HBO
George R.R. Martin is not happy with a ‘Game of Thrones’ mistake that continues in ‘House of the Dragon’
A mythical emblem of the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ has been continually misrepresented by the HBO adaptations of George R.R. Martin’s works, and the author isn’t happy.
‘House of the Dragon’ is currently immersed in a second season that has been living up to the enormous expectations placed on the series. The adaptation of the literary work of George R.R. Martin is generally extremely faithful, and even adds context that helps delve even deeper into some aspects of the work. That said, there are details that do not go unnoticed by the author or the fans, and one of them has to do with the emblem of House Targaryen.
Martin has hinted at points that have not convinced him in this second season, one of them being the fact that Maelor Targaryen, the second son of Aegon II and Helaena Targaryen, has been ignored. Beyond that, the changes that the Targaryen emblem has undergone are not to his liking, as detailed in his blog: “No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.”
He continued: “[For what it’s worth], the shows got it half right (both of them). 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.”
George R.R. Martin does not miss a detail in ‘House of the Dragon’
For George R.R. Martin, the changes that the emblem underwent as ‘Game of Thrones’ progressed and that ‘The House of the Dragon’ has continued to adopt should never have happened, and the author details that “Much of the confusion about the proper number of legs on a dragon has its roots in medieval heraldry. In the beginning both versions could be seen on shields and banners, but over the centuries, as heraldry became more standardized, the heralds took to calling the four-legged beasties dragons and their two-legged kin wyverns. No one had ever seen a dragon or a wyvern, of course; neither creature actually existed save in legend, so there was a certain arbitrary quality to this distinction… and medieval heralds were not exactly renowned for their grasp of zoology, even for real world animals. Just take a look at what they thought a seahorse looked like.”
The renowned writer does not see any logic in what was done, and in his own words, if we stick to the fact that the emblem is designed by the people who inhabit the universe that his books narrate, they perfectly know the anatomy of the dragons and therefore the number of limbs they have. Some of you will ask, what about the heads? It is a symbolic part that refers to Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys Targaryen.
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