HBO hasn’t been shy about attempting to take the warmth away from Amazon’s very talked-about Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premiere, together with a literal and figurative scorcher of a battle scene in final night time’s episode. But it seems House of the Dragon’s third episode, “Second of His Name,” has an arguably extra essential ingredient, no less than for Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin—it lastly matched his imaginative and prescient for one thing the unique sequence tousled.

That one thing is the royal looking occasion, which Viserys went on final night time to rejoice the second birthday of his son Aegon, and which Robert Baratheon went on in season one’s sixth episode, “A Golden Crown”—which seems to have been Martin’s least favourite scene within the entirety of Game of Thrones, in response to The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibbard. And he ought to know, as he wrote the 2020 guide Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, an in-depth historical past of the making of the sequence, by which Martin advised him:

“Where we really fell down in terms of budget was my least favorite scene in the entire show, in all eight seasons: King Robert goes hunting. Four guys walking on foot through the woods carrying spears and Robert is giving Renly shit. In the book, Robert goes off hunting, we get word he was gored by a boar, and they bring him back and he dies. So I never [wrote a hunting scene]. But I knew what a royal hunting party was like. There would have been a hundred guys. There would have been pavilions. There would have been huntsmen. There would have been dogs. There would have been horns blowing—that’s how a king goes hunting! He wouldn’t have just been walking through the woods with three of his friends holding spears hoping to meet a boar.”

If you watch the 2 episodes, there’s a marked distinction between how the reveals deal with the occasions, similar to there’s a marked distinction between the reveals’ budgets—$20 million per episode for House of the Dragon, versus $6 million per episode when Game of Thrones was simply beginning out. So it’s comprehensible why Thrones wouldn’t have been capable of match the pageantry of Dragon, however it was nonetheless one thing that was clearly bugging the creator a full 9 years later (and apparently greater than something that occurred in season eight). Martin hasn’t commented on the brand new scene but, however he absolutely have to be happy, which is sweet. He’s had a tough time of it recently.

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