George R.R. Martin just dropped a big revelation about the special powers of one Game of Thrones character, that could have made a huge difference on the story!
Mention Daenerys Targaryen to most Game of Thrones fans, and they think of fire. The “Mother of Dragons” was well known for commanding those monstrous creatures and surviving being burned several times, even seemingly channeling fire herself. Emilia Clarke did a fine job making that believable on screen in the series.
One would think this was always going to be the case. However, in a talk for the Oxford Union, George R.R. Martin touched on someone uncovering his long written outline for A Song of Ice and Fire which had several differences. Martin noted that there were romances that “I wouldn’t touch today,” and other things he'd changed over the years. But when it came to the Targaryens, Martin’s original idea was far different.
“The basic structure was there. You had the Lannisters and the Starks and you had Dany on the other thing and you had dragons," he recalled. "Actually, that was a decision I wrestled with because remember, I was mostly writing science fiction. And one of the early ideas I had was, ‘Well, what if the dragons are not literally real?' I had written a number of quite successful stories, science fiction stories, about people with psionic powers. You know, they were telepaths, they were empaths, they could do things. And I said, what if this Targaryen family are...you know, pyro people? They could set powers with their minds, and they have that power and they’re dealing with these other people who don’t have that power.’”
As Martin says, before he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire, he was known mostly for sci-fi works. He wouldn’t be the first author to mix sci-fi and fantasy together, and it’s intriguing to imagine how the dragons would have been more an allegory than actual creatures.
So why did this never happen? Martin said the person to thank for that is the late writer Phyllis Eisenstein, as he showed her an early draft of chapters that included Daenerys' psychic powers. Her priceless reaction was, “George, you can’t leave out the dragons! The dragons have to be real! Don’t give me this pyro psychic dragons, no."
"Yeah, she convinced me," Martin admitted. "So I threw out that shit and I gave them real dragons. And thank god."
Obviously, this would have completely altered the entire Game of Thrones saga. It would have been more sci-fi than fantasy, with the dragons perhaps once existing, only long extinct and grown into legend. The Targaryens could have used that belief to make themselves look more powerful and strengthen their rule in Westeros.
It could have played on an old idea that in a medieval world, obviously science would be seen as magic. That could have altered the entire work, with the White Walkers perhaps some strange mutated race rather than the demonic creatures we knew and feared, and other aspects treated more less fantastically as well. But that's just speculation.
It’s probably best that this never happened, as Game of Thrones works better as fantasy than some genre-bending mix. Yet it’s interesting to imagine what could have been had Martin gone through with his original concept for a more sci-fi take on the dragons of Westeros.
Game of Thrones is available to stream on HBO MAX.