{"id":45957,"date":"2022-08-15T12:53:38","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T12:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/house-of-the-dragon-may-be-a-harder-adaptation-than-game-of-thrones\/"},"modified":"2022-08-15T12:53:38","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T12:53:38","slug":"house-of-the-dragon-may-be-a-harder-adaptation-than-game-of-thrones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/house-of-the-dragon-may-be-a-harder-adaptation-than-game-of-thrones\/","title":{"rendered":"‘House of the Dragon’ May Be a Harder Adaptation Than ‘Game of Thrones’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A Game of Thrones<\/em> was supposed to be unfilmable. And it almost was. As a fantasy story with a sprawling cast, inhuman magic, and incredible violence, the first book in George RR Martin’s epic saga took 15 years to reach the screen, survived a failed pilot, and only then blossomed into the juggernaut that won more Emmys than any other drama series in TV history.<\/p>\n

Now the foundation has been laid for a successful show in the Thrones<\/em> universe As prequel series House of the Dragon<\/em> approaches, creators and audiences alike know what King’s Landing looks like and how a Thrones<\/em> show is supposed to feel\u2014but that doesn’t mean the new show will have it easy. <\/p>\n

actually, House of the Dragon<\/em> could prove an even trickier adaptation than Thrones<\/em>. Here are five key reasons why:<\/p>\n

1. Almost every character’s name sounds the same<\/h3>\n

The TV Tropes encyclopedia has a \u201cpretty rigid rule\u201d called the One Steve Limit, which it explains as \u201cno two characters in a work of fiction \u2026 should share the same first name, or even similar-sounding<\/em> names.\u201d But George RR Martin doesn’t abide by this dictum. He likes to repeat character names in his books\u2014which some level of verisimilitude, given how parents (most notably monarchs) name their children in the real world. Fathers name their sons \u201cJr.,\u201d popular athletes inspire new names, and every congressman is named Mike or John.<\/p>\n

In a television show already suffused with fantastical lore, however, that repetition could prove confusing. the game of Thrones<\/em> show occasionally changed characters’ names to alleviate this issue: Asha became Wound<\/em> because of the similarity to Osha, while Robert Arryn became robin<\/em>even though his character in the book was actually named after King Robert.<\/p>\n

thigh Dragon<\/em>‘s creators seem committed to Martin’s original character names. When co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik broached the idea of \u200b\u200bmaking tweaks, his fellow showrunner, Ryan Condal, responded, \u201cWe can’t<\/em>,\u201d according to a Hollywood Reporter<\/em> story.<\/p>\n

So prepare for a show that contains multiple characters named Viserys; multiple characters named Joffrey; a Daemon and a Daeron; a Laenor and a Laena; a Rhaenys, a Rhaena, and a Rhaenyra; and an old Jaehaerys, a young Jaehaerys, a Jaehaera, and a Jacaerys. There are also too many characters whose names start with \u201cAl\u201d to list here, as well as a young Aegon, not to be confused with the other<\/em> young Aegon, not to be confused with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror. <\/p>\n

And that’s not even counting all the dragons, many of whose names also <\/em>look similar. \u201cAll the dragons have weird names with Xes in them!\u201d actor Emma D’Arcy, who plays the adult version of Rhaenyra, said in the THR<\/em> story.<\/p>\n

Good luck keeping track without a flowchart. Notice I said flowchart and not family tree because, well, the Targaryen family tree is almost too knotty to understand, which brings on reason number two.<\/p>\n

2. Almost everyone is related<\/h3>\n

Unlike Thrones<\/em>which brought many different Westerosi houses into conflict, Dragon <\/em>is much more tightly focused. The Starks and Lannisters, Tyrells and Martells, Arryns and Tullys, and Greyjoys and Baratheons are all present in this story\u2014but only as peripheral figures orbiting the central Targaryen star. <\/p>\n

Many of the show’s central characters will thus look physically similar, with the classically silver Targaryen hair. They’ll also all be married to each other, because a show about Targaryens is also inherently a show about incest. Dragon<\/em> will have marriages between siblings. It’ll have marriages between cousins. It’ll have marriages between a niece and her uncle, and a nephew and his aunt. <\/p>\n

Incest was so ingrained in Targaryen custom that, before the events of the show, King Jaehaerys even helped develop a new teaching within the Faith of the Seven, Westeros’s dominant religion. The so-called Doctrine of Exceptionalism explained that the Seven’s opprobrium against incest didn’t apply to the Targaryens.<\/p>\n

Thrones<\/em> dabbled in incest with Jaime and Cersei but, like the rest of the non-Targaryens in Westeros, treated it as a taboo. (Actually, marriage between first cousins \u200b\u200bis practiced throughout the continent. It’s really only the sibling marriages that cause conflict.) Now, Dragon<\/em> has the dual difficulty of getting the audience to understand, first, that the practice is acceptable among the main characters, and second, how all the characters relate to one another.<\/p>\n

3. There’s not as much story to adapt<\/h3>\n

the Thrones<\/em> show was adapted from (for now) the first five books of the A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> saga, which comprise more than 4,200 pages and span about three years’ worth of events in the timeline of this fictional world. By comparison, House of the Dragon<\/em>‘s story stems from only about 250 pages from the Fire & Blood<\/em> companion book. And rather than three years, that material spans three decades<\/em>. <\/p>\n

So while Thrones <\/em>had about 1,400 pages of source material per fictional year, Dragon<\/em> will have an average of fewer than 10 <\/em>per year. Granted, those pages are disproportionately devoted to the three-year period of the Dance of the Dragons, but that’s still an extreme disparity.<\/p>\n

Dragon <\/em>is reportedly aiming for only a three- or four-season arc, rather than Thrones<\/em>‘s eight, but will still require much more new material to flesh out its story than Thrones<\/em> needed (at least before that series advanced past the plot of the still-unfinished books). Martin could help fill in those gaps, given his reportedly heavy involvement with the new show. On the other hand, we’ve already seen the potentially catastrophic downsides when a Thrones<\/em> show has to invent for itself rather than stick to the known outline of a preexisting tale.<\/p>\n

4. The adaptable story doesn’t have much dialogue<\/h3>\n

Another major difference between the two source texts is their purpose and construction. the ASoIaF <\/em>series is a narrative set of stories; F&B<\/em>, conversely, is intended as a historical tome. So while the former allows for a close narration, letting readers see characters’ thoughts and observations and dreams, the latter shows only the \u201cobjective\u201d accounting of a history text. (More on that supposed objectivity in a moment.)<\/p>\n

That gap is most glaring when analyzing dialogue\u2014or the lack thereof. I flipped to 10 random pages in A Game of Thrones<\/em> and counted an average of 11 lines of dialogue per page (ranging from a low of three, in a section when Arya is isolated, to a high of 20, when Tyrion banters with Bronn). When I did the same with the show-relevant portions of Fire & Blood<\/em>I counted an average of only 1.5 lines of dialogue per page, with only one actual conversation across the sample.<\/p>\n

put simply, Thrones<\/em> could lift most of its dialogue directly from the source text. Dragon<\/em> will have to invent almost all of its conversations from scratch.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that Dragon<\/em> is doomed to stilted speech; not every memorable line from Thrones <\/em>came out of Martin’s pages. Littlefinger’s \u201cChaos is a ladder\u201d speech was invented for the show, as we never observe any of his and Varys’s private debates in the books. \u201cTell Cersei; I want her to know it was me\u201d was also new, as was Tyrion’s \u201cThat’s what I do; I drink and I know things.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it’s certainly an added layer of difficulty for the new show. This adaptation would already be tricky enough, even without having to craft every conversation out of whole cloth.<\/p>\n

5. The source story isn’t actually objective<\/h3>\n

the F&B<\/em> book is constructed as a sort of meta joke. Its cover page states that the story is written by a character living inside Westeros, named Archmaester Gyldayn, and is merely \u201ctranscribed by George RR Martin.\u201d While readers could take everything that happened in the ASoIaF<\/em> books as sacrosanct, the depictions in F&B<\/em> Technically come from an in-universe character\u2014with his own flaws and biases and interpretations\u2014who could, at some points, be wrong.<\/p>\n

In fact, Gyldayn even admits his limitations within the text. ace F&B<\/em>‘s fictional writer explains early in his tale of the Dance of the Dragons, much of the story \u201chappened behind closed doors, in the privacy of stairwells, council rooms, and bedchambers, and the full truth of it will likely never be known. \u201d Some first-hand accounts exist\u2014one from a septon, one from a collection of maesters, and one from a court jester named Mushroom\u2014but offer only limited perspectives: If the writer wasn’t in the room, he can’t be sure of what happened inside.<\/p>\n

And even these remembrances \u201cdo not always agree upon particulars, and at times their accounts are considerably at variance with one another,\u201d Gyldayn continues. The septon will say that Character A seduced Character B, while Mushroom will reverse the order and say B seduced A, or the sources will point to different culprits for a mysterious murder, or they’ll ascribe different motivations to a surprising decision.<\/p>\n

As with Martin’s repeated character names, this story detail again parallels the real world. Ancient historians didn’t have the same approach to accuracy as their modern counterparts. As the 19th-century German historian Wilhelm Ihne wrote about Roman annalists like Livy and Dionysius, \u201cEvery writer related capriciously, and almost at random, what appeared to him most probable, without having the least foundation for his assertions, and without even pretending to have trustworthy information.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how will Dragon<\/em> translate that uncertainty to the screen? It could have theoretically chosen a sort of Rashomon <\/em>structure, but Condal told Entertainment Weekly<\/em> that the show aims to provide \u201cthe objective account\u201d of the story.<\/p>\n

That approach contains both promise and peril. The good news is that the treasures affords the show’s creators flexibility in their adaptation\u2014they can always tweak details and attribute the differences to a gap in the history book, rather than an actual change in the canon. The bad news is that they may struggle more to advance a cohesive narrative, with strong and sensible character arcs, because every single time that F&B<\/em>‘s sources disagree, the show will need to decide what actually<\/em> occurred.<\/p>\n

We’ll start learning the answers soon enough. House of the Dragon<\/em> premieres in less than a week, with all manner of incestuous Aegons on the way.<\/p>\n