Many, not all, fantasy worlds that create substantial fandoms have, at least in some small part, an aspirational aspect that drives the identification. They build and require a sense that (regardless of the plotting), the story landscape or story rules are enviable enough that you kinda wish you could live within them. It’s what gives us the “what Hogwarts house would I be in” / “what colour would my lightsabre blade be” / “what superpower would I have if I could have any” thought process.
So, not for the first time, let me just say how tremendously strange I find it that George R.R. Martin’s story world, which minted Game of Thrones and now House of the Dragon, seems to take place in what could, and does, agreeably pass for Hell.
The only other fantasy environment that I regularly treat with that could be called similar is the miserable realm in which the “game” Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay takes place, and I feel the deep kinship between these two worlds for largely the same reasons. Thronesworld and Hammerworld are twinned in that: everything is futile; failure is the guaranteed outcome for any given effort; and also, everything costs a fortune. Oh: and surgery is a death sentence.
In the premiere episode of HBO’s stately, please-please-please-love-us-again adaptation of Martin’s Fire + Blood, a woman dies in the most gruesome surgically-assisted childbirth I’ve ever seen filmed. It’s cross-cut with an equally blood-soaked joust, for what I presume is thematic effect; but the actual impact on my end was me wondering, for real, if I can, should, and will bother with this whole thing again.
Now, admire for a moment (as I have, again, certainly done before) the willingness of Thronesworld (and, for that matter, Westworld) to address a fundamental reality inherent to the “adult” drama: that these things have nothing to do with elevated narrative or artistic merit, and everything to do with the millennia-old human fondness for unvarnished brutality, sexual libertarianism, and shame-free lack of consequence. HBO spent the 2010s minting a fortune on the moral loophole their “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” mantra exposed. The MPAA might be a sack of horseshit of its own, but a ratings-free universe certainly doesn’t need to play coy with the fact that we’re all just bloodthirsty animals, pretending at civility.
All this to say, House of the Dragon’s first and foremost quality is the faithfulness with which it assures You, The Viewer, that you are absolutely back in Thronesworld. The Red Keep glisters in CGI sun. Small Councils meet in darkened rooms, and sex workers ply their trade in slightly brighter ones. If audiences become invested in the characters in the same way they did with Tyrion, Daenerys and Jon — and that is, I think, a big “if” — this show will run ten years and make ten trillion dollars. I do not think there was any great subtlety or creative merit to Game of Thrones, at the end of the day; it was violent delights for people too cultured to go to underground boxing clubs, or to admit to their partners that, yes, they wanted to give polyamory a go ffs. House of the Dragon just seems more mechanical about it. “You seemed to like this; here’s more of it.”
Weighing in the show’s favour is, of course, the subject. It’s “my” bloodline in Westeros (wait a minute… maybe there’s more aspirational filigree to this story world than I gave it credit for?), centering on the Targaryens, the dragon-family with Witcher hair. I love them mostly because they’re equal parts wealth-smug, and uncontrollably rageful. Not, perhaps, the most aspirational of qualities on either side, but dirty-little-secret appealing in their way, much like the violent delights of the entire landscape the show is built on. People like me have the whiff of all of this in the back of our throats, more than we’d like to admit, and it comes out from time to time to remind us that we’re all, fundamentally, imperious assholes (or bloodthirsty animals). A lot of people (including, I admit, me initially) found Daenerys’ villainous heel-turn in Game of Thrones infuriating; it wasn’t more than a month or so into the pandemic that “burn the smallfolk alive” became a very attractive, if fantastical, notion. (That’s my way of saying: those plebes in Flea Bottom were Trumpist anti-vax anti-maskers, every single one of them as stupid and as itching-to-storm-the-Capitol as the one next to them, and you can’t tell me otherwise.)
I’m pleased they’ve (seemingly) centred the show on my favourite queer Targaryen and her bed-mate, and if it all seems too much of a muchness (2 actresses for each, decades-long story reach, and who knows what else!), I’m still aware we’re in the nexus of one of the most heightened “all pop culture for Matt” eras I could ever imagine. House of the Dragon vs. The Rings of Power vs. She-Hulk vs. Andor and all in the space of a month, and all in a time when TV is generally so replete for choices that watching even middling stuff doesn’t feel necessary? Well. You win this round, streamers. Now give us back Batgirl.
Items!:
- Heat 2. Muscular, visual, and very, very male, it’s basically the perfect August read.
- Have you guys ever gone back and listened to the soundtrack — the album mix, not the score — for Batman Forever? It’s fucking bonkers. U2 and Brandy and the Flaming Lips and a Mazzy Star song, all clustered around that track by Seal? Literally who put this together? I want a name! I want a return to an era where vaguely-thematic Batman mix tapes were an actual marketing requirement for movies like this!