Like Game of Thrones before it, House of the Dragon is an ensemble series. The first season introduced us to a large network of characters: There's Rhaenyra Targaryen, the heir apparent to the Iron Throne. There's her younger half-brother Aegon, who is fighting her for it. There's her uncle/husband Daemon Targaryen, the most bloodthirsty character in play. Except for perhaps Aegon's brother Aemond, who killed Rhaenyra's son Luke at the end of the first season, making war between these two rival factions of the Targaryen family inevitable. Rhaenyra has another son named Jace, who's doing all he can to make sure his mother gets to sit the throne. There's Alicent Hightower, Rhaenyra's former best friend and step-mother. I could go on. And we're going to meet several new characters in the upcoming second season. People everywhere!
One of the things I liked about Game of Thrones was that it resisted the idea of there being one "main character," although by the end things did narrow a bit; despite the abundance of riches, much of the story did come down to Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister, who you could call the first among equals. Similarly, House of the Dragon has a huge cast, but to hear showrunner Ryan Condal tell it, the "main characters" are Alicent, Daemon and Rhaenyra.
Condal broke this down during a visit to the official House of the Dragon podcast, where he talked about how the world of the show would expand in season 2. "Certainly there will be people at Dragonstone and King's Landing throughout this story, but others have to go afield if they're going to battle for their claim," he said. "So we really started by kind of following the main characters and, 'Where are they going to go?' Your three main characters — Alicent, Daemon, Rhaenyra — much of this season they spend in different places from one another...And from there, worlds start to build out. So you introduce new characters in those worlds that come in."
"It's natural, it doesn't feel like we're suddenly like, 'Okay, we've gotta see the whole continent.' It does feel like, those people that we knew very well in season 1, we're now going to follow them on their diaspora, as they go out and try to defend the claim that they are defending.""
I think this more or less rings true, although the world may be expanding ever more than Condal implies. For instance, we know that Jace will travel north to Winterfell this season, where he'll meet new character Cregan Stark. Daemon's daughter Rhaena will spend time in the Vale. Neither Alicent, Daemon nor Rhaenyra will be involved in those plotlines. As on Game of Thrones, the characters will be cast to the winds, only to combine later in unexpected ways.
As for our big three, Rhaenyra will spend a lot of time on Dragonstone, Alicent in King's Landing, and Daemon at the cursed castle of Harrenhal, where he'll establish a military presence on behalf of his wife and queen. It will indeed be fun to see them all on their own, learning and growing and meeting interesting new people who may or may not want to kill them.
All of this will require a ton of new sets and locations. Where there any growing pains as they show expanded? "I’ll say it was a shockingly smooth production for as complicated as it was, and it was much more complicated around this time, just from a size, scope, logistics kind of ," Condal said. "The amount that we bit off this time versus in season one was much, much bigger.”
But will they be able to chew and swallow? We'll find out when House of the Dragon season 2 premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, June 16.
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