5 moments from Fire & Blood we can’t wait to see in House of the Dragon
From the meeting of the Green Council to the battle between Daemon and Aemond Targaryen, House of the Dragon stands to be as brutal and beautiful as Game of Thrones.
It’s finally happening! HBO is officially working on a Game of Thrones prequel show: House of the Dragon. Unlike Game of Thrones, which was based on George R.R. Martin’s as-yet-unfishined A Song of Ice and Fire series, House of the Dragon is based on Martin’s “fake history book” Fire & Blood. Specifically, it’ll adapt the part that covers the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal Targaryen civil war that happened years before any of the characters we know and love from the original show were born. That’s some 100 pages of source material, which will leave a lot of room for interpretation.
After the poor reception of Game of Thrones season 8, the pressure is on for House of the Dragon to deliver. At its core, the story has much in common with Game of Thrones: it’s about power, war and the cycle of violence. House of the Dragon showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik have a lot of hurdles to jump when it comes to telling it in a way that’s exciting, doesn’t feel like it’s treading the same ground, and that introduces us to new characters we can fall in love with. The big challenge will be telling this tale in a way that the audience doesn’t know quite which side of the conflict to root for, but rather watches in horror as Westeros burns.
House of the Dragon isn’t set to premiere until 2022, so fans have a while to wait before we dive back into the World of Ice and Fire. Let’s take a look at five moments from the book we can’t wait to see on screen, and how the show approach them.
1. The Build-Up: The Green Council Meeting
The Dance truly begins with the death of King Viserys I Targaryen. During his life, Viserys maintained that his eldest daughter by his first wife, Rhaenyra, would take the throne upon his death. However, Viserys eventually remarried and had sons with Alicent Hightower. It is Westerosi law that thrones and titles go to the eldest son, so there’s a conflict here. Upon his death, Alicent and her conspirators have a secret council meeting dubbed “The Green Council” and crown Viserys’ son Aegon as king. They obviously don’t tell Rhaenyra, who is giving birth on Dragonstone at the time. (Quick sidebar: Alicent’s side of the conflict are mainly known as the Greens while Rhaenyras are called the Blacks.)
I can see a version of the show that starts with the death of Viserys, with the Green Council being the first major event of the series. Perhaps all the events prior will be left mysterious and can be explained by characters later.
However, I think that would do fans a disservice. There is so much important backstory we need to make sense of the civil war. There’s the feud between Alicent’s children and Rhaenyra’s that we get to watch blossom into violence and murder. There are many important players that die early on in the Dance that we have to come to care for. If the show fails to give us their backstories and begins with the war, we’ll just be watching a bunch of CGI dragons burning buildings with no stakes. The time before the Dance is one of the most peaceful times in Westerosi history, although it still has plenty of the backstabbing, politics, love triangles and incest that Game of Thrones fans are used. I believe we need to see what that looks like in order to fully grasp the horror that a civil war brings.
One of the challenges of adapting Fire & Blood is that it’s written like a history book; the author is drawing from multiple sources that have different accounts of how things took place. The show should look at the options and choose the best, most realistic, most dramatically satisfying way to tell the story. And the best choice is definitely to show us some of the peace and prosperity that reigned before the Dance. When we get to the Green Council meeting, I want to feel the full weight of what it means, and how catastrophic the consequences could be.