I'm back to slogging through House of the Dragon, and it's just getting worse.
I think I mentioned that I read a review about it when I was first watching it and the reviewer put his finger on what makes the show so awful, which is that no one ever, not once, has a single conversation about anything other than the line of succession.
Although that's not true. Spoiler: Matt Smith's first wife is briefly introduced and she talks about something I don't remember for about 30 seconds and then promptly dies because no one is allowed to talk about anything other than the line of succession. Ever.
I'm watching a huge range of generations of characters over many years and they literally only have one topic of conversation.
It's so tedious. I know nothing about any of these characters aside from their thoughts about succession, and hilariously, they haven't managed to create any level of investment for me on that topic. Like, I just don't care who takes the throne, I have no investment in any of these people, no understanding of what the stakes are for the kingdom, and no concept of what any potential monarch's vision for ruling would even look like.
So the whole thing comes off more like a stupid, petty family fight rather than the determination of the fate of an empire.
I think we're just supposed to extrapolate what the empire is like from Game of Thrones? Except, that's set something like 7 generations later. That's like extrapolating what the US was like in the early 1800s from what it's like today.
Which is another thing. Why the fuck does it look *exactly* like Game of Thrones if it's so far in the past??? Shouldn't these civilizations be remarkably different in terms of their structure and technology after so many years???
The guards are literally dressed the same. Identical uniforms.
Although I guess that makes sense if I'm to understand that literally no one does anything but fuss about succession day in and day out for the next 200+ years....why would anything change?
I never read the books and just googled the timeline to write this post and read a rough 10,000 year history of the Game of Thrones universe, and holy shit there's some cool story telling that they could have done a prequel about!
I would have loved a show about how the area was colonized, the wall built, the white walkers came to be, and the taming of the dragons.
That would be so much cooler than an entire season of the largely pointless familial infighting of a family during what seems to be a totally uneventful phase of a 10,000 year history of a region.
DH now refers to the show as "miserable people being miserable, plus dragons."
