House Of The Dragon fans are riding high after a fantastic fourth episode of the second season. “The Red Dragon And The Gold” has a double-take worthy 9.6 fan rating on IMDB and is one of the most acclaimed in the entire history of the larger franchise. Author George RR Martin himself gushed about how good it turned out, saying he doesn’t think we’ve ever gotten a better dragon battle in any TV show or movie. He heaped praise on everyone involved in a recent blog, except when it came to one minor detail.
George RR Martin, always one to speak his mind honestly and openly, is not happy with the sigil the show is using for The Targaryens. More specifically, he’s not happy with the fact that the dragon depicted on the banners of our leading family has four legs, not two. According to him, that is absolute nonsense, and he gave us a multiple paragraph write-up on his website explaining why.
Apparently Medieval heralds were quite fond of drawing dragons, but since no one had ever seen a dragon in real life, there was plenty of variance in the drawings. Some people drew them with two legs and some people drew them with four. As things became more standardized, they started calling the ones with two legs wyverns and the ones with four legs dragons. From Martin’s vantage point, however, that’s ridiculous. Both dragons and wyverns should have two legs because birds have two legs and two wings, as do flying dinosaurs.
During the first four and a half seasons of Game Of Thrones, the show depicted the dragons on the Targaryen sigil as having two legs, but those involved in the show later changed it to four legs, which House Of The Dragon has continued using. Here’s a portion of Martin’s analysis…
Game Of Thrones gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A couple years on, House Of The Dragon decided the heraldry should be consistent with Game Of Thrones.. but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one. That sound you heard was me screaming, “no, no, no.” Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.
Now, you might be saying, why is he so worked up about something as minor as what’s on a flag? On the one hand, you’d be right. It’s a bit unusual that we were just given one of the greatest episodes in the history of the franchise, and days later, Martin is complaining about something so seemingly innocuous. On the other hand, however, Martin’s complaint here is a microcosm of why Game Of Thrones is so freakin’ good. Everything is mapped out in such vivid detail and planned out so far in advance that it all logically fits together. The same drive that pushes him to care about the flag is the same drive that pushes him to add minor details that can be called back to multiple seasons later, which is why fans are always nervous or frustrated when Thrones/ HOTD departs from the source material (even if sometimes it’s a positive).
House Of The Dragon is in the middle of its second season. You can catch new episodes on Sunday nights on HBO, Max and various other streaming options in other countries.