House of the Dragon is set to unveil a staggering amount of new dragons in its first season, with more said to come.
HBO’s House of the Dragon series has revealed the number of dragons in their first season to be nine, with 17 reported to be appearing throughout the series. Roughly 200 years before Daenerys hatched Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion, in an age which dragons were thought to be extinct, the Targaryen dynasty was at its peak— dozens of dragons and dragon riders filled the skies and ruled those below.
What those riders didn’t know, is that the dragon dynasty would soon tear itself apart, as many readers of both A Song of Ice and Fire and Fire and Blood already know. More powerful than any dragon is the lust for power in the heart of a human, the very thing that drove the mighty reptilian species to its temporary extinction.
Series showrunner Miguel Sapochnik spoke on the process of differentiating each dragon, a problem that was already present with Game of Thrones’ three dragons that is now at increased risk with House of the Dragon‘s nine.
“I’ve got a book which has hundreds of [concept] designs,” Sapochnik said. “The first thing you want is not to do Drogon. So I came up with a whole theory about how there were three different kinds of dragons, based on their different skulls. We came up with all kinds of stuff. But in the end, we ended up back at Drogon. [Laughs.] There’s something about Drogon. It’s like the Millennium Falcon. It hit something.”
“Each new dragon has its own personality. That’s what’s going on now in our last part of the animation – we’re applying personal character traits to each of the dragons. One of them’s got a [bad] leg. Another one’s much more like an eagle, because she’s kind of neurotic. And another one’s like a curmudgeonly old granny.”
Cast members also weighed in on what creating the dragons within the series felt like and how they were conceptualized.
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“There’s a very symbiotic connection between the dragon rider and the dragon,” explained Matt Smith, who plays Daemon Targaryen. “You’ve got to master it from an early age, and it’s a death-defying experience trying to tame it. For want of a better analogy, it’s a bit like Avatar.”
“We had an animatronic buck, which is controlled by a device that the director can use to plan each flight path,” said Ema D’Arcy, who plays Princess Rhaenyra. “Honestly, having done my first day on the buck, my takeaway was that every member of production ought to have the right to have a go. They should allot time slots. The most acting I had to do was wipe the grin off my face, because I can’t overstress how thrilling it is.”
Finally, George R.R. Martin himself spoke to his hopes on how dragons can be realized in the upcoming series.
“I’m also hoping to see a different interpretation of the dragons than we saw in Game of Thrones, particularly in their colors,” Martin said. “I often describe the dragons by their colors — red, blue, green, and their crests and the bones of their wings are often different colors, too.”
“We kind of lost that in Game of Thrones, with Dany’s three dragons. One is supposed to be black, one is green, and one is white, with secondary colors. But when you saw them in the show, they were all kind of similar to each other. One was black, I guess the other was green, but it was a very dark green, almost like black, and the white one wasn’t really very white. I think we’re going to do better with this new show. I would like all of the dragons to be distinct, so that when you see a dragon fly in, you know at once, that’s Caraxes, that’s Vhagar, that’s Syrax.”
