Summary

• House of the Dragon excels with dragon fights and political intrigue reminiscent of early Game of Thrones.
• Lowborn dragonriders add conflict and depth to the storyline, challenging the ruling class and Targaryen heirs.
• The show's departure from George R. R. Martin's canon creates divisive opinions, but changes can sometimes enhance adaptations.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:House of the Dragon is one of the few TV shows that’s gripping me at the moment. I liked the opening of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Acolyte, but it lost its way with the pointless cameos. Season 3 of The Bear was disappointing and felt rushed. The Boys has been deteriorating for the past two seasons, avoiding clever satire and straying too far into just pointing at real things that happened in US politics an꧂d copying them🍒 outright.

House of the Dragon has been doing things right. I miss Paddy Considine’s stellar performance in Season 2, but the slow-burn politics are reminiscent of early 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game of Thrones and the awestriking dragon fights add gargantuan hits of excit🌜ement.

However, 🌸the penultimate episode of the season has been divisive to say the least. As Rhaenyra Targaryen seeks riders for her three dragons in order to turn the tides of war and reclaim her throne, she looks to lowborns. Minor characters who we’ve followed throughout the season are rounded up and brought to Dragonstone. These are characters who have existed be๊fore only to give the world some flavour, to show what the everyday worker in King’s Landing feels about the war.

I thought the show was going to take these characters and extinguish their heartwarming backstories of protecting families and laughing in taverns in a vile bout of dragon flame. That would have been very Game of Thrones, after all. Instead, House of the Dragon made thr𓆉ee lowborn characters befriend great dragons, asse🥀mbling behind Rhaenyra to ward off Aemond, setting up a dragontastic season finale.

More dragons is always a good thing, in my eyes. The show is called House of the Dragon, after all. And lowborn dragonriders present myriad opportunities for conflict between characters. Rhaenyra’s council rejects the idea and her bastard son Jacaerys rese✃nts her. While I’m all for class squabbles in fantasy, it’s this latter conversation that really struck home how important this decision could be.

Jacaerys is heir to the throne, should Rhaenyra be successful in reclaiming it. But he’s an illegitimate son. The only thing thaꦑt makes him a Targaryen, he believes, is the fact he can ride a dragon. With lowborn commoners mounting the fearsome beasts as well, he feels redundant. Not only is his birthright at risk, his identity is being eroded. And his mother doesn’t have the answers. She must win this war, at whatever cost.

These interactions are what House of the Dragon is (and early seasons of Game of Thrones were) k🤡nown for. Fraught political conversations, often sparking discord between close family members. I want to see where this thread goes, how the Targaryens further unravel. Lowborn dragonriders present numerous problems for the ruling class, and it’s in this conflict that the show will thrive.

But there’s a problem. George R. R. Martin doesn’t like the idea. It wasn’t in the book (the ones he’s actually finished, that is). And therefore fans hate the idea, too. Nothing can change from the established canon, nothing must veer away from the author’s original intent. Except, as countless adaptations have shown, they can and often d🉐o.

This isn’t always a bad thing. The Peter Jackson 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lord of the Rings movies, my go-to example for changing a beloved book, made great changes to Aragorn and Boromir and awful changes to Gimli. The most important chapter in the book is skipped completely. But they’re beloved films because they’re good. Martin has a different probleಌm: he hasn’t writཧten the canon he wants the adaptation to adhere to.

“[Dragons] bond with men… some men… and the why and how of that, and how it came to be, will eventually be revealed in more detail in The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring and some in Blood & Fire,” he explains on his . He threatens the issues that arise if you ignore the canon, but how can adaptors understand the canon if you haven’t written it yet? I’m not trying to rag on a fa🍸n꧙tasy great here, but if you wanted creative control, you needed a more watertight contract and shouldn’t expect TV producers to read your mind.

‘Blood & F🦹ire’ seem♍s to be a typo for Fire & Blood, the second volume of which is currently being written.

However, we also encounter another problem with the lowborn dragonriders: the execution. The final scene of episode seven shows Ulf, a lowborn drunkard elevateꦫd to dragonrider by way of his dubious Targaryen heritage, flying aꦅcross King’s Landing to antagonise Aemond. He woops with joy as his scaled beast swoops over the rooftops, the camera positioned as if it’s on Silverwing’s neck.

It feels tacky, to put it bluntly. The first thing it brought to mind was the final scene of Prisoner of Azkaban, where Harry Potter rides Buckbeak the Hippogriff through the Hogwarts grounds. Then we transition into a shot of Rhaenyra with three dragons and their lowborn riders behind her. It’s a shot made for posters and to be shared online with captions like, “Yaaasss Queen”. But it feels forced. It feels like Daenerys being framed with Drogon’s wings in the ill-fated final season of Game of Thrones. It’s not a shot for the show, it’s a shot for the marketing, an🦩d the final moments of the episode therefore leave a sour taste in the mouth.

I don’t hate the idea of lowborn dragonriders, but I’ve only ever read one George R. R. Martin book and couldn’t bear to start another. The premise sets up political tensions that perfectly embody Martin’s work, at least in adaptations, but House of the Dragon needs to be careful in how it attempts to pull it off. The final episode of Season 2 will tip the scales in either direction, and I’m crossing my fingers that it leansꦡ towards political intrigue rather than shoddy humour.