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House of the Dragon Filming in Spain in October


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2 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

The woman looking somewhat mixed race early in the teaser might be Laena, no?

That's Mysaria / Sonoya Mizuno.

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

The women we see up on the dais seem to be Alicent and Rhaenyra, so perhaps this is going to be what's the Tourney of Maidenpool in the book, i.e. the tourney where Cole gets noticed by the court? Or is Cole already in KG armor on the horse. I can't make that out.

If he was already a KG knight he would bear a white shield. So it's a fair to assume that the Tourney at Maidenpool has been replaced by a Tourney at Horn Hill. As Ran suggests, it may also be a way to introduce some of Rhaenyra's suitors.

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

Also, I can't but notice how silly the premise of this show is in light of the whimpering and undignified ending the Targaryens got in GoT. I mean, I've gone on record saying that I find a history book on a dynasty who failed and will eventually die out pretty pointless.

I Claudius, Rome, the Tudors, the Last Kingdom, Versailles, Medici...

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

I thought that was Luke vs. Aemond. The blond guy didn't look like Laenor from the spy fotos to me.

I'm fairly sure that the blond guy is the same one who appears at the left of the Velryon family shot at 0:39. So it would be Laenor, I'd assume.

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19 minutes ago, Ran said:

ETA: As to black Velaryons, the guy to the left of Corlys is the Vaemond actor. The rest could be a combination of Vaemond's daughter(s) and sisters to Corlys and Vaemond, I guess? But honestly, with the fact that Vaemond and Corlys are definitely not half-black individuals, yeah, it would have to run at least to a grandparent... Whatever, there's really no way to make sense of it. It is what it is.

That they have Vaemond means we are at least going to get a version of the Silent Five plot. That's not bad as such, and they could even elaborate a little bit on the split within House Velaryon during the Dance. George seems to have forgotten about that to only remember it when coming back to it after Corlys' death.

Not sure I like the idea of Laenor as a warrior. What little we know about him has him as not interested in any of that stuff, which, to me, seems to be part of the reason why things between him and Rhaenyra didn't work out. She liked strong, manly, and well-built men. It is quite telling that George has them knight him only for the wedding, and has him behave like a woman during the wedding tourney, where Joffrey basically acts as his champion.

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On 9/21/2021 at 4:05 AM, Lord Varys said:

I've no idea about their plans, but as I've said since the beginning I don't really think they should rush to the Dance. To make the war something the audience cares about they have to make the viewers like the people and understand their motivations.

And that needs depth. Depth that cannot really be created after the war has already started because, if things are adapted more or less faithfully, most characters will rarely meet and interact with each other. Aegon and Rhaenyra only meet when Aegon kills Rhaenyra, Daemon and Rhaenyra are mostly apart, Criston Cole and Rhaenyra never meet during the Dance, etc.

In light of all that I certainly could see them coming up with their own stories for the 120s and/or moving events around so they do not have to jump to the Dance immediately.

For instance, they could really show how things between the families deteriorate after 120 AC or how Daemon and Rhaenyra really start to loathe Otto Hightower after he is Hand of the King again.

And, as you suggest, they should also play up some of the secondary players during the Dance. Cregan Stark, Tyland Lannister, Larys Strong, etc.

One also imagines that, since the Velaryons are all involved in the Stepstones war, we will also see the Triarchy prominently during the Dance. Which is really a good decision on their part since that really adds new elements to the show, things we didn't really see in GoT.

Trailer just dropped

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50 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Running theory is they're going to say that the lower-ranking Valyrian families below the dragonlords were like this. We also saw Celtigar heraldry in spy photos. What if Celtigars are gingers?

 

28 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I don't think that's the road they want to take. Corlys doesn't look like his mixed race, and we get a literal army of black Velaryons in that confrontation scene in the teaser. Laenor and Laena might be among them, but they are not all we are seeing.

I see. I didn't notice there were more Velaryons. I haven't done any freeze frames yet. It would be funny the Celtigards are ginger.

Personally I think giving Velaryons white/silver hair is then a mistake. If lesser Valyrians don't look like dragonlords, why all the white hair? I feel a lot a lot of mental gymnastics need to be done to reason this out.

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29 minutes ago, The hairy bear said:

That's Mysaria / Sonoya Mizuno.

Ah, okay, I only saw a black-and-white picture of her, once.

Quote

I Claudius, Rome, the Tudors, the Last Kingdom, Versailles, Medici...

Well, I'd draw a pretty big line between real world royalty and fictional royalty. Real world history affected people, fictional history is kind of pointless. Why celebrate a bunch of inbred failures, seriously?

And GoT turned the Targaryens into utter failures, no? Especially in relation to the promised prince stuff.

27 minutes ago, Ran said:

No one remembers all those stinking failures, man.

:rofl:

Within the context of the books it is rather weird that Yandel and Gyldayn would actually bother writing much about the dragons during the reign of Robert, no? I mean, is celebrating a failed dynasty the right way to ingratiate yourself with the new dynasty?

19 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I see. I didn't notice there were more Velaryons. I haven't done any freeze frames yet. It would be funny the Celtigards are ginger.

Personally I think giving Velaryons white/silver hair is then a mistake. If lesser Valyrians don't look like dragonlords, why all the white hair? I feel a lot a lot of mental gymnastics need to be done to reason this out.

I guess the idea is going to be that there were black Valyrians in Valyria and the Velaryons are one such house and they still look like that during the show. They would have always looked like that somehow, never mind that they would have intermarried with Andals and First Men for centuries by the time of HoD.

Unless, of course, we hear that the Velaryons also practiced sibling incest in the show.

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24 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

 

I see. I didn't notice there were more Velaryons. I haven't done any freeze frames yet. It would be funny the Celtigards are ginger.

Personally I think giving Velaryons white/silver hair is then a mistake. If lesser Valyrians don't look like dragonlords, why all the white hair? I feel a lot a lot of mental gymnastics need to be done to reason this out.

I've mostly stayed out of commenting, discussing, even over thinking on the Velaryons or Corlys being black, half black, with or without white hair that is also done up in dreadlocks because regardless of my thoughts nothing I say will change it.  But, simply put, the mental gymnastics that ensue thanks to this change make it seem like not a great idea.  From the beginning, I'd thought that if they wanted to introduce black families or characters of Valyrian descent, perhaps they should have just plopped down a whole new family in the middle of Blackwater Bay?  It's the generational mix of Targs and Velaryons that make it so......messy, especially when it comes to the marriage of Rhaenyra and Laenor, it then all becomes extra, extra messy.  

It's not like anything I think or say will change how it went down, but I hope that IF I do get into watching HOUSE, I'm taken out of the questions on this.  One of the best performances I ever had the pleasure of seeing on stage was Laurence Fishburne as King Henry II in The Lion in Winter with a mixed race cast (blind, not acknowledged), and the acting (and story, of course) were so good that the racial change was forgotten in moments.  Stockard Channing as Eleanor was terrific as well, but again, House of The Dragon is doing this differently, so........

It's hard to have trust in the whole thing MAKING SENSE (that is all I want, things to make sense), and past experiences with Game of Thrones makes it hard to trust that too much rewriting without a good reason is a good idea.  I hope I'm wrong to wonder.  I hope that the story presented and the actors make it easy to forget.  It's the past generational mixing of the Targ and Velaryons that leave me with questions on if the change is going to work.........and that long ago mixing of the families over and over again is what makes me think, perhaps, just creating a new family and dropping them in the vicinity of Dragonstone and Driftmark might have been a better idea.  Then again, no one pays for my ideas, LOL, so again, I hope it does go well, for everyone.  

Hell, I'm still trying to get over Dr. Who as Daemon, that to me is the bigger question, LOL  He just doesn't seem to have the Daemon Targ vibes that I have imagined, but that's me.  

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7 minutes ago, Lady Fevre Dream said:

Hell, I'm still trying to get over Dr. Who as Daemon, that to me is the bigger question, LOL  He just doesn't seem to have the Daemon Targ vibes that I have imagined, but that's me.  

I'm kind of feeling Matt Smith as Daemon, he has the swagger. As for the Velaryons, I like the change and I don't think it requires mental gymnastics. The show could have different family tree, they've already made Vaemond, Corly's brother instead of nephew. Does Alyssa Velaryon have to be Velaryon? IF she were from other white Valyrian family does it really effect the story? I don't see how. Keeping track of all these silver haired characters works when reading, but it would be too much in the show imo. The audience will know, black people with silver/white hair are Velaryons, or Velaryon related, the white ones are Targaryens. 

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58 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I guess the idea is going to be that there were black Valyrians in Valyria and the Velaryons are one such house and they still look like that during the show.

No...I think it's that out in the overseas colonies distant from the capital, they intermarried with local merchants in the Narrow Sea...relatively recently.

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9 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

No...I think it's that out in the overseas colonies distant from the capital, they intermarried with local merchants in the Narrow Sea...relatively recently.

I know you've made this argument many times, but it makes sense only if the Velaryons cared more about their trade deals than political alliances with Westerosi houses. Which I suppose it's fine, their wealth is built on trade, but are they being looked down on by other noble houses who value having ancient lineages? It would be nice if they touched on it in the show, and it would be another dynamic in their rivalry with the Hightowers at the royal court.

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17 minutes ago, Sotan said:

I'm kind of feeling Matt Smith as Daemon, he has the swagger. As for the Velaryons, I like the change and I don't think it requires mental gymnastics. The show could have different family tree, they've already made Vaemond, Corly's brother instead of nephew. Does Alyssa Velaryon have to be Velaryon? IF she were from other white Valyrian family does it really effect the story? I don't see how. Keeping track of all these silver haired characters works when reading, but it would be too much in the show imo. The audience will know, black people with silver/white hair are Velaryons, or Velaryon related, the white ones are Targaryens. 

I did like the scenes of Matt from the trailer, it's just difficult for me to think of Dr. Who having any, shall we say, sexual attractiveness, that being a trait I associate with Daemon.  In the past, he's always just been one of the Dr. Who's to me.  I may change my mind on the sexual charisma part, we'll see.  Smith did have a good Targ vibe in general for the teaser, though.  

Alyssa is not the only Velaryon back on the family tree, iirc correctly.......Aegon and his sisters were born of a Velaryon mother.  I can't help but wonder how many more are back there in the Targ family tree, not to mention how many will appear again in the Targ family post Dance of Dragons.  I'm just hoping whatever story the show tells about this, it's good enough to make me forget all I do know when it comes to the makeup of the families.  I hope I don't find myself watching it and thinking "Damn, it would have made more sense to just add another family."  Too much thinking about the written story in comparison to the visual story.......will just take me out of it, and THAT is my main concern with it.  

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47 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

"Pharaohs are boring because their dynasties came to an end"

Pharaohs were impressive real people. Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow were jokes at the end of GoT. Mark my words, people won't forget that. I'd be very surprised if HoD would turn into a successful show. Even more so, since a faithful adaptation inevitably will turn Rhaenyra into Daenerys 2.0.

39 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

No...I think it's that out in the overseas colonies distant from the capital, they intermarried with local merchants in the Narrow Sea...relatively recently.

The fact that they have those weirdo platinum blonde dreadlocks indicates they are 'fantasy black people', meaning we are likely to imagine them as black Valyrians while the Targaryens are white Valyrians. That's why both families have silver-gold hair wear those silly wigs.

If they had bothered with the actual lore then they would have realized that Valyrian looks are pretty much recessive, and Valyrians of black or mixed race ancestry look nothing like the inbred Valyrians. The books have the Black Pearls or Brown Ben Plumm as examples for this.

In that sense, if the Velaryons were just Valyrians who had intermarried with Summer Islanders or other folks with dark skin they would just look like those. They would not have weirdo hair.

46 minutes ago, Sotan said:

I'm kind of feeling Matt Smith as Daemon, he has the swagger. As for the Velaryons, I like the change and I don't think it requires mental gymnastics. The show could have different family tree, they've already made Vaemond, Corly's brother instead of nephew. Does Alyssa Velaryon have to be Velaryon? IF she were from other white Valyrian family does it really effect the story? I don't see how. Keeping track of all these silver haired characters works when reading, but it would be too much in the show imo. The audience will know, black people with silver/white hair are Velaryons, or Velaryon related, the white ones are Targaryens. 

It is just silly to make such changes because it puts you through a lot of mental gymnastics if you know the actual books.

It would have been much better to just change the Velaryons to a Summer Islander family, say. After all, clearly what defined the Velaryons - that they are the heavily intermarried cousins and in-laws of the Targaryens since before the Conquest - is clearly gone now. Else Viserys and Daemon and Rhaenyra would be black, too.

So why do they force us to view the Velaryons as a Valyrian family?

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2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

It is just silly to make such changes because it puts you through a lot of mental gymnastics if you know the actual books.

It would have been much better to just change the Velaryons to a Summer Islander family, say. After all, clearly what defined the Velaryons - that they are the heavily intermarried cousins and in-laws of the Targaryens since before the Conquest - is clearly gone now. Else Viserys and Daemon and Rhaenyra would be black, too.

So why do they force us to view the Velaryons as a Valyrian family?

This is not a one to one adaptation of F&B, so no mental gymnastics required. Accept that this is its own thing, I doubt Vaemond being made Corlys' brother will be the first change in family trees. 

In the show its likely Velaryons are not intermarried with Targaryens all that often. Alyssa or Aegon I mother being some other Valyrian house, how does that change the story of the Dance? It doesn't. 

The show is defining what a Valyrian is, and its not the same as the books. And its fine. I actually like it better tbh. Plus Corlys looks bad ass. 

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27 minutes ago, Lady Fevre Dream said:

 

Alyssa is not the only Velaryon back on the family tree, iirc correctly.......Aegon and his sisters were born of a Velaryon mother.  I can't help but wonder how many more are back there in the Targ family tree, not to mention how many will appear again in the Targ family post Dance of Dragons.  I'm just hoping whatever story the show tells about this, it's good enough to make me forget all I do know when it comes to the makeup of the families.  I hope I don't find myself watching it and thinking "Damn, it would have made more sense to just add another family."  Too much thinking about the written story in comparison to the visual story.......will just take me out of it, and THAT is my main concern with it.  

I get where you're coming from, I guess that just doesn't bother me. When I watch an adaptation I come into to it expecting changes, as long as the continuity of the story all the way to the main show GOT is kept, I'm good. I also think they look amazing.

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55 minutes ago, Sotan said:

This is not a one to one adaptation of F&B, so no mental gymnastics required. Accept that this is its own thing, I doubt Vaemond being made Corlys' brother will be the first change in family trees. 

In the show its likely Velaryons are not intermarried with Targaryens all that often. Alyssa or Aegon I mother being some other Valyrian house, how does that change the story of the Dance? It doesn't. 

The show is defining what a Valyrian is, and its not the same as the books. And its fine. I actually like it better tbh. Plus Corlys looks bad ass. 

If the show is it's own thing, then why are even discussing this here? This is a ASoIaF forum, not a HoD forum.

The bottom line is - the show is an adaptation, it doesn't stand on its own feet. It is derived from intellectual property a TV network has bought from George R. R. Martin. And he told us who and what the Valyrians and the Velaryons are in the books he published.

If you go with this 'The adaptation is its own thing' stuff then you can basically change everything because the two things are separate. And there is especially no need to change small details like family trees or how certain people are related to others.

Making Vaemond Velaryon Corlys' brother is just stupid. It is unnecessary because Corlys is already a pretty old man when the show starts.

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16 minutes ago, Sotan said:

This is not a one to one adaptation of F&B, so no mental gymnastics required. Accept that this is its own thing, I doubt Vaemond being made Corlys' brother will be the first change in family trees. 

In the show its likely Velaryons are not intermarried with Targaryens all that often. Alyssa or Aegon I mother being some other Valyrian house, how does that change the story of the Dance? It doesn't. 

The show is defining what a Valyrian is, and its not the same as the books. And its fine. I actually like it better tbh. Plus Corlys looks bad ass. 

I agree! Its annoying how people get so triggered by these kind of changes. What matters ia that the actors are good and the showrunners don't make a mess of the history like they did in the end of GoT.

An to be honest, the more diverse cast is actually better. Having a bunch of actors who look the same might make it harder to keep up with who is who, specially for those who don't already know the history. 

I also think Corly looks awesome. 

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10 minutes ago, Sotan said:

Accept that this is its own thing


Tell them that they shouldn't care is like me telling you that you should care about the changes. People can do what they please about how they approach adaptations. People who want to see the world Martin built rendered on the screen are going to have opinions. People that want to see changes that they "like ... better" are going to have other opinions. That's the way it is. 

Also, the GoT extras and animated videos which presented the history of Westeros already provided a sense of how the Velaryons (and their seahorse!) should look, so depending on  what you consider to be the HBO canon, they may or may not have already deviated from it.

Re: Vaemond, it could be the case that one of Corlys's canonical (but unnamed) brothers was in fact named Vaemond, and named his first son Vaemond after himself. This is not unknown in Westeros and in any case does not constitute a significant change. Now, if Corlys's brother is one of the guys who complains to the crown about Alyn, then yeah, that's change. It would also seemingly mean that they're removing one generation between Vaemond and Daenaera, she of the skin white as snow... 

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1 minute ago, Sand Snakes said:

I agree! Its annoying how people get so triggered by these kind of changes. What matters ia that the actors are good and the showrunners don't make a mess of the history like they did in the end of GoT.

An to be honest, the more diverse cast is actually better. Having a bunch of actors who look the same might make it harder to keep up with who is who, specially for those who don't already know the history. 

I also think Corly looks awesome. 

Thank You! Give me a great story with great acting and production values and I'm good. And I agree with you, too many silver haired white people would be confusing to the majority of the audience. This is an inspired casting choice. 

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