Just a few years ago, Game of Thrones had what felt like the entire world watching its series finale. While Game of Thrones started as a saga with guidelines and story points pulled from George R.R. Martin’s novels which inspired the series, it eventually reached a point where its storyline was ahead of that in Martin’s published work. The Thrones team had to develop its own finish. The ending would ultimately leave fans scratching their heads, debating why the writers ended the show the way they did and whether or not they ever had a plan at all without Martin’s work to guide them. Now, fans need not have a fear of repeating such history as the Game of Thrones world is poised for a comeback in the form of House of the Dragon.ย This time, the series which promises to have a “very precise” destination in mind, with the source material available to guide it.
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House of the Dragon is going to be telling the story of Martin’s Fire & Blood book, a tale centered around the Targaryen house which ruled over Westeros before a civil war began to tear them down from the inside. Unlike the final season of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik have the story laid out for them already in Fire & Blood as the novel published in 2018. Martin’s ending of Game of Thrones has not yet published, which left D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to their own devices to figure out an ending of their own in the complex saga.
“We have a very, very precise idea of where we wanna go with it, but we can’t tell you,” Sapochnik told ComicBook.com. “I think that the important thing is that this isa… Think of this as an Episode IV, the Star Wars Episode IV. So it’s kind of, we’re in the middle of a history that is rich and full of stories to tell and it’s a good place to start.”ย
The Fire & Blood story, published in 2018, lays out the history of the Targaryean family’s rule from a third party’s perspective. An archmaester is recounting the saga in Westeros history and the reader learns the detailers through their account of it all. Fortunately for the showrunners, that means there are enough major events to bring to live-action life to satisfy readers, enough wiggle room to offer up their own surprises or details, and a beginning and end to follow which Martin has already laid out in full.
Sapochnik sees the characters of Game of Thrones, where he directed some of the show’s best and biggest episodes, as a great reference point for what will driveย House of the Dragon. “The question that I’m left with at the end of Thrones, of the original season, when you start to look at, ‘What do I want to know more about?’ is I’m fascinated by the idea of like, ‘What are Dany’s origins?’ Like, ‘Where does you know, where do these people come from? Why are they so crazy?’ You know, ‘Where did they get that white hair from?’ I mean, those are, I think that this answers those questions and gives you a real sense of Targaryenism. We’ve got a thing in this show which we call Targaryen exceptionalism, which is an argument, a kind of a philosophical argument that often happens between Viserys and his brother, where one sees the future of Targaryens belongs to the dreamers, who are the people, the occasional characters, the occasional Targaryens who have prescient vision and see the future as they did see the end of Valyria. And then there’s the old school, Fire & Blood Targaryens like our character Daemon, who really think that everything should be conquered and conquest is everything.”
Condal echoed the sentiments. “If you really think about it this is the most obvious successor show to pursue,” Condal said. “I mean, the minute George pitched it to me, a million years ago is, ‘Oh, this is the one that I want to do the most.’ It made the most sense because it’s, we didn’t get to know anything about the Targaryens in the original series, not really. I mean, we got to know Daenerys very well and Viserys a little bit, until he was melted. And so it’s fascinating to go from that world where there were no Targaryens and they were trying to reclaim the scraps of this empire to a time when, the height of their power and decadence and glory and see what it was actually like when they were in power with dragons.”
Are you excited for House of the Dragon? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter! House of the Dragon releases new episodes every Sunday on HBO Max.
