Video Games Tutorials and News - House Of The Dragon Review - Game Of Thrones
Welcome back, everyone. This is going to be my larger House of the Dragon review article. I was able to go to the premiere a little while ago, and they're finally letting us post more complete reviews talking about more specific things. So it was so great to finally go back to Westeros. So congratulations, Episode 1 is being released this weekend on the day I'm posting this article.
Everyone, you made it. I used to use a long claw in all my Game of Thrones episode articles, and I did order a new version of Blackfire. You actually see King Viserys the First Targaryen holding Blackfyre during the episodes because it's still around during this part of the timeline and it doesn't get lost till later.
I don't know when that sword is supposed to arrive in the mail, so I'll probably just use a long claw until we get it. There are starks in the show; it's just a different group of starks because it's earlier in the timeline. The show does jump around a little in the timeline, and they're way more comfortable with jumping in the timeline than they were during the original series, but the main plot picks up 187 years before the events of Game of Thrones season 1, and there's like a quick time jump to before that to the great council of 101ac to kind of explain how things get to where they are at the beginning of the main plot.
I did also like a lot of the references that they included to the main series, like there are direct references to Daenerys Targaryen. The Long Night White Walkers, and A Song of Ice and Fire just in general, just to help place you in the timeline, like this is when this is happening, and this is when that other stuff is going to happen eventually.
They actually start the episode with like a little bit of hand holding for people that are brand new to A Song of Ice and Fire just in general, so if you didn't read the books or if you're coming to this series fresh completely, like you didn't watch the original Game of Thrones episodes, you will be able to understand what's going on pretty quickly.
As someone who spent a lot of time going over those original Game of Thrones episodes and reading all the books (I even read the Fire and Blood book that this series is adapted from). I didn't think they went overboard. With the hand-holding, they didn't over explain the show inside the show. That's supposed to be my job.
But some of the references are almost fourth wall breaking too, like you'll be pointing at the screen a couple times going "my god they said the thing," but they kind of did that a little bit during the original series too, where like someone literally in the episodes would say "a song of ice and fire." So, because this is like literally the first episode, there's a little bit of that going on during episode one, but just like the original Game of Thrones episode one.
House of the Dragon, episode one is largely meant to reintroduce you to Westeros. All the major houses that you remember from Game of Thrones are still here, but because the events of the series take place so far in the past and the events that they cover are so different. The show largely focuses on a lot of houses that you didn't see a ton of during the main show, but some of the new houses they introduced, like House Velaryon, in House Hightower, were still around during the events of Game of Thrones.
On the main show, it's that during the events of that series they chose not to focus on those houses, so you don't hear about them when they were actually writing the show. George R.R martin actually worked on the scripts with them, helping advise them because, even though they are adapting, the Fire and Blood book is basically like a much smaller amount of material that they're adapting than what they were adapting for A Song of Ice and Fire in the Game of Thrones series.
The story is mostly based on the Fire and Blood book, which is basically like a history book written as a history book. It's not written as a novel like the Song of Ice and Fire novels. It's written like an actual history book just about the Targaryen family and the things that happened to them during different periods in history, but one of the other differences from the main A Song of Ice and Fire novels is that it's not written in first person perspective.
It's written by a third party or a couple of third parties that are trying to remember things that happened, so they wind up getting a lot of things wrong or incomplete, and it might be a very subjective tale about this family during these periods in history, whereas during the main Song of Ice and Fire novels like Game of Thrones.
Storm of Swords, and Clash of Kings, each of the chapters is written in first person perspective. So you're getting way more of what the characters are actually thinking and feeling as things are happening to them. So what they said they aim to do in this new series is give you that more objective view that you got during the Song of Ice and Fire novels because the Fire and Blood book is written in a third person perspective and gets a lot of these events wrong, so they're taking like an old master's remembrance of what happened and giving you more of that objective, a song of ice and fire treatment, where you get more of what each of the characters is thinking and feeling during all these events.
I think during Fire and Blood, there's like an old maester, who's like a court jester, that winds up telling most of the story during that. George R martin wrote it this way on purpose, so the show is just trying to fill in a lot of those gaps. And if it wasn't clear, this actually started life as George R.
Martin's show he's the person who developed it, and he hired the show runner before HBO ever learned about the show. They worked on it for a while, then he brought it to HBO and said, "Hey, make this show," so he brought the show runner to HBO themselves. And Ryan Condol is the person who does most of the writing.
Miguel Sapochnick, the other show runner you remember, was the director of some of the best episodes of Game of Thrones. He's mostly focused on the practical aspects of making the show and just the way that they actually film it. He did hard home, battle of the bastards, the winds of winter, but throughout all of it, George R.
Martin was helping make a lot of decisions about what they did with the actual show. He had or he has way more control over this show and the other spin-offs that they plan on doing, the other prequels that they plan on doing, than he did during the main show. So this is very much George R. Martin's show in the way that the main show wasn't.
