The HBO prequel to Game of Thrones and so many blonde wigs are on the way.
Can you hear that a long way off? A faint sound like wings beating? If so, it’s probably because the world of Game of Thrones is back, baby (or you’re about to be roasted by an impressively drawn dragon, but we hope it’s the former). Today, the first official trailer for House of the Dragon, an HBO prequel series about the Targaryen family, came out. (If you were thinking, “Wait, didn’t that already happen?” that was just a teaser trailer that came out in May.) Once the show starts on August 21, we’ll recap it every week. But until then, here are some of the first things we learned from our first trip to King’s Landing since that terrible day in 2019.
1. Coming back to Westeros is a pleasant surprise.
If your first thought when you heard about the Game of Thrones prequel was “Huh? Then I just stopped caring, and we can’t say we blame you for that. But for the rest of us, it’s a surprise how good it feels to be back. We all know that Bran the Broken has the best story (sigh), but it’s nice to go back to this world with a whole new group of characters that a certain pair of showrunners won’t be able to mess with. The budget is very large (seriously, the dragons look amazing). And the fights are just as dirty as ever. We’ve arrived.
2. Ramin Djawadi is back with a trick he has used before.
Ramin Djawadi, who wrote music for Game of Thrones, is also back, and it looks like he’s bringing a bit of Westworld with him. This trailer has Djawadi’s orchestra-heavy cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” which reminds me of the instrumental covers that fit the theme of his second HBO show. It seems like an obvious choice since the mashup is full of beautiful women in furs. In addition:
3. The conversation is very direct.
When a character says, “Knives will come out,” Prince Daemon (Matt Smith) is threatened with a knife in the next shot. A different character says, “War is on the way,” as a shot of two groups getting ready to fight shows. Over footage of a burned field, a voiceover tells us, “Your family has dragons.” Even though this makes us think, it’s just a trailer. And George R.R. Martin said that the writers did a good job and even made some improvements to his original story. We’ll just have to trust him for now.
4. Everyone has light hair
So the wigs don’t look like bad Game of Thrones cosplay as much as everyone thought when the first promo pictures came out. But, as other people have said, Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) still looks like Phoebe Bridgers.
