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House of the Dragon Series Order Announced


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Of course Targs will probably all look the same, they're all inbred. 

I think the Targaryen fan base that roots for them to burn people and goes YAAAAAAS while on screen people are screaming in agony turns a lot of GA members off. The GA will tire of the show if it is written solely from the Targaryen POV. There needs to be a perspective shift (the original series did this well). The Conquest would be more interesting from the POV of people they are attempting to conquer. The Targaryen's belief in their own superiority could also be exposed. I hope they spend a good amount of time showing the Dornish POV. 

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The Dance is no less about the great houses than it is about the Targs. Anyone that thinks this story is just about the Targs obviously hasn't read very much about it. There is no shortage of characters with eyes and hair that aren't purple or gold-silver, including Rhaenyra's three eldest sons, at least one of whom should be among the main characters early on.

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4 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

We’re finally going to get an answer on what color Vhagar was.

Hadn't thought about that, good point.  I'm not a gambler, but anybody wanna put odds on it?

13 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I hope to God we don't get endless dick jokes, and 14 year old Rhaenyra being taught how to pleasure her uncle.

I doubt your prayers will be answered.  This is HBO.  It's not TV, it's unnecessarily pervy.  I suspect Rhaenyra will be aged up in any sexual situation though.

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42 minutes ago, DMC said:

Hadn't thought about that, good point.  I'm not a gambler, but anybody wanna put odds on it?

 

Dragon colors:

Balerion: King Aegon I, of course black  (died in 94 AC)

Meraxes: Queen Rhaenys (Aegon I  sister/wife), silver scales, golden eyes

Vhager: Queen Visenya (Aegon I sister/wife), unknown

Sunfrye: Aegon II, golden scales 

Vermathor: King Jaeharys I (initially), bronze

Caraxes: Prince Daemon Targaryen, red scales

Syrax: Queen Rhaenyra, yellow scales

Meleys: Princess Rhaenys, scarlet scales, pink wings

My best guess for Vhager is green (no specific reason)

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2 minutes ago, DisneyDoc2425 said:

My best guess for Vhager is green (no specific reason)

I think if you got Meraxes associated with silver/gold (the house's trademark hair color), and Balerion associated with black, then the obvious conclusion is Vhagar should be red.  But what do I know.

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15 hours ago, DMC said:

I dunno, I think I could sell a show on the Dance - it's the goddamn Targaryen Civil War!  That's actually the most succinct and sexy tagline of any prospective prequel outside of the Conquest (and I suppose Robert's Rebellion, but I'm not counting that) to pitch to a casual viewer.

As a pitch this does work and sounds great. But do the main characters actually deliver on that front? I mean, there are som good dragon battles in the story, but most of them happen early in the war and they do not ever involve more than three dragons at a time (unless we count the Storming of the Dragonpit as a dragon battle which it is not) in a scenario where there are about twenty dragons in total. Insofar as a raising of the stakes or an escalation is concerned, the Dance doesn't really deliver more than GoT.

I'm not that convinced it is going to be a very tantalizing show in the later seasons when the dragons are dying like flies and one has to watch people making insane mistakes again and again and again. The bottom line is there are not only very few sympathetic characters there, there is really no character you can root for in the end.

15 hours ago, DMC said:

Fair point on The Crown not dealing with actual power, but the political back-dealing aspect of Martin's world is pretty close to a historical soap opera as well.  That's all politics is, really, no reason to get haughty about it.

Sure, and that's the kind of thing the reign of Viserys I could actually do very nice - the actual Dance not so much. Unless they make the story more complex.

14 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

I hate it when people go "how are they going to differentiate the Targaryens, they all look the same!" 

How?  they all have silver-white hair and purple eyes?

By that logic, all Lannisters have golden blonde hair and green eyes, and Starks generally have black hair and grey eyes.

Most black people tend to have dark skin and dark eyes too.

But why is "they all have white hair and purple eyes" suddenly supposed to make them indistinguishable?

don't they dress differently?

That is a good point. But then, they really didn't care about eye colors in GoT, so why do we expect they would for this new show (I'd like it if they did, but I'm not holding my breath). And if their cared about variation in hair color there is a spectrum there. Rhaenys is dark-haired, Rhaenyra's sons are brown-haired, some of Valyrian-colored Targaryens could be more platinum-blond with others being more golden-haired, etc. - sort of like we get for Alysanne and some of her children who didn't look all alike.

Some people are really making themselves look ridiculous when they try to limit the 'family resemblance' thing only to the Targaryens. There are just as distinct Lannister, Stark, Baratheon, Tully, and Arryn looks - something that likely goes back to all those cousin marriage among the nobilities in the various regions. There wouldn't talk about the distinct looks of a family if they were not known for those looks for decades or centuries (which is especially striking in the Lannisters and Baratheons).

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5 minutes ago, The Grey Wolf said:

I'm not getting my hopes up. The Dance is, imho, the worst-written and plotted of GRRM's wars so unless they significantly change or expand the existing material I'll probably pass.

I disagree. Coming off of a reading of the Wars of the Roses as an intra-family conflict that was fundamentally about the consequences of a king that would not govern, I think that the Dance hangs together pretty well.

There's a decent implicit critique on leadership inside of it; Rhaenyra seemed to have rested everything on the fact of her prior-established legitimacy, was unwilling to compromise to defend it, and there was a clear point in the Dance where she simply stopped risking any of her directly associated assets or possessions at all. Aegon on the other hand...

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@illrede

My issues are:

1) Most of the characters are dumb, cruel, and incompetent.

2) Most of the characters lack depth (because the reign of Viserys I and the latter half of Jaehaerys I got short shrift in F & B V1).

3) There are a lot of blank spots in the Dance. (For example, when were the Vances of Atranta defeated and when did the Caltrops join Ormund's host?)

4) It was nowhere near as destructive as later wars. More men die at the Redgrass Field than in half of the Dance's major battles combined. Furthermore, the Dance affected only the Riverlands, Crownlands, Reach, and Westerlands coast. In contrast, the FBR affected at least the Reach, Westerlands, Riverlands, and Vale and the WOTFK the Riverlands, Crownlands, North, Westerlands, and a bit of the Reach as well as the Stormlands.

5) Practically all of the battles are curb-stomps where leading figures die like inglorious chumps. (How Criston Cole is an important and controversial figure in Jaime's time when he did nothing of note before or during the Dance to earn a reputation as "one of the best and worst of the Kingsguard" baffles me for example.)

6) The war isn't paced like a proper novel, movie, or TV show. The war reaches it's high point early in 130 AC with First Tumbleton and peters out from there.

7) The Dance lacks character arcs, which makes the absence of a thematic underpinning even worse.

All in all, long before reaching Aftermath-The Hour of the Wolf me and my friends were all thinking the same thing: "I don't care about any of these characters anymore."

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Plenty of other shows in the sea, which is a nice thing. I quit GoT with S5 because I disliked it too much, and I'm not watching Watchmen despite it being in my usual wheelhouse because I don't care to indulge the terrible ethics of DC and Damon Lindelof.

I've always thought the Dance and the events leading up to it made for the most tantalizing period for a drama, so we'll see what they do with it. Condal being a genuine fan, per GRRM, strikes me as a good thing. But then I'm sure Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams are genuine fans of Star Wars, and yet they've made their missteps, so that's of course no guarantee.

 

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17 minutes ago, The Grey Wolf said:

All in all, long before reaching Aftermath-The Hour of the Wolf me and my friends were all thinking the same thing: "I don't care about any of these characters anymore."

 

Same. At least the Lannisters are interesting and smart--they really captivate, know they are bad, and don't care. A novel--Correction, a dry encyclopedia/history book primarily about the Targaryens did them no favors. It will be interesting to see if the show can overcome the spinoff curse-(I'm having flashbacks to Caprica). Better Call Saul is the exception to the rule--and I think it's because they did something different. Gilligan didn't return to meth labs. With this new GoT show, it's still centered around the same thing: dragons and the Iron Throne. So now we'll have HBO trotting out the IT again in marketing and drawing from the tit and dragons well. I doubt this thing will win prestigious acting awards. 

And the Stark prequel is a loss. Knowing who Brandon the Builder was as a person or what he actually built? NOPE! We don't get that. But we get to know dragon colors. Ya know...the really important stuff here. 

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2 hours ago, Bael's Bastard said:

The Dance is no less about the great houses than it is about the Targs. Anyone that thinks this story is just about the Targs obviously hasn't read very much about it. There is no shortage of characters with eyes and hair that aren't purple or gold-silver, including Rhaenyra's three eldest sons, at least one of whom should be among the main characters early on.

Not really. All of the great houses have at best supporting roles in the Dance. If they had their agendas then the show will have to invent those. We don't know why the various houses joined the sides they did, what they hoped to gain in the end by offering military support, etc.

In a proper buildup scenario one should expect to understand the motivations of people like Tyland Lannister and Larys Strong, just as there should be time given to the late-comers and smart people who ignored the Dance (like the Tyrells).

But doing that wouldn't change the fact that a faithful adaptation of the Dance would have Borros Baratheon and Cregan Stark sitting on their asses for most of the war, and Jeyne Arryn personally doing essentially nothing at all.

If you want to adapt faithfully this would mean that the people who do nothing actually do nothing - and thus have not much meaningful screen time.

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2 hours ago, Ran said:

I've always thought the Dance and the events leading up to it made for the most tantalizing period for a drama, so we'll see what they do with it. Condal being a genuine fan, per GRRM, strikes me as a good thing. But then I'm sure Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams are genuine fans of Star Wars, and yet they've made their missteps, so that's of course no guarantee.

The Dance is possibly the most interesting period of Westerosi history we know so far. But George made the war as such not a very interesting sequence of events, something that in that form is not going to be a very tantalizing.

I mean, we do all agree that we do not expect ASoIaF to end with traumatized Myrcella 'winning the war', and then getting a couple of novels of coda dealing with bickering and greedy regents. We do expect - and can reasonably expect - that Euron Greyjoy and the Others are going to raise the stakes, not lower them. And one could expect that the average viewer is not going to expect the kind of war the Dance actually is - one that leads nowhere, where none of the main characters do anything heroic or even praiseworthy. Even the great Addam Velaryon essentially throws away his life for nothing - a queen who wanted to see him dead - and he does it to stop a riderless dragon.

And, honestly, unlike with the main series where we do have many young POVs who we can expect to be around at least until the grand finale, that's not the case for any of Rhaenyra's sons. Luke and Jace die rather early, and neither of them gets a Robb-like death with a lot of build-up (in fact, Jace effectively has an accidental death if we take the grappling hoof version of Vermax's fall where the dragon flies to low and drives the thing too deep into its body), Aegon III cannot be a character one can identify with - he will have an arc that's going to destroy his personality rather than help him to come into his own. And Viserys is just going to be absent a lot.

I mean you don't have to have a lot of imagination to imagine what George could have done to utilize Aegon II, Rhaenyra, Daeron, Rhaenys, Rhaenyra's sons, etc. better.

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