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the next House of the Dragon thread


EggBlue

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Thinking about Dunk and Egg a bit more, leads me to thinking about how I feel about Targaryens in general...

They were among some of my favorite characters, but which ones?

I liked Egg, Prince Baelor, Rhaegar, Maester Aemon, and of course Dany most of all ... and what do they have in common. For me, they are all the ones extended themselves beyond the Targ milieu. 

They had meaningful connections and evolved by becoming part of the larger world. I like Targs out of Targ settings, basically. I like the way they show their spirit and how they brought things out in others.

(And of course, I like dragons, because I like the spirit animal bond, and the way the story was told through this.)

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4 hours ago, Lady_Qohor said:

Surely its ok to change a few minor things from the book if it results in a better viewing experience. Does a minor bit of lore really matter as much as ensuring that a significant portion of the audience feel as though they too are part of the Game of Thrones world?

Not sure in what sense this necessitated black Velaryons rather than, you know, black Hightowers, black Strongs, black maesters, septons, Kingsguard, dragonseeds, or bastard pretenders? I think black actors would have been better served if not being used for a Valyrian house but rather other roles.

And thinking about diversity - you could have included more among the Targaryens as well as the Velaryons (with proper Valyrian looks) by casting albino actors (which would have done away with (some of) those silly wigs) or Asian actors and actresses - Princess Rhaenys, for instance, could have easily have been played by an older actress of Asian descent since she had black hair. Hell, how easy it would have been to establish, say, that Orys Baratheon's commoner mother was YiTish to have such a background make more sense (thus Boremund and Borros could have had also a somewhat Asian look). It is easily imaginable that this trait was completely gone about 200 years later when Robert comes along.

The Hightowers could have easily enough had had a more mixed/hispanic look, considering they are a house in the far south in the Dornish neighborhood who may have taken wives from abroad more than once in their long history.

Hell, even among the established houses could have been folks who look ususual. Say, let's assume they include Sara Snow in season 2. How will she look? We have no clue. She doesn't have to be white at all. She could be Cregan's half-sister by a Braavosi merchant of mixed heritage.

One doesn't always need to have (more) black people to be more diverse. It may have been good to focus more on other minorities.

4 hours ago, Lady_Qohor said:

I also think we have to be careful here. It feels like some of the people criticising black Velaryons didn't quibble nearly so much that Daenerys wasn't played by a 13 year old actress, that Bran & Rickon didn't have red hair, that Jon Snow's hair was black rather than brown, that Olenna Tyrell wasn't as tiny as described in the book or that Charles Dance didn't have side burns.

I'm not so much obsessed with the looks of characters as such - if they fit the role broadly - although I certainly think that a faithful adaptation should try to meet as many of those criteria as possible. The issue with the Velaryons is that this is pretty big part of the world-building.

GoT kind of botched this by not making their Shireen (who was a great actress) black-haired, just as HotD botched it again by not making Rhaenys black-haired. It is worldbuilding feature that the Baratheon black hair prevails.

Going a little bit through the reviews:

I find the take on it being bad that draw the curtain back and show us what's going on in Rhaenyra's and Laenor's respective bedchambers confusing, to say the least. Anyone with a fleeting familiarity with the source material should have known that the issue of Laenor's sons is going to be addressed in a non-history book adaptation of FaB. In fact, we very much expected and, I assume, looked forward to see what *actually* happened there. How those characters got along, what exactly Harwin's role was in the family, how Rhaenyra and Laenor got along, what Corlys and Rhaenys thought about the entire thing, etc.

Wanting them to go with veiled allusions and chaste scenes there feels very obnoxious I must say.

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Not sure in what sense this necessitated black Velaryons rather than, you know, black Hightowers, black Strongs, black maesters, septons, Kingsguard, dragonseeds, or bastard pretenders? I think black actors would have been better served if not being used for a Valyrian house but rather other roles.

It puts the actors at the center of the intrigue and also, frankly, is rather easy for the audience to understand why exactly everyone believes Rhaenyra's children are bastards more than the fact they have brown hair.

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I must say that I am enjoying the meltdown on some subreddits over the less than stellar reviews.

The degree of antipathy exhibited against David Benioff and Dan Weiss (usually made very personal, too) is nauseating. All over some piece of entertainment.

What did Benioff and Weiss do? They did something never achieved before and created one of the most engaging works of fantasy on television, using material that the author himself considered impossible to adapt. It ended poorly, but they had a great run for a good long while, and nothing of that genre has come close to equaling it since. On the contrary, most fantasy shows released now are somehow worse than the worst seasons of Game of Thrones (I'm looking at you The Wheel of Time, The Witcher and countless other Netflix effluvia).

The cognitive dissonance that many are experiencing coming to terms with the fact that critics are rating this show (independent of the clutches of Benioff and Weiss) as inferior to their pet hate project is hilarious.

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1 minute ago, C.T. Phipps said:

It puts the actors at the center of the intrigue and also, frankly, is rather easy for the audience to understand why exactly everyone believes Rhaenyra's children are bastards more than the fact they have brown hair.

Well, a version I could have liked is if Harwin had been black and thus Rhaenyra's boys had also had been a somewhat darker skintone ... and that would have been pretty much ignored by Viserys, etc. Not only could have reinforced this the medieval take on race as a pretty much non-existent social category and it would merely have moved away things from brown hair, brown eyes and pug noses to skin color.

The way the elder Velaryon boys look like in the show they could easily be Laenor's sons, after all. Sure enough, they have dark hair but the Laenor actor himself doesn't have that dark a skintone, so with Rhaenyra being the mother the boys could easily enough have been Laenor's.

1 minute ago, IFR said:

I must say that I am enjoying the meltdown on some subreddits over the less than stellar reviews.

The degree of antipathy exhibited against David Benioff and Dan Weiss (usually made very personal, too) is nauseating. All over some piece of entertainment.

What did Benioff and Weiss do? They did something never achieved before and created one of the most engaging works of fantasy on television, using material that the author himself considered impossible to adapt. It ended poorly, but they had a great run for a good long while, and nothing of that genre has come close to equaling it since. On the contrary, most fantasy shows released now are somehow worse than the worst seasons of Game of Thrones (I'm looking at you The Wheel of Time, The Witcher and countless other Netflix effluvia).

Sorry, George may have conceived ASoIaF as something that might be impossible to adapt. But he really wanted HBO to adapt it once he had watched Rome. Regardless how you view D&D they didn't really make this a success - the source material did. It was that good, so easily to adapt that because dialogue and plotting work so great that you have to barely write scripts there. It is all a question of budget and screentime.

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5 minutes ago, IFR said:

I must say that I am enjoying the meltdown on some subreddits over the less than stellar reviews.

The degree of antipathy exhibited against David Benioff and Dan Weiss (usually made very personal, too) is nauseating. All over some piece of entertainment.

What did Benioff and Weiss do? They did something never achieved before and created one of the most engaging works of fantasy on television, using material that the author himself considered impossible to adapt. It ended poorly, but they had a great run for a good long while, and nothing of that genre has come close to equaling it since. On the contrary, most fantasy shows released now are somehow worse than the worst seasons of Game of Thrones (I'm looking at you The Wheel of Time, The Witcher and countless other Netflix effluvia).

The cognitive dissonance that many are experiencing coming to terms with the fact that critics are rating this show (independent of the clutches of Benioff and Weiss) as inferior to their pet hate project is hilarious.

Oh, man, have you been reading the HOTD subreddit? I don’t know which is better, them freaking out that a few reviewers had the AUDACITY to not like the show, or taking joke lines about bad wigs and there being too many Targaryens and going, “See! This person’s a hack! Their opinion is invalid!”

Both r/asoiaf and r/gameofthrones have been almost apathetic to all news about HOTD (with the exception of the White Walker prophecy). And r/freefolk’s dueling obsessions with hating D&D and worshipping Daenerys are at odds now. They don’t know whether to gloat over bad reviews or go postal over their queen’s house being disrespected.

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16 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Sorry, George may have conceived ASoIaF as something that might be impossible to adapt. But he really wanted HBO to adapt it once he had watched Rome. Regardless how you view D&D they didn't really make this a success - the source material did. It was that good, so easily to adapt that because dialogue and plotting work so great that you have to barely write scripts there. It is all a question of budget and screentime.

No, both Martin and Benioff and Weiss made it a success.

Good source material means nothing if you don't have people who are proficient at adapting the material. It probably took a good deal of luck as well, but people like to pretend that Benioff and Weis just bumbled into the material and accidentally cobbled together one of the most successful shows of all time, saved by the brilliance of the source material. This is patently ridiculous.

Watchmen (using just one example) is very good source material. And the movie adaptation is loyal to it. And the movie is...well, I thought it wasn't too bad. But it was a mere shade of the quality of the graphic novel.

Interestingly, an inverse example is The Godfather. The movie is actually quite loyal to the book, with most of the dialogue pulled from the book itself. The movie however made a lot of intelligent, judicious editing, and created something remarkable out of a fairly underwhelming book.

Adaptation matters. It's silly to me that people try to pretend otherwise.

At any rate, I only wanted to make an observation, not turn this into a GoT debate.

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1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

 

Sorry, George may have conceived ASoIaF as something that might be impossible to adapt. But he really wanted HBO to adapt it once he had watched Rome. Regardless how you view D&D they didn't really make this a success - the source material did. It was that good, so easily to adapt that because dialogue and plotting work so great that you have to barely write scripts there. It is all a question of budget and screentime.

They did make some improvements. Adding a bit of love between Robb and Talisa was nice. Yeah it was a typical Hollywood cliché, but it added some much needed romance in a series devoid of such things (if we ignore Dany/Drogo). Catelyn and Ned had a successful marriage, but there was never much of a focus on their warmth. 

Familial love was a thing and Jon/Ygritte had a very passionate relationship, but that came off as more of a boy becoming a man and dealing with his hormones. So Talisa was nice. And people make fun of how she was added in as some random nurse on the battlefield but Henry IV fell in love with Elizabeth Woodville after finding her on the side of a road. 

ASOIAF doesn't have too many of these happy coincidences, and maybe that is because they don't fit its style but it was nice to see. 

1 hour ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

I can't even imagine how much D&D are enjoying it, they might actually get the last laugh after all.

I never felt much of an urge to defend them. But for some reason this makes me really happy to think about. 

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1 hour ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Oh, man, have you been reading the HOTD subreddit? I don’t know which is better, them freaking out that a few reviewers had the AUDACITY to not like the show, or taking joke lines about bad wigs and there being too many Targaryens and going, “See! This person’s a hack! Their opinion is invalid!”

 

Lol, like you said the reviews aren't even that bad, just lukewarm. But a lot of people there built this up as the next great television phenomenon for it to just be another show in a long catalogue of options is devastating to them. 

But really, with so much competition it's hard to stand out nowadays.  

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2 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Lol, like you said the reviews aren't even that bad, just lukewarm. But a lot of people there built this up as the next great television phenomenon for it to just be another show in a long catalogue of options is devastating to them. 

But really, with so much competition it's hard to stand out nowadays.  

I think people found a sense of community/excitement in GOT and want HOTD to bring that back. But it’s not going to be the same, and not having a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score is proof of that.

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9 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Lol, like you said the reviews aren't even that bad, just lukewarm. But a lot of people there built this up as the next great television phenomenon for it to just be another show in a long catalogue of options is devastating to them. 

But really, with so much competition it's hard to stand out nowadays.  

I feel like the primary goal of Hot D (internet meme-ing is good) is going to be brand repair at the first start. The big thing that House of the Dragon must accomplish with audiences is going to be less being the cultural phenomenon that Game of Thrones was--because it already is building on that--and more that it is going to need to get as many fans back into the franchise as possible as well as remind them as to why they liked GOT. Because, oddly enough, from HBO's perspective I think HOTD's individual success is less important than setting up the long-term viability of it as a franchise for the cable network that can go on forever.

Which is related to it being a success but not necessarily the same way as people want it to be, cultural touchstone wise.

And "another show in a long catalog" is an iffy thing since its up against other adaptations of Eighties and Nineties classics like, say, Sandman.

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13 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Which is related to it being a success but not necessarily the same way as people want it to be, cultural touchstone wise.

I assumed that HotD could be a show that critics love but that the genral public is mixed on, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Critics have already rejected it to a degree, and if viewers reject it too it's a disaster.

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29 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

I assumed that HotD could be a show that critics love but that the genral public is mixed on, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Critics have already rejected it to a degree, and if viewers reject it too it's a disaster.

Weirdly, I expect the exact opposite of. Though Criticdom has been pretty good.

The general public will be much-much more enthusiastic about this than the critics.

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7 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I think people found a sense of community/excitement in GOT and want HOTD to bring that back. But it’s not going to be the same, and not having a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score is proof of that.

Better that though, than the 31% approval rating that the last season got.

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4 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

How come?

Hot D seems like it is going to be thriving primarily on the fact that the reason the massive amount of anger exists for GOT was because so many people really-really love Westeros. S8 is basically the Prequels, Last Jedi, or Mass Effect 3. The good will and love for it is still there for all the fans because they love Westeros and want more of. Which is why things like the Mandalorian or Clone Wars are such massive-massive hits because they didn't hate Star Wars, they just hated that particular incarnation of it.

Critics by and large aren't going to be the people who jump into Hot D with a cannonball from a diving board. They are not people who are going to want to be transported to Westeros and relive all of their decade of love all over again. This is a show that is meant to attract all the old obsessive fandom back and say, "hey, let's give it another go." I fully expect a lot of GOT fanservice and deep dives that critics won't be interested in but super-fans will.

I also expect critics will be sneering at going, "More incest, dragons, and white-haired pretty people."

While fans will be, "MORE INCEST, DRAGONS, AND WHITE HAIRED PRETTY PEOPLE!"

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1 hour ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Hot D seems like it is going to be thriving primarily on the fact that the reason the massive amount of anger exists for GOT was because so many people really-really love Westeros. S8 is basically the Prequels, Last Jedi, or Mass Effect 3. The good will and love for it is still there for all the fans because they love Westeros and want more of. Which is why things like the Mandalorian or Clone Wars are such massive-massive hits because they didn't hate Star Wars, they just hated that particular incarnation of it.

I agree with you regarding the attitude of the fans towards the franchise, the fact that HOTD is the most anticipated show of 2022 is proof of that.

Though I wouldn't compare the Prequels to season 8 ^^ Last jedi and rise of skywalker, yes, definitly, but the Prequels, even if they had flaws (but just like the OT had some flaws) was at least logical within its world. Whereas the last 2 films weren't. They're just pretty to look at, that's it. I mean in ROS you have people doing horse-riding on a star destroyer for Christ's sake... Disney should have stuck with Marvel, since they like to make the same thing over and over.

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