House of the Dragon’s second season may not arrive until 2024, but showrunner Ryan Condal has said that it will feel much more like the “middle run of Game of Thrones” because it will have “been earned” from spending so much time with the characters in the slower-paced first season.
Speaking to The Sunday Times ahead of the Season 1 finale of House of the Dragon, Condal promised that Season 2 will have “more blood” and will “get to the spectacle.” However, he is proud of how the first season took its time to fully establish these characters throughout their lives.
“We will get to the spectacle,” Condal said. “But you have to understand these people’s complexities before they’re thrown into war. Series two will hit the rhythms people came to expect from the middle run of Game of Thrones, but it will have been earned, and viewers will feel the tragedies because we put the work in.”
Condal also spoke on one of the biggest complaints by some of the fanbase – the lack of “the gift of Tyrion Lannister.” Condal and the team want these moments of levity between those of great sorrow, but he also doesn’t want to just retread what came before and take the easy route. That being said, he does believe that Matt Smith’s Daemon does fill some of that void left by Tyrion.
“Any of that,” Condal says of trying to create a Tyrion-like character or one even like Bronn, “would have just read as, ‘Oh, they’re doing their Tyrion — it’s pandering’. Now we’re writing series two, though, we’re finding natural pathways into moments of levity in this really dark drama. Also, I think Matt Smith is very funny. If there is one character that does not care, it is Daemon.”
For more, check out our review of the penultimate episode of House of the Dragon and how a shocking moment in the series mirrors Game of Thrones’ greatest sin.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
