Apart from brief scenes and dialogue, the eldest son of king Viserys ( Paddy Considine) and Alicent Hightower ( Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke) is introduced to us as mainly a nuisance for Rhaenyra's ( Milly Alcock and Emma D'Arcy) claim to the Iron Throne. Take Aegon Targaryen ( Ty Tennant and Tom Glynn-Carney), for example. What we get is the introduction of heavily important characters to the Dance of Dragons with very little context. While this is important to bring us the action that we're all here for, it still leaves us wanting for more, and not in a good way. House of the Dragon sure tries hard to give us that, but its main focus is still on the what, not really on the how. It's a fictional history book, meaning that its focus is mainly on factual events.įor that to be brought to the screen, many gaps had to be filled in order to create something that deserves to be told, a story with a complete narrative and characters with well-established development arcs. Creative as he is, Martin wrote a book under the premise of an unreliable narrator (Archmaester Gyldayn, a famed historian of House Targaryen), without bothering to create a narrative or delving too much into the specifics of each event. Adapting a novel into a television series is a big enough challenge, but Fire & Blood isn't exactly a novel. House of the Dragon is based on Martin's book, Fire & Blood, which analyzes the history of the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros. If not, well, at least we got some dragons, right? If the show was well-received, then good, everything may seem like a success. The time jumps, then, make explicit how the studio actually approached the show as a gamble. For a show to be seen as a success, it needs to generate a lot of buzz in a short period of time, so House of the Dragon needed to impress right away. Martin also mentioned that the show would require four seasons of 13 episodes to fully do the Dance of Dragons justice, and that sheds some light on how the current industry landscape operates. While it may have seemed like a good strategy at the time, now that the first season is nearly over and the second one is already confirmed, the viewers were left with a rushed story, many recasts to accommodate the time jumps, and barely any time to actually enjoy the performances the actors worked so hard to convey. For most of us, this would've been a no-brainer from the start, but what if it went wrong? The time jumps would then serve as a way to compress the story and go straight to the meat of the show, thus avoiding any possible backlash while still giving us some fiery action. When its first season debuted, House of the Dragon hadn't yet been renewed. Unfortunately, the memory of the last seasons of Martin's first medieval fantasy show is still fresh on most viewers' minds, and HBO was fully aware of that. Comparing House of the Dragon to Game of Thrones is inevitable in some (or most) aspects, but it's not really fair with a show that has just begun.
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