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Spoilers Game Of Thrones’ Spinoff ‘House Of The Dragons’ ordered to series

Is it bad that my biggest takeaway from the last episode was half expecting King Viserys to have a Disenchantment-esque death by accidentally slipping on his way to the Iron Throne and impaling himself on one of the swords? :lol:

Okay, the dinner scene was riveting and the head slicing was unexpected. Otherwise, eh.
 
Starbrow said:
This series feels much smaller than GoT. Has much much fewer enemies and conflicts.
I was hoping that as time will pass the real story will reveal it self, but instead we got lots of time skips, and drama about Throne succession. Not very interesting.
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It's by design. The book House of the Dragon is based off of is only 730 pages. Half the of the book isn't even about the Targaryen Civil War, but a history of the reign of Targaryen conquest. I think the first 5 episodes of the show cover maybe the first 50 pages dedicated to the Targaryen civil war.

HBO wanted to start the show with episode 6. With adult Alicent and Rhaenyra and introduce all the characters starting there. The showrunners talked them into doing a prequel for a prequel, and starting the show with Rhaenyra as a teenager. To tell a more complete story and make the audience care about the main characters.

Who cares about some old king dying bit by bit every episode/chapter?
Who cares about a princess who cheats on her husband, births 3 bastards and still expects to be crowned queen?
Who cares about a rival queen and her problematic (to say the least) son, that she wants to be king?
Etc

You begin with a baseline of what normal looked like for these characters and then transition to how time and their own sense of greed/entitlement has changed them. Basically, the Tudors with dragons.

Things will hit the fan this coming episode. Now that King Viserys is dead, the scramble for the throne will begin in earnest.


If you don't care for the show but want to see where things are headed, watch The Dance of Dragons video. It was included in the DVD/Blu-ray special features of GOT season 5. It's narrated by actors from the show, who are in character telling the story.

Kerry Ingram as Shireen Baratheon
Harry Llyod as Viserys III Targaryen
Mark Addy as King Robert Baratheon
Michelle Fairley as Catelyn Stark
Pedro Pascal as Oberyn Martell
Jack Gleeson as Joffrey Baratheon

By the 1 minute and 10 second mark, it tells the story up to where HOT D is presently. After that, spoilers for upcoming episodes and seasons.
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Starbrow said:
It's like Star Wars and Deathstars, they are fighting over a Throne - that's the theme of this franchise, but the scale at which HoD is nothing compared to GoT. And that's really noticable.
If HBO should have learned anything from season 8 of GoT, they should stop listening to showrunners and go with their own gut on this. Cause at the rate this show is going, it's just not very interesting.
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To each their own. I find the characterization here multilayered and fascinating, while The Rings of Power is shallow and sloppy.
 
Starbrow said:
But i didn't even mentioned Rings of Power, why would you bring it up?

The scale is what bothers me the most. Even the sets they are much fewer in numbers and much smaller in scale. I noticed quickly same sets beeing shown over and over again. GoT was huge, and all over the places. HoD is really small.

GoT was an adventure, HoD feels like KR drama with gore, lots of chatter, little action and conflicts. If things are just begining, they really should have skipped the first few episode, specially after puting so much adertisement on one actress just to replace her with another, and one can't even see much age difference between them.
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HOT D is telling its own story in its own style. It's not Game of Thrones.

As for scale - I haven't felt a lack of it, but I don't understand it's relevance when considering quality.

So far as what HBO ought to have done - all signs point to this being a raging success for them: critical acclaim, consistently high audience scores & record viewership numbers.
 
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Starbrow said:
But i didn't even mentioned Rings of Power, why would you bring it up?

The scale is what bothers me the most. Even the sets they are much fewer in numbers and much smaller in scale. I noticed quickly same sets beeing shown over and over again. GoT was huge, and all over the places. HoD is really small.

GoT was an adventure, HoD feels like KR drama with gore, lots of chatter, little action and conflicts. If things are just begining, they really should have skipped the first few episode, specially after puting so much adertisement on one actress just to replace her with another, and one can't even see much age difference between them.
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As others noted, you had effusive praise for The Rings of Power in the other thread essentially simultaneously. For me it's been a deeply flawed show that has consistently failed to engage me with the characters other than in the Elrond/Durin subplot (which feels like it was done by a different showrunner). The writers of that series are engaging in shallow plot-based writing, rather than centering things on characterization, which is how you make a compelling series. Much of it just offers nice visuals and spectacle (I'll admit the filming is often better than HOT D, where the showrunners seem to just love dimly lit scenes.

Regardless, turning to HOT D, again, it works for me because everything is centered on characterization. Apparently HBO originally wanted the series to begin at Episode 6, but the showrunners convinced them they needed the first five episodes to provide the backstory and initial character motivations...which was the right decision to make. Rhaenyra and Alicent being enemies without establishing first how their friendship systematically fell apart would make the characterization incredibly shallow, for example. Seeing Viserys for those first five episodes helped make the pathos of his decline much more poignant. Seeing Criston Cole before he became a total shitheel is also a plus.

Regardless, this is the story from the books, only deepened, because that story was a fictional history account by an unreliable narrator writing centuries later, where here we have a firsthand account. Why the hell would they invent a needless secondary plot whole cloth in Braavos or some crap in Dorne which wasn't relevant to the characters who are now part of the story - not to mention not relevant to the actual unfolding of the civil war?

I can understand this isn't what you would like, but that doesn't mean it's an ineffective show, it just means it's not to your taste. This isn't action-adventure, it's a tragic political drama. And frankly, most fans of Game of Thrones preferred the first four seasons (which were mostly people talking in rooms) over the big-budget action spectacle of the latter seasons.
 
Starbrow said:
If you want to discuss RoP you should do it in RoP threat, else it looks like a cheap shot and simply unnecessary for this conversation.
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It is not, because tastes differ. I would not expect someone who loved The Rings of Power to enjoy HOT D.

Starbrow said:
I see you have already accepted HoD beeing downgraded to political drama, even though it's promoted as Action-adventure. But even for a political drama, it's very shallow, GoT was much bigger in political scale with all the Houses beeing involved. HoD just doesn't have that. Maybe you just don't see it right now, but i noticed it right away after just few episode " Where were all the players in this drama ?". Just too few, and getting smaller.
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Again, it's an adaptation of a narrative which is only a few hundred pages long, as opposed to Game of Thrones, which was an adaptation of an (incomplete) series of books which totaled thousands of pages. Particularly in the run-up to the war within the narrative, there's not really a role for the other houses. That changes as the Dance breaks out in full, and the Greens and Blacks try and recruit different houses to their side.

I will admit that it's a pretty claustrophobic narrative in some senses right now. Even side characters like that random Lannister have dropped out since the beginning of the series, as it's become more concretely focused on familial dynamics. But as far as the realm in general is concerned, nothing bad has happened yet, because this is all hidden from public view (aside from rumors).

The scope of the series will widen once we see the huge collateral damage that the war will have, both on lesser nobility and the smallfolk. We still have a bit more family drama to get there though.
 
"House of the Dragon" is based on one novel, and it is focused on one family - the Targaryens. It's only natural that it will be on a scale smaller than "Game of Thrones". HBO and the showrunners had made that clear. Also, this adaptation of "Fire & Blood" will probably last three to four seasons. It seems some people had expected this series to be an exact replica of "Game of Thrones".

It amazes me how some want this series to be on the same scale as "Game of Thrones", despite it being an adaptation of only one novel. And at the same time, these same people want to rush the narrative in order to start the civil war right off the bat.
 
Starbrow said:
It' doesn't matter what this is adaption of a novel, or a series of books. I see this show for what it is in front of me, and it's not great. If you remember last few season of GoT wasn't an adaption of anything, still the scale and the joy until Season 8 were massive.
You have to understand what you are basically saying, because it wasn't in the novel the rest of the world outside doesn't exists. While you are okey with this, i am not. They showed the true scale of "the world " in GoT, and i would expect nothing less from other spin offs. If it's not there than it's just a bad show nothing else.
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Although the other attempts at doing GoT spinoffs have for the most part mostly failed, HBO still wants to make the world into an MCU-style tentpole franchise, with lots of different shows with different tones.

Criticizing HOT D for not being GOT is thus kinda like criticizing She Hulk for not being the Avengers. It misses the point entirely. This is just gonna be one "flavor" of story that is told in Westeros, while Game of Thrones tried to tell all the stories at once.
 
Starbrow said:
If they want to make a franchise, HoD is not the way to go. They should have picked a better time frame in the story, to make this, possibly last spin off, more interesting. Cause to me right now HoD looks like a massive downgrade.
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It's a tough situation. Nobody was expecting the audience of GOT to come back after the disaster that was the 8th season and finale.

HBO had been trying to get spin-offs started before GOT even ended. The first spin-off they wanted to do and actually spent $35 million on production for a pilot was a Long Night/Age of Heroes prequel. Where it was going to cover the first invasion by the White Walkers and how the the men of the North stopped them.

Production for this show was a nightmare. There are skant details from the books and not nearly enough to fill a multi-season production. HBO wanted it to be a second Game of Thrones. With all the famous houses participating (Lannister, Targaryen, Starks etc). Then they had to be reminded that this was a prequel set thousands of years before GOT. House Lannister and Targaryen don't even exist and their ancestors wouldn't even have those names. Location wise. No Kings Landing, no Wall, no Winterfell. Just forest and villages. No dragons, just the Starks and other Northmen fighting zombies. Only black actors to play the Children of the Forest/elves. When in GOT, they were either white or green skinned. HBO's suggestion was to say the black elves were cursed and that's why they look white and green by the time Bran meets them thousands of years later.

It was just a mess.


Unlike GOT; House of the Dragon/Fire and Blood has a beginning, middle and end in the books. HOT D is close enough to GOT that all the big name houses the audience and executives at HBO would recognize from the show. It has dragons (which is a huge thing for HBO for some reason). And it's short. It will likely wrap in 3 seasons, but GRRM is hoping for 4.


We do have that Jon Snow spinoff that Kit Harrington pitched and GRRM will be involved in. That's not going to look anything like Thrones either. Speculation is it will be like Twilight Zone episode: Last Defender of Camelot. Which GRRM wrote back in 1986. Where an immortal Jon Snow has survived hundreds of years after the wars and how all the magic is gone in the world now.


These are some of the best spinoff ideas they have. The other big idea is redoing the entire GOT show. HBO/WB/Discovery is trying to milk this IP for all it's worth. They were just slow on the draw about how bad GOT's ending damaged the brand.
 
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Episode 8 should have been the pilot. Everything that came before it could have been flash back episodes sprinkled throughout each subsequent season because that's what they feel like. Filler. I guess this is my way of saying that episode 8 was good.
 
I agree that Episode 8 was good. So far, it's my favorite in the season. But I don't agree that the story should have begun with Episode 8. That would be like "Game of Thrones" beginning near the end of Season 1. For me, that's like rushing into the story. And I don't care for that.
 
EmoBorg said:
Aegon may be the King but Rhaenys stole the show.

Go Team Black.
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Perhaps it's a good thing Rhaenys didn't kill them. If she had, the realm might have rallied around Aegon and Helaena's children as a reaction.
 
Dee1891 said:
Perhaps it's a good thing Rhaenys didn't kill them. If she had, the realm might have rallied around Aegon and Helaena's children as a reaction.
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Come to think about it, you could be right. But i did want the main players on the green side to be burned so badly especially Ser Criston Cole.
 
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EmoBorg said:
Come to think about it, you could be right. But i did want the main players on the green side to be burned so badly. I especially hate that Ser Criston Cole.
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Yeahhhhhhh maybe but I sure wanted her to cook at least a few bastards.
 
Rhaenys really should have BBQd the Greens. She could have taken out all of their dragon riders in one shot. Big mistake...
 
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