All Series Must Die (Which Is Why There Are New Ones) -- The Game of Thrones Series Spinoffs

um yesssss

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbkxnp/hbos-game-of-thrones-prequel-the-long-night-george-rr-martin-vgtrn

GRRM:

Yes, this is a prequel, not a sequel. None of the characters or actors from GAME OF THRONES will appear in the new show. All of the successor shows we’ve been developing have been prequels, as I have mentioned before. This one really puts the PRE in prequel, since it is set not ninety years before GAME OF THRONES (like Dunk & Egg), or a few hundred years, but rather ten thousand years (well, assuming the oral histories of the First Men are accurate, but there are maesters at the Citadel who insist it has only been half that long). We’re very early in the process, of course, with the pilot order just in, so we don’t have a director yet, or a cast, or a location, or even a title. (My vote would be THE LONG NIGHT, which says it all, but I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up. More likely HBO will want to work the phrase “game of thrones” in there somewhere. We’ll know sooner or later)

dunno, but this sounds badass to me

"Thousands of years ago, there came a night that lasted a generation," Old Nan explained to Bran back in GoT's first season. "Kings froze to death in their castles, same as the shepherds in their huts. And women smothered their babies rather than see them starve, and wept, and felt the tears freeze on their cheeks... In that darkness, the White Walkers came for the first time. They swept through cities and kingdoms, riding their dead horses, hunting with their packs of pale spiders, big as hounds."

Jane Goldman as showrunner is...not promising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNwwt25mheo

i guess the dragons are still rendering

matt smith? being scary? i always find that so unnerving because he seems like the kind of non-threatening doofus who furiously resents being a non-threatening doofus and then blows up a town.

I mean, without real time source material to contend with, this might be solid.

The source material was basically what made GoT good, though.

this does have source material—it’s based off the biggest section martin’s fire and blood, which is a history of the targaryen family, plus a few short stories that go into more detail, like “the princess and the queen”

Oh right, it might be good then.

My point was more about the “real time” descriptor, meaning they won’t be outpacing them source material during the run and have to scramble to tie shit together. Okay

lol stupid phone added the stray “Okay”

Yes, if based on completed GRRM material it probably will be decent (though of course I've personally yet to see evidence that he can conclude an epic fantasy story in a satisfying manner).

the story they're planning to tell here def has an ending, and a bit of a scouring of the shire-style epilogue which i doubt they'll include

Really enjoyed the first episode of House of the Dragon. Definitely up for lots more political machinations in this world. The young girl Targaryen was very good and Matt Smith looks like he's having (and will be) lots of fun.

Pretty wild - if not surprising - that the original show has finished and we now have the spin off and still no new book has been published.

forgot about this thread. there was a little discussion about it on the "but is it on netflix" thread. fully expect this spinoff series to end before the next book arrives

i'm debating about whether i should go back and read fire & blood again or just let the series surprise me. idk if i can resist lol

Rhaenyra looks eerily like John Mulaney imo? Am I crazy?

Thought the first episode was entertaining enough. I hope they find ways to broaden the sense of the world beyond just the inner turmoil of the Targaryens. My favorite thing about the GOT books and HBO series was the way the world kept getting bigger throughout them. So I hope we get scenes in the free cities and so forth.

xp i will never unsee that lol

I sort of got Elrond of Rivendell vibes from Rhaenyra.

Just watched E2 and am enjoying very much. Most of my friends are still riding high on the whole “game of thrones sucks now” vibes from the end of the series - so feel like I’m going this alone

i found the first ep reprehensibly gratuitous in its sex, violence and exposition. like if an AI was fed all the episodes and told to make a spin off.

Ha! Much less of it in e2. But the weird sad orgy in e1 did feel very unnecessary. Like they thought people would complain if there wasn’t an ott brothel scene.
The violence was just right tho, imho

Yeah I was a bit put off by the half assed tavern orgy scene and the various gory bludgeonings, like OK we get it, you're reminding us what this show was all about before it went all Iceman Cometh.

what i ultimately liked about GoT at its best was how lore was told through plot, how battles became epic iliad-esque dips into hell, where the quiet moments presented opportunities for exploring character development and not chances to be even freakier, how the shifts in locale and different storylines gave natural narrative gear shifting. The sadism and tits were to be endured more than celebrated. Now its like everybody's joffrey. WTF would i wanna watch that for.
but of course i'll probably watch the 2nd ep. I'm a tv masochist.

there's no gore or sex in episode two so don't worry

there is the possibility of an incendiary incident – but let's not spoil things.

I'm not squeamish! It's just kinda boring and predictable.
I'll watch ep 2 before I complain too much more but the telegraphing of the story direction (and eventual red herrings) are coming fast and furious in episode 1. Gosh, i wonder if those cuts the king is getting on the iron throne might be a more serious problem than they appear?

i feel like that's not supposed to be a surprise? they've made it pretty obvious, as they literally talked about the gash on his back that isn't healing.

this first season is gonna be unlike anything else that has ever aired on tv. from what i can tell, this season is gonna cover roughly 30 years of westerosi history, and they can't really compress the timeline because there are characters who factor heavily into the coming conflict who haven't even been born yet lol

xp, of course; i'm just using that as an example. The birthing murder scene was also obvious from 80 feet away. Every character's presumed arc is being played to the rafters right now to the point where bad guys are twirling mustaches "but they aren't really BAD so much as they are machiavellian do you see"
Wake me when there's an interesting conversation.

xp

yes, I was browsing The World of Ice & Fire last night while I was watching this and counted 12 Targaryen kings between this one and Robert, so this series has quite a lot of ground to cover.

Is that their intention? How many season is this supposed to be?

they're planning to cover a period of history called "the dance of the dragons." i won't elaborate or spoil, but the period they're looking to cover is about three decades, not the 20 or so decades until robert's rebellion.

yeah I assume there will be yet another proposed series after this one that fills in some of the gaps. I had thought we'd see the mad king in this series but we are way way way early for that.

yah, no mad king in this series

that's kind of disappointing

The confrontation at Dragonstone was good in this episode. Disappointed they're using p much the same theme music and titles concept from GoT though.

I'll give it time but its just feeling like more of the same so far. And I am really not liking Matt Smith. He's no Joffrey.

he's more jaime than joffrey, i think

I suppose so yeah. I just dont feel any genuine menace or malice from him, he just seems petulant.

TBH hes more like Viserys!

(er... GOT Vierys obv, not current one)

it doesn't help that everyone on both shows has the same name

Was also very disappointed with the theme xps

You'd think it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with something new that maybe used some of the familiar motifs of the original music a la the new Star Trek shows

ramin dijwadi def could've come up with something new and good. it seems to be a decision from the higher-ups, which makes it worse.

i kind of like that the song and titles are basically the same, that allows me to just think of this as another season of the same show.

Seems more like incidental music than a theme

I'm certain the opening credits to ep 1 played a different song, that only had references back to the GoT theme, but then ep 2, it was jus tthe old theme?

there wasn’t a credits sequence in episode one, i don’t think

True but it did have an opening sequence with a thematic tune that wasnt the same. I assumed that would be the theme and as it turns out, no.

how it's going:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/house-of-the-dragon-miguel-sapochnik-leaving-1235208276

i mean i knew it’d be gnarly but fuck me, i’ll never get used to that bludgeoning brutality

The amount of times Dunk got stabbed or whacked on the head with a mace went quickly from horrific to absurd.

I thought the episode was amazing!

The flashback just didn't seem really necessary to me. Like we have a decent sense of his past now, it was like no we need one highly specific traumatic incident for some reason.

Agree the battle was kind of grotesque. Thrones gonna Throne I guess. How many Thrones fights have ended with someone punching another person in the face over and over?

Me too xp

That battle though. Fucking hell

Thanks for the warning! Definitely like the show but not really into head-punching violence any more. Might skip it.

Meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6w7O1kwuBk

Yay I’m excited.

looking forward to this!

Great series, enjoy the shorter episode length. Agree that the flashback was too long. Baelor’s death iirc is pretty abrupt in the novella too, you just get to really like him and then that.

that traumatized me. I'm still thinking about it.

honestly? kind of a perfect finale. This show was such a lovely, just straight-up Good TV Show … i’m so impressed! Def looking foward to more adventures to come

And “Sixteen Tons” in the credits was a great touch. Grew up w that one, my Dad played it a lot.

Season was kind of a masterpiece

Such a wholesome show, generally I mean, accepting people's heads still get stoved in.

Can't be the only one who heard a mention of Dorne and was like fuck, don't go there, after GOT.

Anyway, a fun bonus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l01hTdB5PK4

Annnnnd here we go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3NuadWeKr0

One more trailer in the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JlMjgqduVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t92ukx0A2fk

Great first episode imo

Yeah was not expecting this episode to go ~that~ hard

But ok! Let’s go

good episode overall, still feels like there are way too many characters to to properly service, but i was glad to see the big sea snake and alyn spotlight this week. the navigation through the narrow pass was my favorite part of the episode and one of my fav moments of the series

The consensus seems to approve, and I'm in the mood for some violent fantasy nonsense, so I'm finally giving this show a go

Two years btw s2 and s3 was tough. they pick up s3 basically in media res & im like “…whut”

yea this would have def been a pretty good s2 finale but i guess they couldn't do that for some reason?

yeah hbo cut their total episode order last season so they had to shift stuff around

ah that would explain it

Two years btw s2 and s3 was tough. they pick up s3 basically in media res & im like “…whut”

lol, came here to say this! scene after scene had me like 'who tf is this' and i like how they've now made me think the same thing when a dragon appears also. 'wait, which dragon is this?'

idk if american broadcast had a 'previously' bit but the uk one didn't and it really needed one, i may as well have been rip van winkle for how much i remember about s2.

some great action tho. wonder how they'll manage to move things back to the customary eight episodes of people frowning and grunting before the next big battle scene.

Was certainly glad I watched the recap but I still needed to do some reading afterwards:

https://www.theringer.com/2026/06/21/house-of-the-dragon/house-of-the-dragon-every-character-season-3-premiere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVTUYGZM4UY

Luckily, we got like a 5-minute recap before the ep when we watching it on the app, otherwise it would have been even more confusing.

Great episode though, I love the immediate payoff on the pieces being moved at the end of the last season.

ah that would have helped. the uk one just barrelled straight into it, oops.

Yeah I will definitely clinging to Ringer’s House of R for their recap & deep dive pods

Definitely appreciated the lengthy recap before the show started.

Last time around I did a full s1 rewatch before s2 started and it helped tremendously - really made me love s2 and I don’t have any of the gripes other folks had… except that the season did seem to be building to a finale that never came, until last night.

So I get why, in real time, it might feel like s2 was a let-down and/or it’s hard to feel up to speed with s3, but at the same time all of those complaints should eventually just wash away if you can just watch the show straight through.

Watched a 20 minute YouTube recap before watching the episode tonight. Pretty amazing how dense the first two seasons were.