Westeros

Another episode aired, and we’re rapidly approaching the end of the second season of House of the Dragon. As usual, Linda and I have posted a video recapping the episode and discussing its deviations from the source material in Fire and Blood, illuminating background that may not be obvious to viewers, and some dragon lore.

And, speaking of dragon lore, a lengthy post on dragons, their legs, and their habits from GRRM got a lot of attention almost two weeks ago. Given that some of what he talks about seems related to House of the Dragon, we’re going to add some of our own thoughts ... following the video, and the extras that HBO released around the episode.

Here are the extra videos HBO has released around the episode, with a look behind the scenes, and a preview of the next episode:

Now, on to the matter of dragons. The fact that the dragons have two legs, not four (or rather, their forelimbs are their wings, and they do not have additional forelimbs besides those), is something we have long beaten the drum on. We were among the first to point out how the very first behind the scenes video for Game of Thrones showed a Targaryen banner with a four-legged dragon, which was thankfully corrected (by simply being excised from the show). I even pointed the issue out to Bryan Cogman when visiting the set, and he noted they themselves had caught it and fixed it. And fixed it they did… until for some reason the four-legged “original” design somehow showed up on the show after several seasons, as GRRM notes.

House of the Dragon has clearly tried to provide retroactive explanation with the dueling Targaryen sigils used by the Blacks and the Greens, a fact that we discussed with showrunner Ryan Condal in our first interview with him. So, we’ll not dwell on that.

However, George also made some remarks which we think are relevant to the show, given what we learn in the Vale in this past episode. George seems to not particularly agree with it:

This has raised questions among some viewers and readers, who thought there were examples of nomadic dragons. First, to state the obvious: we have in fact never seen a nomadic dragon, either in the show or in the books. “Nomadic” implies that they have no specific home and will regularly move from place to place, following food or whim or what have you. GRRM makes it plain that all dragons want to have a lair, and that once they have a lair, that establishes their territory.

Some may point to the behavior of Drogon in A Dance with Dragons: the dragon flies increasingly further and further away from Meereen, until it practically vanishes for weeks at a time. But we see why this is in Daenerys’s final chapter in that book: Drogon was seeking, and finally found, a lair in the Dothraki Sea.

Others may point to the behavior of Balerion the Black Dread, carrying the ill-fated Princess Aerea to her doom. But here we clearly have a dragon that has been bonded… and its bonded rider wanted to go “home”, and as Septon Barth speculates (which the maesters will almost always sneer at, but as George says Barth’s speculations were more right than wrong), the dragon was the last to have been born in Valyria and might have decided that its inexperienced rider wanted to go there.

And finally, others point to a post-Dance event, a particular dragon that heads off to makes it lair. I’ll link to the wiki entry for this dragon if you really want to be spoiled about it. But in brief, as GRRM says in his post, dragons would not fly off from their lairs on their own “save under very special circumstances.” I believe that if special circumstances can apply to any dragon in Fire and Blood, it will most likely apply to this very specific dragon because of what happens to its rider in the Dance… and because of what happens to another dragon that it was very closely associated with.

To sum up, George’s basic point is that he has given some real thought to the hows and whys of dragons, and in the case of the question of whether a dragon might take off and go somewhere else, he has a very specific idea of how and why that may happen. It appears that his advanced knowledge of House of the Dragon—he’s seen all the scripts and, in all likelihood, seen cuts of all the episodes—indicated that the writers decided to do something that simply doesn’t fit the canon of dragon behavior. He no doubt remarked on it when he commented on the scripts, and may have had discussions to try and suggest alternatives, but ultimately the writers run the show and make the final call because they have an obligation to HBO to deliver the best story they can put together within the constraints of time and money and narrative economy that they face when making a TV show.

If anything, it’s another reminder that the HBO Game of Thrones-House of the Dragon universe is an approximation, made for TV, of George’s World of Ice and Fire.