If A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms And if in the end everything revolves around the prophecy from “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the franchise is ruined.
Photo: Steffan Hill/HBO
Prophecy Schmophecy. Daemon’s big moment in House of the DragonThe season two finale was just as big for the series as a whole. His experience with the prophecy of A Song of Ice and Fire, which was supposed to be the culmination of his long flight to Harrenhal, seems to reconfigure his entire psychology in the service of Rhaenyra, thus removing the great conflict between two main characters. The vision is delivered to viewers as a clumsy piece of brand management: we see images of game of Thronescomplete with lightning from the Night King and a lingering shot of Daenerys, who ultimately House of the Dragon along with its predecessor in a more overt way than ever before. I think this is supposed to be one of the biggest rewards of the season, but oh, the Moan I did it when the vision was playing on my screen. Not this nonsense again. If we get more of this from the rest of the planned HBO series, game of Thrones Spinoffs that are next in line A Knight of the Seven Kingdomsthis franchise will be as fun as a sack of potatoes.
This insistence on the explicit linking of a spin-off with his main work pushes game of Thrones in tricky war of stars territory. The latter has become a franchise so hampered by its cowardly inability to commit to anything other than its original characters (especially the Skywalkers) and ideas (good versus evil) that it has essentially become stuck in itself. You can’t Only tell a good story; you always have to throw in a Luke here and a Yoda there, which means very few characters get to live their own stories on their own terms. It’s sad. It’s boring! Still, it’s not hard to see where this persistence comes from. Grassroots fans are a limiting but nonetheless effective force, and the strategy of appealing to the grassroots generally fits well with conservative corporate incentives: game of Thrones was a hit, so to make the spinoff a hit, game of Thronesbe it a reused prophecy or a reused theme song. But drawing from the same source over and over again eventually brings diminishing returns, and if a franchise can’t grow into something other than itself, then it never truly builds a future.
It is hoped that this franchise conservatism will House of the Dragon. This is the first spinoff, after all, and I can understand seeing it as a bridge to a future generation of shows. But that should mean A Knight of the Seven Kingdomswhich adapts a series of novellas by George RR Martin, collectively known as The stories of Dunk & Eggcan be as far away as possible from the shadow of the game of Thrones as possible and to devote himself fully to his own identity.
The framework for this autonomy is embedded in the source material, which was written after the events of House of the Dragon and before game of Thrones: These novellas are largely self-contained adventures featuring Ser Duncan the Tall, a Westerosian hedge knight (think a rōnin or a gig economy knight) and his squire “Egg,” who happens to be a royal prince in disguise. Sure, Egg is actually King Aegon Targaryen the Fifth, which means there’s always the possibility that he’s talking about that one time his great-granddaughter went to war with her half-brothers because her best friend misunderstood her king-husband’s last words. Which would be perfectly fine, as long as it’s in the form of taste-chatter between the two main characters while they hang out on the Kingsroad eating kidney pies or whatever. Egg’s family history and the fate of his lineage is an important aspect of his character, but it shouldn’t necessarily be what the show is about. around. Here, too, the source material already gives the spin-off a new meaning: these stories are essentially explorations of what chivalry means as a philosophy and institution in the moral morass of Westeros. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was supposed to be about that specifically; but if Egg ends up playing a big role as a prophecy guy, then, well, the franchise is screwed.
Commitment to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as a self-contained narrative about two traveling adventurers would allow the franchise to play in fresher directions. In particular, it takes us away from the “I want to rule the kingdom” stuff and the “we have to save the world” stuff – big aspects of game of Thrones which are now repeated in House of the Dragon — and to the earthier textures of Westeros. Ironically, it is the war of stars Franchise that gives us the best possible model for what A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms can be. I am of course talking about Andorthe Tony Gilroy-led Villain One Prequel that took advantage of the little narrative space available between the main texts and built an entirely new universe. AndorThe great joys of lay in two things. First, it plunged headlong into exploring violent themes around ordinary people rebelling against fascism, an idea that was war of stars but was never given the attention it deserved on screen, Villain One. Second, AndorThe ground perspective allowed for a more tangible experience of the fictional worlds. Coruscant was densely populated and the windows of the housing units were mostly dirty. The people of Ferrix had their own rituals based on their own unique history. To sneak into a city, you had to park your ship in one place and literally take a bus.
This sense of pace and structure is nothing new for Game of Thrones. The first few seasons of the original series really made you aware of the scale of the world, so that pairs of characters could take entire episodes (or seasons!) to get from one place to another. That quality was largely lost as the action got faster and faster in the final seasons, and the series suffered because in those longer stretches you could spend time with these characters while they could just be who they are, gradually evolving in relation to each other and the world around them. Brienne and Jaime wouldn’t be such an interesting duo if we didn’t have to follow them as they trudge through Westeros. The same goes for Arya and the Hound, Tyrion and Jorah, etc.
This quality is not complete missing from House of the Dragon. In season two, large portions were devoted to Ulf, Alyn, and the other little people who would become dragon riders, even if they weren’t well developed. That’s also part of why I ended up liking the shockingly long segment on Tyland Lannister in the finale, “The Queen Who Ever Was” — he’s just a guy trying to do his job and getting beat into the dirt for his efforts. That’s fun! That’s also why I liked the odd couple of Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower, who continue to be woefully underused. Cole may have started the season as the supreme edgelord, but by the end he seems to be turning into a vessel for ground-level war weariness. The Targaryens are up in the skies burning the shit out of each other, but Criston and Gwayne are now just two sad guys trying to do their job and avoid the fate of the barbecue. That’s understandable and tragic! Much more than a royal conflict, the stakes of which are determined by events far in the future, the outcome of which we, the audience, already know.
Andor could have turned out to be a wild outlier for war of starsbut boy, what a vision for the future it represented for the franchise. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is capable of doing exactly the same thing. Let’s spend more time in the dirt of Westeros. What do the homes of the common people in the valley look like? How does a tavern in the Riverlands make money? What does it mean mean to be a brave knight in Westeros, a land full of human darkness? These are new and interesting questions to explore, and if the game of Thrones Franchise should have a real future, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms would lean on them.
