HOUSE OF THE DRAGON

[houseofthedragon]

Extended trainer here:

I am so excited for this!!! Anyone else???!!!

HOTD will be premiering on the 21st Aug (22nd Aug for U.K.)

Really enjoyed this episode, loved the tension building and when horrible Alicent finally lost her cool.
I'm trying not to compare it to GOT, but actually for me I think I like it better with the (much smaller) group of people as it's easier to follow. Sometimes I would need to do reading after GOT episodes to work out what had happened!

Exactly! You are supposed to care about the characters but they are not properly introduced, many look similar (I know they're related but still..), and have odd and similar names, eg Rhaenyra /Rhaenys. Eve Best, a brilliant actress, mostly wasted.

We needed more time with these characters. And more daylight!

I was responding to @RoachTheHorse

@pemba 🤣. I like the article linked to earlier up the thread where they make the point that it's dialogue that's lacking. The pace can move fast (GoT often did), but the scripts managed to add small details and asides that let you get to know the characters and their relationships, in a way the HOtD is just missing.

I am enjoying the massive dragons though - I'm easily pleased!

If anyone is a The Last Kingdom fan, Ewan Mitchell will play Aemond next. He played Osferth, Alfred's bastard son the monk, in that. And Phia Saban who played the older Ælfwynn will play Halaena.

Oh God, this has just made me despair. ANOTHER time jump and I can't yet recognise the current Aemond or Halaena in a line up. I am going to be totally lost - and I am following along with a Targaryan family tree up beside me (which is giving away spoilers, but is the only way I can figure it all out).

I'm getting grumpy with the show now.

why does Sir Cristian hate Rhaenyra so much?

@sideplates because she took his virtue, sullied his white cloak, and then didn't want a relationship with him so he did it for nothing.

@sideplates Hell hath no fury like a man scorned. He hates Rhaenyra for breaking his oath of chastity for just fun.

I still think hate is off the scale, like he needs to chill a bit surely. It's been years!

In order to pay for all the dragony CGI did the producers drastically slash the lighting budget? It looked like it was filmed on someone's phone FFS! I have read Fire & Blood twice but still couldn't follow who was saying what to who and why! Poor DH gave up very early on and started mending the little coffee table next to the sofa.

I enjoyed it and understood what was going on apart from a disastrous failure of concentration right at the very end - too busy wondering whether the boatman was going to knife Qarl and throw him over the side to notice who it actually was, and had to rewind.

But the decision to turn scenes shot in broad daylight into nighttime scenes was very odd. I rewatched it last night and during the last bits of the funeral scene I paused while I went to get a cup of tea. DH came in and literally didn't realise I had the telly on at all it was so dark. The body language and behaviour is completely wrong for the time of day, the shadows people are casting are clearly early afternoon, and the burning torches don't shed any visible light around them. I can see why they thought Aegon's flight with Vaegar and R&D's liaison would be better at night but there's several scenes before that which surely could have been left in the original daylight.

The last (I think) series in GOT got a lot of criticism for being shot in the dark. I do have a new TV now (so might be that), but HOD doesn't seem as dark, like they have two tea lights rather than the one GOT used 😄.

Oh and if you recall the GOT cinematographer said it was our fault!!

mashable.com/article/game-of-thrones-too-dark-cinematographer

(However, I didn't listen as my new TV isn't a $5,000 one!! Not even a tenth of it 😁.)

It wasn't the whole of series 8 that was too dark, it was just The Long Night. As the name suggests, that episode was meant to take place entirely in the night, and they notoriously shot it over weeks and weeks of night shoots: the problem was that it wasn't properly visible under less than ideal TV watching conditions. I watched it on a big telly in a dark room and it was great, but it's not reasonable to require that of every viewer.

Driftmark, however was an episode largely shot in daylight where the filmmakers had a rethink late in the production process and regraded it artificially to look like night, but overcooked it so a lot of detail was lost, especially under non-ideal conditions, and also it just looked weird in places. A shame, because I loved it otherwise.

I was thinking that Laena's death by dragon would have been really moving if we had spent more than 5 minutes with her. Still don't get why she married Daemon, or he married her, or what they were to each other. Dismissed in one line " we were happy enough." Daemon doesn't seem to care about his weeping girls at all.

Contrast her death to Varys' death by dragon in GoT , which really made me sad, because we had got to know him and he had the best lines.

I think that Rhaenyra and Daemon are supposed to be the big love story. They are both kind of self-obsessed and arrogant. We don't really get to know or care about Laena or Harwin because ultimately Rhaenyra and Daemon never really cared that much about Laena or Harwin. They were distractions to bide their time with until they could be together but they were the parents of their children. So, it's more about the affect of losing their parent that it will have on the children and how they grow up.

I guess we are building up to Viserys eventually dying and they are just telling the story of why Rhaenyra and Alicent don't get along and why the children don't get along and how this will lead to battle lines being drawn and which side others will support.

@BlackberryCat Maybe! And is it wrong of me to have had sort of a sex dream about Daemon and Rhaenyra?, 😳

I suppose I must find Matt Smith strangely attractive as blond evil Daemon. When he was Doctor Who I found him goofy and funny.

I guess we are building up to Viserys eventually dying and they are just telling the story of why Rhaenyra and Alicent don't get along and why the children don't get along and how this will lead to battle lines being drawn and which side others will support.

I guess so too. But do this this might have been the right circumstance to use flashbacks to exlain the backstory a bit at a time. Instead, focussing most the efforts on getting to know all the characters and their actors in latest time period first.

I haven't read the books so I might be completely wrong though. It's just how I interpreted it. i think it would be more worrying if you had a sex dream about Matt Smith as Prince Phillip. 😂

He's a bit like Ryan Gosling for me. I don't find them conventionally attractive but there's something cool about them which makes them quite sexy.

Started watching this, and got about 5 or 6 episodes in, and got a bit bored. Haven't watched any more. I just couldn't be bothered to stay with it.

Daemon wanted to marry Rhaenyra all along. Even in the first episode there’s flirting between them.

@BlackberryCat there is something about him though I suppose. Even though I wasn't consciously aware of it and I'm probably nearly old enough to be his mum. I am quite surprised at myself "

His interpretation of Prince Philip was great I thought, do you agree? I wonder why he keeps getting bad guy roles, probably because he's not conventionally handsome. But seems a lovely guy and a good actor!

MS with the current 1/2 up 1/2 down straight platinum hair do is quite pleasing on the eye. When he was Dr Who I had no idea he could play a villain but I much prefer him like this!

Our TV cost a fortune and is properly hi-tech. DH spent several happy hours buggering about with all its many, many, many settings.

We still couldn't see shit last night