Why Game of Thrones fans should be optimistic about House of the Dragon

It’s been over two years since the end of Game of Thrones. While the show was a media phenomenon like nothing else in its time, these days it’s hard to even have a conversation about it without the talk eventually turning toward the bitter disappointment people felt for the final season. It’s understandable, all things considered…but at the same time, GoT had so many incredible moments and it’s a shame that they feel overshadowed by all the problems fans had with the show’s final leg.

It’s also difficult to see some of those fears and hesitancies spill over onto the upcoming Game of Thrones spinoff series, House of the Dragon, which is due out sometime next year. HotD covers the brutal civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, when different branches of the Targaryen  family fought each other over the Iron Throne. It’s a period as rife with political intrigue, betrayal, epic battles, and memorably horrific deaths as anything on Game of Thrones. With way more dragons.

Given the conversation around GoT‘s ending, it can be easy to feel a little jaded about the upcoming spinoff. Fans have already raised a bit of a hubbub about Matt Smith’s casting as Daemon Targaryen, and with Daenerys’ abrupt heel turn still so fresh in many of our memories, some are having trouble getting excited. Fool me once, and all that.

But there are also some seriously good signs on the horizon for House of the Dragon, both in terms of the production itself and the material it’s based off. Obviously, the jury is out until we actually get to see the series itself…but in the meantime there is cause to be optimistic that this show could be every bit as memorable and epic as Game of Thrones…and hopefully, avoid that show’s pitfalls.

House of the Dragon will hit the ground running

To start off, let’s discuss the team behind House of the Dragon. While Game of Thrones had to build everything about Westeros from the ground up, HotD has the advantage of already having an immense amount of its costuming, set design, and production work flow already established. This means that unlike the original series, which had a notoriously rough start and had to figure out many things on the fly, House of the Dragon started production as a well-oiled machine. We’ve seen a few initial images of a few key actors in costume, and it’s already been enough to stoke excitement to a borderline unbearable level.

To top that off, the showrunners for House of the Dragon are Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik…and while showrunners do not necessarily a great show make, these guys are worth pausing for a minute to talk about. Condal is best known for his work on the show Colony, but he’s also a longtime fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and friend of author George R.R. Martin. He actually originally pitched doing a Dunk & Egg series to HBO before he was brought on to do House of the Dragon, so you know he’s got a serious love of this world.

Condal also pays extreme attention to detail; he’s currently doing a 12-part podcast series called The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, where he nerds out over movie props. And one of those props that he’s talked about recently? New Valyrian steel swords, which we’ll be seeing in House of the Dragon.

Condal seems dedicated to capturing what made the original show work while also showing us a different time period. “Worldbuilding is so critically important, especially in a fantasy world,” Condal said on the podcast. “[We] try to make it all feel like it wasn’t just lumped together and dropped on the plate…There’s hundreds of years of history going into this and everything evolved naturally through the people that built and designed and used these things.”

According to HotD‘s armorer, Tim Lewis, Condal has spent more time in the armory than any other writer he’s worked with, hashing out details and such. I’m going to count this as a serious point in his favor.

Then you have Miguel Sapochnik, who really needs no introduction. Sapochnik was the director and mastermind behind some of Game of Thrones’ most iconic episodes, including “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” “The Winds of Winter,” “The Long Night,” and “The Bells.” That means he was behind the majority of the huge action set pieces in the latter half of the show’s run. And while season 8 did prove that spectacular set pieces alone can’t make up for lapses in other areas, it should go pretty much without saying that to have a visionary such as Sapochnik behind the wheel for a show like this is a huge boon.

Especially when you consider just how many epic throwdowns are in store…

The source material for House of the Dragon is complete

This is where the other part of that “hold thy pessimism, thee of little faith” argument comes in. It’s pretty universally agreed that Game of Thrones started to hit most of its snags once it ran low on source material. The first three books in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series were expertly laid out, supplying the original show with a vast wealth of both major moments and character development to draw from. And while the fourth and fifth books in the series — A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons — had that too, the story became more sprawling and harder to adapt. Beyond that, well…the show moved into uncharted territory, with both successes and stumbles.

House of the Dragon is unlikely to encounter those issues, because the source material is already finished. George R.R. Martin recounts the Dance of the Dragons in its entirety in his book Fire & Blood. So we already know all of the major events that GRRM deemed worth writing about, as well as those leading up to it and out of it. That means that Condal, Sapochnik, and the rest of their team have a full picture of the entire tale going into this thing, as opposed to the half-finished story that Dan Weiss and David Benioff had to work with for Game of Thrones.

On the other hand, what source material we have for the Dance is far less detailed than A Song of Ice and Fire. Fire & Blood is a work of “fake history,” recorded for posterity by one Archmaester Gyldayn. Gyldayn’s recounting of the Dance is drawn from several in-world books and firsthand accounts, and Martin often lays out multiple conflicting or complimentary versions of events. This means that while the show’s writing crew has some major milestones laid out for them, as well as plenty of smaller moments, much of the details are left ambiguous. That could pose a danger, but it’s also an opportunity: the writers have a full outline to work off, but they also have the room to let the characters grow and breathe, to shape events as best suits the story they are telling as opposed to being bound to a highly detailed, thousands-of-pages long novel series.

As for those milestone moments, they’re pretty great. There are moments in the Dance as shocking and awful as the Red Wedding, and hardly anyone involved in the conflict comes away with clean hands. Both the “blacks” and “greens” — as the forces respectively dedicated to Rhaenyra and Aegon II Targaryen come to be known — commit treachery and do awful things. There are a scant handful of stalwartly good characters, but most operate on a sliding scale of morality. Characters that begin as heroic commit horrific deeds; others who seem sadistic have noble ends. The twistiness of the Dance is George R.R. Martin at his finest.

The easiest way I can think to describe the Dance of the Dragons is that it’s more like the first four seasons of Game of Thrones, wholeheartedly focused on a brutal war of succession in Westeros. Except that dragons are a major part of the equation — both sides have them, and they come in various sizes and strengths, with riders of various ages and experience. Many of the large battles and dramatic moments revolve around multiple dragonriders battling head-to-head, or dragons appearing unexpectedly to utterly destroy an opposing force. But since these dragonriders are mostly all related, the familial tension and grudges are extremely deep. Think of the sort of animosity that Cersei has for Tyrion, and you have the barest idea of what lies in store.

While I love White Walkers and the more magical elements of Game of Thrones, there are other fantasy series that do those kinds of things at least as well. But when it comes to political fantasy? It’s hard to think of a series on par with Game of Thrones. House of the Dragon stands to fill that void, and merge the fantastical elements with the politics in a way that will be fresh even to longtime GoT fans.

When the dust settles on the Dance of the Dragons, House Targaryen’s power is more or less broken. They have another century or two of rulership ahead of them, sure…but the height of their power is behind them. Looking at this conflict in that light, House of the Dragon stands to tell a really compelling tale about how the thirst for power and revenge cripples this ruling family.

There are a whole lot of reasons to be excited for House of the Dragon. We’ll be eagerly awaiting its premiere on HBO in 2022. But in the meantime, if you want to find out what kind of heartache and mayhem awaits, Fire & Blood is well worth the read.

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