terribly fussy about who rides them.”

Fire and Blood is pretty interesting in and of itself, but Song of Ice and Fire fans may be particularly interested in how it foreshadows and shapes the current timeline. For example, there’s one bit where Queen Alysanne Targaryen tries to fly her dragon beyond the Wall but it refuses to go. “[I]t troubled me then and it troubles me still,” she wrote to her husband the king. On the show, we know the dragons are capable of flying beyond the Wall, but in the novels, who knows?

Martin has also suggested that Aegon Targaryen, the guy who originally conquered Westeros 300 years before the main series began, may have done it to unite the country ahead of the White Walker invasion he saw coming down the road, the same one the characters are dealing with now. “The Targaryens have certain gifts and yes, taking the dragons and dragon riding and dragon breeding was one of them,” Martin said. “But the other gift was an occasional Targaryen had prophetic powers and could see glimpses of the future, which they didn’t always necessarily properly interpret because, you know, they were fragmentary and sometimes symbolic. But to what extent did they share those gifts, what did he see, what prompted him to do all this? These are things I find really interesting to ponder.”

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Martin is big on pondering, and has left a lot of his mythology open-ended specifically because he thinks questions can be more interesting than answers. “I do try to do that too, yes, deliberately put in little hints and mysteries and some of them maybe you can solve if you put the clues together, at least you can come up with a plausible theory, and some of them are just meant to be perpetually something to make you think and wonder,” he said.

"(Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.) Tolkien did that too, and like many of his other fans, I think and wonder. I love that, and my books are full of things like that that I hope to never explain, just let people wonder about it."

I agree with that, for the record. There’s a lot to be said for a story maintaining an air of mystery, just so long as we get enough concrete answers to satisfy us. Hopefully The Winds of Winter, whenever it comes out, will have a good balance of both.

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