Aegon's Conquest writer outlines his approach to new Game of Thrones prequel show

Game of Thrones ended back in 2019. Since then, HBO has prepared two prequel series: House of the Dragon just wrapped up its second season the other month. Then there's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is going to premiere next year.

But the world George R.R. Martin created in his Song of Ice and Fire series has a long history, and HBO is looking at developing other spinoffs beyond those two, although we don't know if anything in that group will actually make it to TV. One of the highest-profile spinoff series is a show about Aegon the Conqueror, the first Targaryen ruler of Westeros and the guy who made the Iron Throne.

Aegon is talked about often enough on Game of Thrones and especially House of the Dragon. Like the latter show, any Aegon series would be based on Martin's book Fire & Blood, which is written as an in-universe history of the Targaryen dynasty cobbled together by a guy named Archmaester Gyldayn. To work on this idea, HBO has wrapped Mattson Tomlin, who talked about how things are going to Nexus Point News.

"It starts with what George has done," Tomlin said. "I've now gotten to spend quite a bit of time with him, and there have been a lot of pinch-me moments of just kind of going through Fire & Blood, highlighting passages, and asking him, 'What did this mean? What is this?' What I think it is. You know sometimes really grilling him going, 'I don't understand what's happening here.' And then other times going, 'I think that it could mean this.'"

"But it's really taking that text and treating it like it's real history. That's one of the things that my approach to it was to [that] Fire & Blood is written like a real history and these things happened. We know the history of Alexander the Great; we know the history of Napoleon. We know what the battles were. We know a lot of the people who died. We know in some cases what was said or what might have been said, but we don't know everything. We don't know all of it. We kind of have these flagpoles that tell us this is how we marched through history. But then also there's that great quote that somebody much smarter than I said: history is written by the people who won. And so then there's that as well. For me, it's about making sure that I respect George and I respect the text. And then also, it still has to be a dramatic story. Those characters have to go on a journey; they have to change; they have to go from a beginning to a middle to an end. Figuring out how to do all of that with the clues that that textbook has left for me and go, okay, I'm going to interpret this very real history and try to make it a really vivid show that hopefully people love and don't hate, doing the best I can."

This sounds like more or less the right approach to me, although I'll admit I'm a little jumpy after the season 2 finale of House of the Dragon, which I thought "interpreted" the text right into a brand new story that bore little resemblance to Martin's book or to the spirit of Game of Thrones. I also get a little nervous hearing on Tomlin's insistence that characters on TV "have to go on a journey; they have to change; they have to go from a beginning to a middle to an end." I mean, yeah, most good stories involve characters changing in some way, but I hope Tomlin won't feel the need to drastically change Aegon's very entertaining life story so it will better fit some kind of preconceived model of what a good story must have.

But that's me getting ahead of myself. Like I said, this Aegon the Conqueror show may never even materialize. If it does, I wish it the best.

In the meanwhile, Mattson Tomlin has a brand new show out: Terminator: Zero, an animated series set in the Terminator universe. All eight episodes are available to stream on Netflix now.

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