I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time

On Saturday, December 2nd, 2023, HBO released a teaser trailer for their upcoming Summer 2024 show House of the Dragon, airing its second season. Within hours, trailer breakdowns were crafted by the usual explainers – that’s awesome to see. But none of them, I feel, are going to be suitable for my dad.

Dad Sponaugle has read all of the main A Song of Ice and Fire books, has seen Game of Thrones, but hasn’t read Fire and Blood. It wasn’t hard to get him to watch House of the Dragon, but I wanted him to see the show with at least some context – non-spoilery context, so for Season One I wrote up trailer breakdowns as they came out.

Daemon Targaryen: You are all cursed with me.
Viserys Targaryen: OR NOT!
Daemon: (Somehow, still cursed. Trust me.)

Hey, with House of the Dragon, the prequel/successor series to HBO’s Game of Thrones airing, I re-started my avocation of writing articles about the show for Watchers on the Wall, the Game of Thrones fan site.

HBO, roughly a month before the new show House of the Dragon is set to premiere, released a final trailer for the show. They’ve previously released two teaser trailers and a series of character photos. Because my dad has read the A Song of Ice and Fire books and seen the Game of Thrones adaptation on HBO, but has not read Fire and Blood – the Targaryen history – to provide him baseline context for the upcoming show, I’ve been making non-spoilery (or, very light-spoilery) posts that focused on the trailers.

This is one of those posts. It’s long, because the trailer had close to 100 shots to present and talk about.

HBO has released a teaser trailer for their upcoming fantasy show House of the Dragon, taking place in the same universe as their hit show Game of Thrones. It’s the first of several potential prequel series in the world of Westeros. Nearly everyone and their relations have already scrambled to put out trailer breakdowns via YouTube videos or podcasts or whatever. That’s cool. But I wanted to do one, specifically for my dad.

Sometime after Game of Thrones first aired, I got my dad a copy of the first book – A Game of Thrones – as a Father’s Day gift. My dad likes to read, and we’ve had good experiences talking about books we’ve read in common. (I got my dad to read science fiction books when I was a teen – he probably wanted to figure out some way to have a conversation with me – and that has carried on through my adult life.)