Filming on House of the Dragon, HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series. Set around 180 years before the original show, House of the Dragon tells the story of a brutal civil war fought between different factions of the Targaryen family. Like its mother show, House of the Dragon has a huge cast, but much of the recent filming has included the character of Daemon Targaryen, played by Doctor Who veteran Matt Smith.
The crew is filming in Cornwall, England, with Daemon hanging out on a number of beaches. We’ve seen him wielding his Valyrian steel blade Dark Sister, which was used by Visenya Targaryen herself during Aegon’s Conquest of Westeros and passed down through the Targaryen family after that.
Our best bet is that the show is filming snippets of Daemon’s time during the War for the Stepstones, when he teamed up with the powerful Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) to conquer a string of islands held by the Free Cities of Myr, Lys and Tyrosh on Essos. Recent pictures published in Metro are very interesting. We won’t publish them here for fear of lawsuits, but we can talk about them; just beware potential SPOILERS.
Daemon Targaryen stabbed on the beach?
The newest pictures, which you can also see on the House of the Dragon Brazil Twitter account, show Daemon apparently at the end of his rope. He’s walking around the beach, wading into the water even though he’s fully dressed, stabbing the sand with Dark Sister, and in one shot lying on the beach with Dark Sister seemingly jutting out of his belly.
Does that mean Daemon dies this early in the story? Probably not. The angle of the paparazzi show makes it look like he’s been stabbed, but more likely it’s wedged in the sane next to his body. Daemon is a very important character in the Dance of the Dragons — that’s what this Targaryen civil war is called — so it wouldn’t make sense to kill him off this early.
As for why he’s lying on the beach and walking into the surf, perhaps the War for the Stepstones is going poorly at the moment, or maybe he’s just received some bad news; as outlined in the pages of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, Daemon is a pretty dramatic guy. You’ll see what we mean when the show premieres sometime next year on HBO and HBO Max.
House of the Dragon uses the wrong Targaryen sigil?
In other leaks, Reddit has noticed something interesting about some of the Targaryen banners flapping on the set of House of the Dragon: at least in some shots, the Targaryen dragon sigil looks to have four legs rather than two, as it does in the books.
George R.R. Martin has gone on record before about how, in his world, dragons only have two legs, in part because it would be physically impossible to fly with four. Now, the entire idea of dragons might be physically impossible, but the point stands: in the world of ice and fire, dragons are two-legged creatures, and the Targaryen sigils should reflect that.
Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time HBO had gotten this wrong. As Los Siete Reinos points out, there were times on Game of Thrones when the dragons on the banners had four legs. Whoopsie.
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