We’re back with our series on the Best of A Song of Ice and Fire, this time looking at a Stefan pick: Daenerys’s big Dracarys moment. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

“House of the Dragon” is a civil war story, and civil wars are often described as wars of brother against brother. Your characters make that theme literal.

LUKE Our relationship and our death were very much a symbol — not just of what’s to come, but the theme of the whole piece, really, which is family against family.

Does taking on that symbolic weight add pressure?

ELLIOTT No, because that symbol is built within our relationship naturally, being identical twins. That’s a unique relationship — unique only to identical twins, who are split-embryo. Even a twin who’s not split-embryo … not to sound disrespectful, but they’re more like a brother and sister born at the same time. An identical twin is a beautiful phenomenon of nature.

But you’re playing identical twins in the act of killing each other.

LUKE I think it helps. You’re aware of what they’re up against because of all these years of being a twin. If that was a scene between me and Criston Cole, it would probably be a bit harder. Doing it with Elliott made it easier to get there and sit in that head space. It’s naturally grounded, something you can latch onto.

I interviewed twin actors Elliott and Luke Tittensor about playing twin Kingsguard knights Erryk and Arryk Cargyll on House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

This ability to shock — not in the gross-out sense, although this is often the case as well, but rather in the sense of a sudden, severe surprise — is the greatest strength “House of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are often said to be battles of brother against brother; fantasy can make the metaphorical literal. What better way to illustrate the senseless brutality of warfare than by having two men who look and sound exactly alike, who love each other, who say they are one soul in two bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves exactly nothing?

I reviewed tonight’s weirdly untitled episode of House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

Like “Game of Thrones” before it, “House of the Dragon” can be challenging to the prestige-TV palate. Its emphasis on criminal-political conspiracies, high-octane performances by a suite of talented character actors, and family drama in all its forms can be traced directly back to “The Sopranos.” But its use of high-fantasy spectacle and Grand-Guignol violence add notes that can ring as discordant in some viewers’ ears.

Listened to the right way, however, the sound is magical. Condal and company have constructed a drama of chamber rooms and bedrooms, roiling with sexual energy and gendered experience, occasionally marked by near-psychedelic explosions of high-fantasy supernatural spectacle. As women pray and sob and make love, dragons soar, blades are drawn, and eyes are taken for eyes. It’s Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” via the sword-and-sorcery artist Frank Frazetta. And if it’s what you’re into, it’s magnificent.

I’m covering House of the Dragon for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

It has been nearly two years since the shadow of dragons’ wings last darkened our screens. When “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” prequel based on the book “Fire and Blood” by George R.R. Martin, returns this weekend, its sprawling cast of characters will be prepping for war, the sides distinguished by the color of the banners they fly.

The Blacks are led by Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy). Named heir by her father, King Viserys, years earlier, she has seen her claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros usurped by her younger half brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney); he and his backers, including his mother, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), are known as the Greens. Now these two women will determine the fate of what remains very much a patriarchal world.

Whether you want to pick a team or simply brush up ahead of the Season 2 premiere, airing Sunday on HBO, here is a primer on the major players from both sides of the great dragon divide.

Did I write a cheat sheet for this season of House of the Dragon? Does a Dornishman [REDACTED]?? I broke down Team Black and Team Green for the New York Times, where I will be covering the show all season long with both episodic reviews/recaps and interviews, and maybe more.

In fantasy combat, dragons are a difference-maker. Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-queens Visenya and Rhaenys united six out of seven quarreling kingdoms by lighting entire castles and armies on fire from the backs of their beasts. Daenerys Targaryen effortlessly torched the forces of House Lannister — then of the people of King’s Landing — with a single surviving dragon at the end of Game of Thrones. If you wanna get really nerdy, none other than Gandalf the Grey reveals in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings that he helped Thorin, Bilbo, and company kill Smaug the Golden so that a revived Sauron could never use him as city-killer against the Elven kingdoms he himself couldn’t touch. From middle-earth to Westeros, these creatures are no joke.

That’s what makes the prospect of a full-scale Targaryen civil war in season two of House of the Dragon so frightening — not just to the defenseless small folk but to the wiser members of the opposing Team Black and Team Green themselves. It also makes the question of who controls what dragons as crucial to the conflict as sizing up your enemy’s nuclear stockpile. A dragon’s size, age, temperament, temperature, combat experience, rider, and perhaps even their relationships with other dragons all play a part in determining their effectiveness in battle.

So in preparation for this Sunday’s premiere, here are all the dragons in play at the start of the so-called Dance of the Dragons, the civil war between the Blacks, led by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen and her king-consort Prince Daemon, and the Greens, ruled (sort of) by King Aegon II Targaryen and his mother, Queen Alicent Hightower. Each side boasts its own dragons, while some are still up for grabs. Considering the magic and might of these monsters, this could wind up as important as knowing the Targaryen family tree itself.

But brush up on these sky kaiju while you can: This war promises fire and blood, so best not to get too attached.

I wrote a field guide to all the dragons available at the start of House of the Dragon Season 2 for Vulture. IT BEGINS.

After a persistent technical issue kept us apart, Stefan and I are back! He and I speculate on the nature of dragonkeepers in the latest Boiled Leather podcast — subscribe and listen!

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

Our series on A Song of Ice and Fire’s Greatest Hits continues with a new Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast on the Hound’s origin speech from A Game of Thrones, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In my most recent appearance on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our “Best of ASoIaF” series with a look at Bran’s dream from A Game of Thrones—available here or wherever you get your podcasts1

Oh man, I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. The Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast’s “Best of A Song of Ice and Fire” series resumes as Stefan Sasse and I take a look at Septon Meribald’s monologue from A Feast for Crows, my favorite passage in the whole series. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The final iteration of my increasingly enormous House of the Dragon character guide is up at Vulture. This takes you all the way through the entire first season. Thank you for playing along!

We experienced technical difficulties, but now the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Listen to Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of House of the Dragon right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Much of the finale’s storytelling is conveyed through largely silent close-ups of people’s faces, particularly Rhaenyra’s. What was the thought process behind that?
I think about the amount of craft and hard work that went into getting that set built and those costumes made and those wigs put on everybody’s heads, just to get to a space where I can have two people talking to each other at a table or by a fireplace. Those moments are a testament to everyone’s work.

I tell the actors to take their time and live in those moments of silence, to not feel they have to rush through those scenes. I call it “the mud” — those complex, human, partner-on-partner scenes. I cut my teeth in network television, and I think silence scares people; I appreciate a show where the silences are deliberate choices to make it more cinematic and emotional.

One of my favorite moments is when Rhaenyra comes in and she’s just been crowned queen. Emma and I talked about this: “Sit and wait until you feel you have something to ask or say. Think about your dad: What would he do? Look at all those faces looking back at you. Where do you start? What are your first words as queen? Just be there until the line wants to come out.”

I interviewed Greg Yaitanes, the director of House of the Dragon‘s excellent season finale, for Vulture.

That seems to be the case most specifically with Prince Daemon. Much of the fandom wants to see him, as you put it, wearing a white hat or a black hat, to the point that many of them criticized Sara Hess, a writer and executive producer on the show, for her less-than-glowing assessment of Daemon. Did you see this coming?

I’m having trouble understanding it. We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming.

To me, Daemon is the antihero of this story. He’s a character with a real darkness to him, who’s dangerous and charming in equal parts. I knew people would be fascinated by him and latch onto him, but I figured they’d do it in the way they did with Jaime Lannister or Bronn or the Red Viper. I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future.

Nobody in the show writes in a vacuum. I’m the lead writer; I oversee everything that happens on the show; every choice comes through me. If it’s on the screen, it’s because I either wrote it or approved it being written. Sara Hess and I wrote 85 percent of Season 1 together. We did not set out to write villains and heroes in this. We set out to write interesting humans and complex characters who are hopefully compelling, but compelling doesn’t always mean heroic or unimpeachable.

I see Daemon as having heroic aspects to him, and I understand why people would. I mean, he’s incredibly charismatic, he’s handsome, he looks great in that wig, he rides a dragon, he has a cool sword. I totally get it. But if you’re looking for Han Solo, who’s always going to do the right thing in the end, you’re in the wrong franchise, folks.

I interviewed House of the Dragon co-creator and co-showrunner Ryan Condal for the New York Times.

Which brings us back to that torn-out page Alicent sent to Rhaenyra as an olive branch. The two girls were just 14 when Rhaenyra was declared heir and Alicent was sent by Otto to “comfort” a grieving Viserys, putting an end to those carefree days. Luke was just 14 when he died. And so a war set up long ago in the names of two children, who grow into women whose shared childhood memories nearly prevent that war from breaking out, becomes inevitable when a child dies. None of these poor kids asked for any of this, but the system — the monarchy, the patriarchy, the violence underpinning it all — turned them all into cogs in the war machine anyway.

Dragons, incest, one-eyed princes, ancient prophecies, etc.: They’re the flashy, occasionally sleazy adult-fantasy stuff that have made Dragon blockbuster material. The arresting visuals — the meeting between Rhaenyra and Otto at sunset, Luke’s flight through the stormclouds, all those hulking dragons — help as well. But it’s that central tragedy, of two well-meaning women slowly made into realm-destroying monsters in a world where actual monsters still take wing, that elevates the show above its genre counterparts. Forget dragons for a moment; there are other ways to soar.

I reviewed the season finale of House of the Dragon for Rolling Stone. Heck of a show!

Stefan Sasse and I are back with our latest weekly BLAH, this time focusing on House of the Dragon Episode 9! Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The latest iteration of my House of the Dragon character guide is now up at Vulture, covering the events of episode 9. Brush up before the finale!

Perhaps it’s too late at this point to ask, but does some part of Ser Criston still love Rhaenyra?

[Smiles ruefully.] First love is first love. I think everyone will always love the person that they fell in love with for the first time. From the first time you hear a beautiful piece of music, you’ll always love it, even if you’ve heard it a hundred times, because you remember that first time you heard it. So yeah, he will always love Rhaenyra.

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Fabien Frankel for the New York Times.

Okay, so: Why didn’t Rhaenys just torch the royal family and the whole Green crew?
[Laughs long and hard.] I know! The temptation is there, right? In the end, she makes a bigger choice. We see that at the moment with what’s going on in Ukraine; to choose not to destroy is the better choice. That’s an important thing for us all to remember right now.

It’s why she would have made such a great leader. She had, in that moment, all the power. Yet she has respect for Alicent as a woman and a mother. They understand being in the grip of other people who might torch them. They know the only right choice is not to go there. Furthermore, it’s the intelligent choice, on her part, not to torch a whole bunch of innocent people in the room. What’s to be gained? In the end, it’s not her battle.

The escape she makes on the dragon is something that’s been brewing since that very moment she was passed over wrongly, unjustly, for the crown. It’s this yearning just to get the hell out and get away from the whole ruddy lot of things. When she bursts out of that arena, she’s internally saying, “Fuck you all.” It’s more about that than a need for revenge or destruction that the men might’ve jumped onto. She’s breaking her own glass ceiling.

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Eve Best for Vulture.