How House of the Dragon saved the Game of Thrones Franchise | Video Essay

In this video essay we break down and discuss how House of the Dragon saved Games of Thrones. GoT Season 8 left the franchise in a bad way and HoTD swooped in to save the Game of Thrones franchise from it's issues. The finale has brought the incredibly popular series to a close, setting up the Dance of Dragons, with incredible characters like Rhaenyra, Daemon, Aemond and Alicent spearheading the war. HBO can't release season 2 soon enough!

Game of Thrones - (2011)
House of The Dragon - (2022)

Music

0:00 - Intro
1:26 - Part 1
13:37 - Part 2
23:42 - Part 3

[AntonChyst]

Huge respect to HBO for using real dragons
instead of CGI. I hope
everyone is safe during filming.

[maximillienrobespierre]

Viserys is simply perfect. Such a nuanced character is a rare treat and Paddy's interpretation was absolutely flawless.

[nerdoutreachprogram]

I love the dynamic between Daemon and Aemond. You can tell Daemon sees a younger version of himself in Aemond, and that Aemond sees the kind of man he wants to be in Daemon. Such a shame they’re on opposite sides. The dinner scene where Aemond calls them Strong boys and Daemon stepping between them with a smirk on his face was so fucking _good._

[omegaRST]

Everyone is talking about the walk to the throne, but the dinner afterwards was just as impactful to me, such beautiful framing and acting, one of the most emotion-filled scenes I have ever watched

[Tenken]

Out of all of the seasons of GOT, I never felt as touched and emotional as I did watching an old, dying man slowly and painfully make his way to a throne for his daughter. If there's anything that would really tempt me to put HOD over GOT it would be this.

[methospayne]

Crazy that the picking up the crown and putting it on his head only happened because it accidentally fell off his head irl and they just went with it was a fucking adlib and it crushed the scene amazing

[PhilHug]

The showrunners have said that after they finish the Dance of the Dragons, they will likely turn the show into an anthology series that covers other parts of Targaryen rule like Aegon the Conqueror and the Blackfyre Rebellion

[vkolyok]

I just can not get over Emma D’Arcy’s face in the last shot. It just says it all. It’s so brilliant it is beyond me. The sock, the anger, the determination. I know that the show is so much more than this one scene, but come on!

[sayanchakraborty]

The best thing about the show for me is that it knows that audience is a smart audience and hence knows they don't need to spoonfeed us everything and hence making it a smart series through its subtext and the screenwriting and foreshadowing is just so awesome

[nnmartin]

King Viserys actor, Paddy Considine, gave one of the best performances in the show. When the door opens and I saw the dying king make his way to the throne, I was just spellbound.

[hollys]

The scene w Daemon choking Rhynera made sense to me. He beat someone to death for simply being a messanger. He slashed someone in half bc they called his wife a whore or something along those lines. He killed his wife of the vale bc she was an....inconvenience? If someones violent in public i think its safe to assume they're violent in private as well.

[moviefansa]

Rhaenys scene where she bursts through the floor could be a means of showing control she has over her dragon where as in the finale we see Aemond and the lack of control he has over his. Just a thought

[m.cproductions]

Didn’t Paddy Considine do such a good job that Martin has stated he may re-write Viserys’ info in Fire & Blood to make the character more accurate to his portrayal in the show

[adamcrabtree]

What Ned Stark was to GOT, King Viserys is to HOTD. Both good men surrounded by scheming people. And when they both die wars get started in their name

[Donnirononon]

Man when Daemon helped his brother to sit down, best scene of the whole season imo. Got to admit i shed a tear.

[bungalowfeuhler]

I love Aemond after that final scene. He’s a deeply traumatized kid who just got his drivers license, not realizing how dangerous it is to use his pickup truck to chase his little cousin who’s fleeing on a bicycle. He wants to make his cousin feel the terror of having your eye slashed, but doesn’t actually want to hurt him. Lots of people don’t understand how dangerous a vehicle actually is until they experience a car accident. This is just like that.

[antonioborrego]

The time skips in my opinion are REVOLUTIONARY. It leaves each episode feeling like a whole season. It’s inevitably going to end up being a tad complex, but my god they walk this line SO beautifully. Incredible stuff man. Waiting for this next season is going to kill me.

[xanderm]

The scene when they are all at dinner and he slowly looks at his family, knowing he's at the end of his life, the acting, the music, it was very powerful

[harlequinne.]

Viserys showing up to take the throne to protect his daughter and her legitimacy as his heir is hands down the best emotional scene in game of thrones followed closely by the heartfelt emotion of the dinner that follows.

[theeNappy]

Regarding that scene with Aemond and Luke at the end of the season, it makes the tragedy of the war soooo much richer. I read the book, the book's an outline, it's a treatment, it's sparce on details and even then a lot of those details are contradictory (given it's formst as an in-universe history written more than a generation later and itsrlf working from incomplete snd contradictory sources, that makes sence). The Maester character who wrote the book wasn't there, he's just repeating what he's read, it's all he *can* do. It's best treated by the show as a roadmap, hitting those major plot points and key details, but otherwise remaining flexible enough to flesh out and breathe life into the literally dead characters in the book. That's exactly the stew they pulled off in that scene: Aemond's still a punk-ass kid playing at being a dangerous badass. He's not interested in murder so much as freaking out the asshole who took out his fucking eye. That's why he tells Luke to cut out his own eye: he's bullying his bully back. He chases Luke on drgonback to scare him, it still hasn't sunk in for this teenager that he's at war and war isn't just looking badass and scary with a saphire eye, war is murder. When Arrax (who's also freaked out and being chased) tries to fight back, Vhagar takes that personally and kills them. Vhagar is the experienced killer Aemond pretends to be. This isn't a game of looking anime af for her; she's a veteran of murder and does so without ceremony. That's the moment Aemond realizes this isn't a game, that there are consiquenses. It's all fun and games till someone looses an eye, or because this is hyper-violent Westeros, till the guy who lost an eye murdered his nephew. So what's Aemond gonna do, come down and be all "I didn't mean to kill him" when his whole persona has been building up an image as a dangerous badass? No, he's gonna own it like he meant to do that. And thus the fact that the first kinslaying in the Dance was an accident never makes it into the histories; that devastating civil war started with a kid playing too rough is lost to time.