The bathtub scene is key to fleshing out the state of the kingdom’s succession conundrum: Due to Westeros’s present gender politics, King Viserys and Queen Aemma do not consider their daughter, Rhaenyra, a potential heir and have been trying unsuccessfully for a boy for a decade. But I have mourned all the dead children that I can.” I know it is my duty to provide an heir, and I’m sorry if I have failed you. Had two pregnancies ended well before their term. “The Heirs of the Dragon” was a talky, throat-clearing hour that sufficiently set the scene but felt distractingly clumsy in places. A natural question arises: Will House of the Dragon be able to accomplish the same?Īs far as the premiere goes, not really. At the same time, Game of Thrones was notable for its ability to deconstruct, subvert, or innovate on genre tropes, and in the case of Fire & Blood, the 2018 book on which House of the Dragon is based, that deconstruction is embedded in the actual form: Martin wrote it as a historical account complete with conflicting perspectives. Now, let’s be frank: That’s an incredibly difficult task, and I’m not even sure it’s possible to deliver dense fantasy exposition elegantly. It is the duty of this episode to disproportionately shoulder the burden of establishing stakes and emotional investment in a set of players distantly related to ones we used to care about - and to do so in a manner that isn’t, shall we say, ham-fisted or uninteresting.
DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING VERSION 12 RELEASE DATE SERIES
Martin’s framing of the series as more “historical fiction with some dragons thrown in” as opposed to “classic high fantasy,” House of the Dragon squarely opens as a story of royal-court intrigue largely operating without an instantly hooky external threat (i.e., White Walkers) at the outset. (Princess Rhaenyra as “an uncanny doppelgänger of Daenerys,” as our recapper Hillary Kelly puts it, caused me to forget where we were in history for a few minutes.) Plus, owing to George R. But there’s also the basic technical problem of exposition: House of the Dragon plops us into dense political machinations taking place several eras prior to Game of Thrones but with many familiar visual signifiers to screw with your brain. Sure, there’s the whole way Game of Thrones ended, which the show has to spiritually navigate whether it wants to or not. This prequel does not start from a particularly enviable position. In this story, the board has essentially been reset. But that was a whole monoculture ago, and as Game of Thrones’s first prequel series ( House of the Dragon) arrives on HBO, much of that knowledge has atrophied. There was once a time when the map of Westeros was clear in my head: who all the players were, where they were positioned on the board, what everybody wanted, and how fucked they were - with large chunks of historical context and familial lore filling it out.