House of the Dragon is a better Game of Thrones follow-up than most of us expected, but even so, it has its shortcomings. That’s the bad news; the good news is Nine Voyages – the upcoming animated spinoff revolving around Corlys Velaryon (AKA the Sea Snake) – could fix one of those shortcomings.
Don’t get me wrong: House of the Dragon is, for the most part, a great show. Season 2 started stronger than it finished, and it got plenty of people pumped for Season 3. And most of the show’s issues – stage-setter plotting and pacing, placeholder characters, and so on – can easily be addressed next time around.
But there’s one thing House of the Dragon can’t do that Nine Voyages can: leave Westeros behind.
House of the Dragon Is Game of Thrones 2.0
In fairness, House of the Dragon‘s near-exclusive Seven Kingdoms setting isn’t the fault of showrunner Ryan Condal and his team. The show’s source text, Fire & Blood, revolves around the Targaryen dynasty, and most of their story unfolds in Westeros. What’s more, House of the Dragon zeros in on the book’s Dance of the Dragons civil war. It’s a logical creative choice, however, it means there’s even less scope to nip overseas. And the knock-on effect is that House of the Dragon rarely shows us anything new. The Red Keep, Harrenhall, Winterfell, the Wall, Eyrie – all these places still look largely the same, over 100 years before Game of Thrones. Previously unseen locales such as Rook’s Rest don’t move the needle much, either.
Related: House of the Dragon: How Are Tyland and Tywin Lannister Connected?
Indeed, the best House of the Dragon can do is iterate on what’s come before. It can’t show us a different society, but it can dig further into the power dynamics of the one we’re already familiar with. The same goes for dragon-on-dragon combat; with more winged beasties on hand, House of the Dragon‘s aerial battle sequences are lightyears ahead of its predecessor’s. Yet evolution such as this only counts for so much, and when you get right down to it, House of the Dragon is more of the same. The same costumes, the same castles, the same court intrigue – in short: the same world. The closest we get to a new culture is the Triarchy, in scenes like Tyland Lannister’s work trip to Tyrosh. Other than that, House of the Dragon is basically Game of Thrones 2.0.
Nine Voyages Will Chart a New Course for the Franchise
Fortunately, the same shouldn’t apply to Nine Voyages. The spinoff’s very name is practically a promise that it won’t. The “nine voyages” of the title refer to Corlys Velaryon’s legendary seafaring adventures prior to House of the Dragon Season 1. That’s the premise of the show: watching Corlys and his crew visit locales outside Westeros barely (or never) depicted in live-action. We’re talking Lys, Volantis, Ghaen, Qarth, Great Moraq, Yi Ti, Asshai, and more. The upshot of this is that Nine Voyages should recapture the wonder of Game of Thrones‘ early seasons, when we hadn’t yet seen everything the franchise had to offer. It’ll be stunning new vistas and colorful characters every episode, combined with another relative novelty: naval warfare.
Related: Does House of the Dragon Season 2’s Finale Tie Into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?
I’m not overselling things, either. A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin recently confirmed that Nine Voyages had to be an animated series because HBO couldn’t afford it otherwise. “Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live-action version prohibitively expensive,” Martin wrote in a blog post. “What with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to… well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation.” Heck, animation is itself new ground for Game of Thrones. Fittingly, the Sea Snake’s spinoff is charting a new course for the franchise.
Reinvent or Die Is the Name of the Game (of Thrones)
That’s what it ultimately boils down to: doing something new. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or die; when you manage a long-running IP, “winning” equals “reinventing.” As compelling as Westeros is, there’s a limit to how much time we want to spend there. The only solution is to either radically reimagine that world (as cancelled prequel Bloodmoon supposedly would’ve done) or leave it entirely. Nine Voyages opts for the latter – and sets itself up to potentially sail past House of the Dragon in the process.
Game of Thrones spinoff Nine Voyages does not yet have a release date.
Published: Aug 10, 2024 09:00 am