The secret told in the first episode of House of the Dragon comes from George RR Martin

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Last night, the house of the dragon took us back to the world of Game of Thrones and the impending royal dispute between the most dysfunctional family in all of Westeros: the ‘House of the Dragon’ and their platinum blonde Targaryens. With King Viserys’s (Paddy Considine) inability to father a male heir and his refusal to let his chaotic brother Prince Daemon (Matt Smith) claim the throne, Viserys appoints his eldest daughter Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) as his sole heiress, and tells her the one secret all Targaryen rulers must know.

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Image: Gizmodo

It is the prophetic dream of Aegon the Conqueror, or, as the first king of the Seven Kingdoms called it, the Song of Ice and Fire; that is, the events shown in Game of Thrones. The showrunner of the house of the dragon Ryan Condal wanted to use it to connect the new series to the original, but it turns out the dream wasn’t Condal’s idea. “The [George RR Martin] he told us early on, when he casually mentioned the fact that Aegon the Conqueror was a dreamer. Aegon had a vision of the White Walkers breaking through the wall and sweeping the land with cold and darkness. And he never made it into the history book because [Aegon] he never told anyone, or at least the people he told didn’t tell the writers of the story. So it’s in George’s head.”

It’s kind of the author to blurt out that this was something that just existed in his head about how things happened in the House of the Dragon, as the secret of the Targaryens passed from one leader to another. “And at some point he is going to leave, as Martín told us,” continued Condal. “So, you know, with his permission, of course, we infused that into the story because it was a great way to create resonance with the original show. One of the things we struggle with is that there is a 170-year gap between our show and the birth of Daenerys Targaryan as told in the opening titles,” he said: “How do you create that resonance? There is no surviving character, but these ideas and these concepts of this existential threat to Westeros that we know as fans and watchers of the original series have come through.”

Obviously, this would fill the head of every leader in the Targaryen line with extra anxiety (perhaps even fueling their genetic madness) that they will be the ones to lead Westeros through this winter storm. “If we see them come into this world and we make them aware of it and we give them this higher purpose of ascending as sovereigns, as rulers, then the Iron Throne is not just a seat of power. It is a seat of responsibility and a burden to carry forward this idea that sounds crazy if you talk about it, “explained Condal. “What if Rhaenyra just says to someone, ‘Hey, there’s this prophecy that’s why I can’t go in and intervene in this problem that’s going on in other parts of the realm.’ Then what? You sound crazy or you sound like you’re trying to avoid a problem. He gave us a lot of that, he gave us very interesting things, dramatic things to play with. And I think he gave us a real sense of spirituality, which definitely existed in the original series, this idea that his magic was coming back into the world, the only real magic in this world is Dragons. So we were looking for that other thing that we could connect with us across that space and time and make it feel like it’s all happening in one cohesive universe.”

The secret told in the first episode of House of the Dragon comes from George RR Martin