Why George R.R. Martin wanted to make House of the Dragon

Hop into the saddle and get ready to fly: HBO’s Game of Thrones successor show House of the Dragon premieres this weekend. This prequel series is set some 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and tells the story of a brutal civil war fought between rival factions of the Targaryen dynasty, then at the height of its power. The broad strokes of the story were set out by author George R.R. Martin in his book Fire & Blood, but it’ll be up to the show to flesh them out.

How did showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik settle on this particular story to tell? It came from the big man himself. “George [R.R. Martin] sees this particular story as the most important event in the Targaryen history, outside of the conquest,” Condal told Yahoo News. “The conquest wins them the power that then this story precipitates them beginning to lose. Before even Fire & Blood [George] had written quite a bit about this period. The Princess and the Queen was about Rhaenyra and Alicent as adults. The Rogue Prince is about Daemon when Rhaenyra was more of a child that adapted into this book’s chapters. But this has always been on his mind as having the most thematic and spiritual resonance with the original series. So when I sat down with him, the very first meeting we ever had, this was the chapter that he slid across the table to me and said, ‘This is the one I want to tell.’”

"Here’s the story you’ve always heard about. The Targaryens, at the height of their power with 17 dragons and great wealth and power and influence. They’re unchallengeable. This is that time. So I think it’s a fascinating place to drop in because they’ve just started to turn and decline, but they don’t realize that until it’s too late."

“Forget about the original show’s characters for the time being without discarding them”

House of the Dragon will feel familiar to Game of Thrones fans; there’s a lot here that people enjoyed in the original series, including political backstabbing, a sprawling story, and sky-high production values. That said, House of the Dragon is its own show, right down to the basest building blocks. “Everything you see on that screen was built brand new for this show,” Condal said. “Certainly, we had plans and designs, but all that stuff was up in Belfast, or it didn’t exist anymore because it had been taken down, or it would’ve been folded away, put into storage, or put in the Game of Thrones museum.”

House of the Dragon has the tricky task of luring in Game of Thrones fans — both those who loved the entirety of the original series and those who felt down by the ending — but also standing on its own two feet. After all, they want this show to be on the air for the long haul, and it’s going to have to create its own momentum to pull that off.

“I think that something about adhering to the books very closely this season has been part of what seems to have been successful,” Sapochnik said. “For this first season, we need to establish this as its own thing, separate from Game of Thrones. We need to pay our respects to it. We need to have a similar language, but not absolutely the same. We need to sew the seeds we’ll pick up and run with as we move forward. And we need the audience to, in the loveliest way possible, forget about the original show’s characters for the time being without discarding them. Ryan and I have a healthy, antagonistic relationship in that we discuss and challenge each other about what we want to do because we come from very different places and usually find a healthy, happy medium.”

It’s all about balance. See what that looks like in action when House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21, this Sunday.

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