New Peek at House of the Dragon

[The Wondering Wolf]

10 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Also the article claims that Otto is like Littlefinger and Corlys is like Tywin, which is.

Hm. I don't really see it. Littlefinger is a guy of low nobility, with no military, friendly to everyone, he creates chaos and uses unconventional methods, he only cares for himself. Otto on the other hand is brother to a top10 lord, part of a mighty family, arrogant, all law and order and safety, uses conventional methods, cares for the realm (he just fails to regocnise it isn't up to him to make certain decisions).

I guess there are things Tywin and Corlys have in common, but the former is driven by the experiences in his youth, so it's all about public image and the concept of his house (not really the actual family members themselves). Corlys is ambitious, too, but more in an intrinsic way. He does not have to travel around the world, but he does because he can. He wants his children to be kings and queens, but he leaves Laenor alone, even when everyone knows about Laenor's relationships to men. His wife and his children ride dragon, so who cares what people say?

[Ran]

The audition texts give only a very broad sense of what the writers are thinking, so don't make too much of it. As Rhys Ifans says, his character is very smart, and very political. When they're taking GoT dialog to use for auditions, the character that best fits that may well be Littlefinger when they hunt around for something.  They're not literally saying these characers are 1:1 the same, they're just indicating that there's something they share, whether it's political intriguing or establishing a dynasty. 

[Corvinus85]

So having read the EW article on the main characters, Daemon seems to be kinda shafted. The article gets wrong his job description (though the show doesn't based on the trailers). And, based on Condall apparently, Corlys Velaryon is the only one out of all the characters with war experience. smh And I grow tired of the line about gods flipping a coin.

On Otto being like LF - I hope this doesn't mean his accent is going to keep changing episode to episode. 

[Ran]

Corlys's experience is the same as Daemon's: the Stepstones. But the show begins in 101 AC, so certainly at that point the realm has not seen a war in generations.

[Lord Varys]

The comparisons are indeed way off there. Otto Hightower is pretty much the antithesis of Littlefinger both in background and ambition. There he is more like Tywin. And he clearly lacks Littlefinger's competence or ruthlessness ... else the way to remove Daemon from the succession would have been to murder him. He would have also groomed Aegon into a proper monarch and he would have never lost his standing with the boy. How bad Otto as a politician is you can see when his royal grandson fires him early in the war ... at a point when they faced at best only minor complications.

The way to play and present him is more like a methodical guy who first thought mainly about the Realm (stop King Daemon) and, perhaps, only about the crown and his his descendants as Targaryen kings when the opportunity presented itself to make Alicent the queen.

Must say I also don't like that decadence narrative there. They are not decadent. They are content, happy, and prospering. Having no big war for 70 years is a great accomplishment, not a sign for decline.

Corlys is ambitious for his wife and children ... but clearly not in a way that's even remotely evocative of Tywin.

Also must say I start to loathe the black Velaryons even more. They seem to be exactly the people they are in the books but now lack their defining marriage ties to the Targaryens. I hate that.

[The Bard of Banefort]

I watched the EW video, and Emma D’Arcy said the same thing most of us have been saying on here for a while, that GOT would not have been made today. It makes all the indignance that D&D expressed over people daring to criticize them even more laughable. They would have gotten absolutely skewered today.

Another thing Emma said was that HOTD is very intimate in a lot of ways, more like a family drama. That’s more appealing to me than the spectacle, but I wonder if most GOT fans feel the same.

[The Bard of Banefort]

I’m not British, so it’s hard for me to differentiate between the accents (I never noticed Littlefinger’s shifting accent, for instance) but I could tell that both Olivia and Rhys have very different accents from the other cast members. I wonder if they’ll be using different accents on the show, since everyone is supposed to be from King’s Landing.

Speaking of which, I can’t wait to hear what Jacob Anderson’s Cajun accent sounds like in Interview with the Vampire  If you want to hear how wild Cajun accents can get, look up an interview with James Carville.

[Ran]

EW apparently has content lined up every weekday from here to Comic Con from Nick Romano's visit to the set and interviews. They've released a couple more pieces as well: a piece on the Iron Throne, a piece with an image of Graham McTavish as Harrold Westerling.

Guessing the last trailer drops on the 23rd, around the time of the big panel.

[The Dragon Demands]

14 hours ago, Ran said:

The audition texts give only a very broad sense of what the writers are thinking, so don't make too much of it. As Rhys Ifans says, his character is very smart, and very political. When they're taking GoT dialog to use for auditions, the character that best fits that may well be Littlefinger when they hunt around for something.  They're not literally saying these characers are 1:1 the same, they're just indicating that there's something they share, whether it's political intriguing or establishing a dynasty. 

Oh I know, I know, but still...kind of shows "they think of Rhaenyra as a bit more Arya-like than Cersei-like, at least in her youth"

[The Dragon Demands]

4 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I watched the EW video, and Emma D’Arcy said the same thing most of us have been saying on here for a while, that GOT would not have been made today. It makes all the indignance that D&D expressed over people daring to criticize them even more laughable. They would have gotten absolutely skewered today.

Another thing Emma said was that HOTD is very intimate in a lot of ways, more like a family drama. That’s more appealing to me than the spectacle, but I wonder if most GOT fans feel the same.

Yeah I wonder what Emma meant by that: sort of out of context, just remarked "Game of Thrones couldn't have been made today"...in reference to what exactly? What did Emma say before that?

I mean I don't like what D&D did, but even I'm hesitant to quote that or read into it. I mean purely from a production standpoint though...it is WEIRD that they made a major Emmy-level show without female writers or directors for its last five out of eight seasons...and what's weirder is that the media outlets were too spineless to even remark on it. Media outlets who normally complain about that kind of thing.

[The Dragon Demands]

Oh, Eve Best is perfect as Rhaenys:

 

[The Dragon Demands]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

EW apparently has content lined up every weekday from here to Comic Con from Nick Romano's visit to the set and interviews. They've released a couple more pieces as well: a piece on the Iron Throne, a piece with an image of Graham McTavish as Harrold Westerling.

Guessing the last trailer drops on the 23rd, around the time of the big panel.

oh crud I was waiting for him to finish to make one big combined report, ack

[The Bard of Banefort]

So far, I’d say Rhaenys has the best costumes, although the teen girls have some good ones too. The worst probably goes to Daemon and Viserys, who are basically wearing the same costumes from GOT. 
 

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

oh crud I was waiting for him to finish to make one big combined report, ack

I don’t know if you make videos on the weekends, but if you do, I would break them up that way. Do this week’s content this weekend, then next week’s the weekend after. 
 

 

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Yeah I wonder what Emma meant by that: sort of out of context, just remarked "Game of Thrones couldn't have been made today"...in reference to what exactly? What did Emma say before that?

I mean I don't like what D&D did, but even I'm hesitant to quote that or read into it. I mean purely from a production standpoint though...it is WEIRD that they made a major Emmy-level show without female writers or directors for its last five out of eight seasons...and what's weirder is that the media outlets were too spineless to even remark on it. Media outlets who normally complain about that kind of thing.

If I remember correctly, Emma said that “the climate is different now.” As someone who made a thread titled “TWOW and Today’s Social Climate,” I wholeheartedly agree—for better and worse. Better, because there’s a lot less sexual exploitation on TV and more diverse storytelling, worse because—well, all the other reasons. Mainly an extreme moralism and refusal to grant anyone the benefit of the doubt. (There’s also a huge belief that depiction = endorsement now.) That’s why, while the showrunners probably think they’re being super progressive, they’re still going to end up pissing a bunch of people off without trying to (like I said before, Asian sex workers, burying your gays, etc.) So I don’t think Emma was talking about the writers/directors so much as the salaciousness of GOT. No network would want to touch that now, not even HBO.
 

Here’s a pretty good summation of what I expect the discourse around HOTD to be like:

 

[Sotan]

On 7/13/2022 at 10:15 PM, The Bard of Banefort said:

Based on some of the actors’ comments, it sounds like most of them read FnB, which is a nice change from GOT (granted, it’s a much easier read).

The fan discourse around this show is already pretty toxic and dispiriting, and not just because of GOT. It hasn’t reached Rings of Power levels, but there’s already a lot of bickering about race, gender, whether the actors are “pretty enough,” etc. Right now, it’s mostly the anti-woke people who are angry, but I fully expect the woke people to lose it too once they find out that the Asian lady is playing a sadistic sex worker, the Black characters are part of a group called “the blacks,” and all the gay men are killed off (one of whom is beaten to death by a Dornishman). You can never please everyone, but HOTD does seem to have a lot stacked against it at the moment. 

I'm low-key here for the chaos. LMAO.

[Sotan]

On 7/13/2022 at 11:49 PM, The Bard of Banefort said:

The idea that actors are better off not reading the source material is such a silly argument to me. Actors don’t need to interview drug dealers or prostitutes to play them in a movie, but plenty of them do, despite real people not having the same story as their characters. Directors give their actors research assignments all the time to prepare for a role. The cast didn’t read ASOIAF because they didn’t want to sift through five 1,000-page books

Assuming that reading the source material can only help an actor is as incorrect as assuming they're better off not reading the books. I think it's whatever works for that particular actor.

[The Bard of Banefort]

45 minutes ago, Sotan said:

I'm low-key here for the chaos. LMAO.

I need to learn how to adopt this mentality. I was able to bask in the chaos around S8, so hopefully I’ll be able to do the same for HOTD. Right now I’m pretty anxious about the show though.

[Sotan]

15 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I need to learn how to adopt this mentality. I was able to bask in the chaos around S8, so hopefully I’ll be able to do the same for HOTD. Right now I’m pretty anxious about the show though.

That's funny because S8 broke my trust with the shows and even in ASOIAF in general. Now I can enjoy the new shows without caring too much, and the intense reactions are hilarious. 

I'm also particularly interested in this first season of HOTD because that is where all the really interesting things in the story (for me at least) happen. The war itself was kind of boring to me. I'm curious to see how these actors inhabit these roles and how the writers fill in the very large blanks. 

[The Bard of Banefort]

2 minutes ago, Sotan said:

That's funny because S8 broke my trust with the shows and even in ASOIAF in general. Now I can enjoy the new shows without caring too much, and the intense reactions are hilarious. 

I'm also particularly interested in this first season of HOTD because that is where all the really interesting things in the story (for me at least) happen. The war itself was kind of boring to me. I'm curious to see how these actors inhabit these roles and how the writers fill in the very large blanks. 

That’s what seasons 5-7 did for me. At least Littlefinger was finally gone by S8. And I agree that the lead-up to the Dance is more interesting than the war itself.

[Sotan]

1 minute ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

That’s what seasons 5-7 did for me. At least Littlefinger was finally gone by S8. And I agree that the lead-up to the Dance is more interesting than the war itself.

I was purposefully in denial from 5-6 because the last 2-3 episodes of both seasons were fun spectacles that made me paper over my misgivings. Cersei sitting the IT, in particular, I somehow couldn't shake as a bad omen. Season 7 was when I couldn't ignore it anymore but extended the show grace it didn't deserve, and I got egg on my face in S8 as a result. 

[The Bard of Banefort]

After reading the quotes, would you guys say the reporter misunderstood what the showrunners were saying here?

https://ew.com/tv/game-of-thrones-catspaw-dagger-house-of-the-dragon/