It’s time to be less jaded and look forward to this. At least, that’s what I am trying to convince myself of.
I’ve read through the section of Fire & Blood in which this is set (even though I haven’t finished it). It’s a long encyclopedic-type book, not an actual novel, it describes what happens to so and so’s and everyone related to them, and there’s a lot of interesting overall series of events but without any dialog or details that make a novel truly interesting and dramatic in the moment to moment parts of any particular story. So that’s for the writers of this show to fill in. So you could do that with 10 episode, or several seasons, depending on what scope they want to pick.
IMDB lists Viserys as appearing in all 10 episodes, and it’s his early, untimely death that kicks off the Targaryen civil war. So this isn’t a one-off. It probably won’t run for 7-8 seasons, but I suspect season 1 ends with his death, having spent the 10 episodes establishing the familial and political factions and frictions that ignite into open conflict upon his death. So they could milk this for 5 seasons without effort.
OMG Olivia Cooke means it’s an insta-watch for me.
Apparently GRRM is going on a press tour to promote the new show.
Expect more stories like this!
Yeah, fans can be terrible, but George, baby, you can’t build out an intentionally serialized world, then tease people about the next installment for eight years and not expect them to be frustrated.
Even though it’s not fair for someone to suggest that Martin “owes” them the sequel on their timeframe, it’s also not fair for Martin to expect fans to only engage when he wants them to.
I am looking forward to a new trailer!
You stopped counting :) It’s been 11 years since the last book. And seventeen years since the book before that.
Martin is in his prime, and has decades of re-writing ahead of him. :)
The Hollywood Reporter’s cover story is HOTD, and the first story online is the long struggle to figure out the first GOT follow-up
I think many of us remember the 20 or so pitches we kept hearing about for different shows. It was kind of nuts.
HBO still has a bunch of different GOT shows in development. But that’s the thing about networks (and studios): they have hundreds of projects in “development”, but most of those will never see fruition. There’s a reason why they call it “development hell.” Show development is the equivalent of R&D costs for tech firms.
I have HBO Max, so will probably end up watching this at some point, but I remain skeptical. The part the first seasons of Game of Thrones really got right was the worldbuilding and creating “realistic”, complex characters (i.e., characters that are driven to take actions by the world they live in and are shaped by that - frequently to their doom). Driven as much by the setting as the characters.
To me, this looks like very typical medieval succession drama, except with dragons. Driven by the characters and their differences. And yeah, I’ve seen GRRM saying this has “complex, morally grey” characters, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Looking forward to this!
It is interesting how many of my friends, who would not usually be into fantasy but loved Game of Thrones, have zero interest in this after the way GoT ended. If this sentiment is in any way representative it’s amazing how much D&D’s burnout and lack of interest caused so much damage to the potential for the followups.
I love fantasy, but I’m nearly in the same camp because of this; I have next to no faith whatever spin off occurs will end remotely decently so I’m hesitant to even start. I’m sure I’ll give it a go after some positive word of mouth, but I should an automatic viewer if not for my experience with GOT’s last season.
I really wish this wasn’t stacked to largely overlap with Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Not really sure I want to be watching two high-end fantasy shows simultaneously. We don’t get many of these, I wish they had spaced them out.
My current plan is, don’t watch House of the Dragon when it comes out, watch it after Rings of Power wraps up. We’ll have to see if I can stick to that. If you all say House of the Dragon is amazing, I’ll probably end up watching them simultaneously.
D&D’s ending to GoT will probably be studied by film/show schools for years. And it’s certainly the reason that I’m much less willing to give this the benefit of the doubt than something like the Rings of Power.
But even beyond that; there is just no way this ends up being good, unless the showrunners are extremely good at carrying a show like this. And I’m far from convinced. I know the showrunners won an Emmy for “The Battle of the Bastards” episode, but to me it is - 100% emblematic of the latter half of GoT - relatively impressive cinematic execution for a TV show with terrible writing and nonsensical events. E.g., Jon choking among the dead (looks good, but is stupid), his ridiculous plot armor, his stupidity, Sansa supposed to be a strong female but in reality acting extremely dumb, etc, etc.
And House of the Dragon, based on a finished story in Fire and Ice part 1 (which will probably never see a part 2, since GRRM has touted that as his last ASoIF project) does not fill me with confidence. IMO, GRRM’s great strength as a writer are to create grounded and realistic-feeling plots despite the fantasy setting and complex characters that make sense in their setting. I feel that is one of the main reasons GoT was so successful; it could be enjoyed even by people who don’t enjoy fantasy. Fire and Ice doesn’t play to any of those strengths. The conceit of the book this is based upon works against his strengths; characters are “historical” so there is none of the rich inner dialogue and depth that exists in ASoIF and which the actors were able to communicate so well in GoT to base this on. There is also no plot to speak of; just lots of battles, dragons, accounts of people getting married, murdered and other atrocities. Which makes me think this is going to be a lot more like GoT S5-8 than S1-4.