It’s going to be a few more years until fans get the next season of House of the Dragon, but HBO has been working hard with other spinoffs of Game of Thrones.
One spinoff is said to focus on the journey of Aegon the Conqueror as he attempts to unite the Seven Kingdoms, and though we haven’t gotten an official update from the network, the series writer does give some info on his progress.
Update on Aegon’s Conquest
Terminator: Zero writer/creator Mattson Tomlin is said to be the writer behind Aegon’s Conquest, and talking to Westerosies (via NexusPointNews),Tomlin explains his approach to adapting George R.R. Martin’s lore. He says:
“It starts with what George has done. I've now gotten to spend quite a bit of time with him, and there have been a lot of pinch-me moments of just kind of going through Fire & Blood, highlighting passages, and asking him, What did this mean? What is this? What I think it is. You know sometimes really grilling him going, I don't understand, what's happening here. And then other times going, ‘I think that it could mean this,’ But it's really taking that text and treating it like it's real history.”
Tomlin goes on to talk about the concept of historical figures and how people treat them in reality. This is the way that he’s also going to approach the adaptation of the books, by treating the lore like actual history. Tomlin continues:
“That's one of the things that my approach to it was to [that] Fire & Blood is written like a real history and these things happened. We know the history of Alexander the Great; we know the history of Napoleon. We know what the battles were. We know a lot of the people who died. We know in some cases what was said or what might have been said, but we don't know everything. We don't know all of it. We kind of have these flag poles that tell us this is how we marched through history.”
History is Written by the Victors
With this approach from a historical perspective, Tomlin implies that he could be adding things to the story as the recorded history is one that the victors write, which would lead to many more unflattering elements being omitted—which Tomlin could explore. He says:
“But then also there's that great quote that somebody much smarter than I said: history is written by the people who won. And so then there's that as well. For me, it's about making sure that I respect George and I respect the text. And then also, it still has to be a dramatic story. Those characters have to go on a journey; they have to change; they have to go from a beginning to a middle to an end.
“Figuring out how to do all of that with the clues that that textbook has left for me and go, okay, I'm going to interpret this very real history and try to make it a really vivid show that hopefully people love and don't hate, doing the best I can.”
If anything, this was kind of the same approach that the showrunners of House of the Dragon ended up doing with the source material. With one of the book’s main themes being the unreliability of history, the show goes on to add its own storylines to explain what really happened during the Dance of Dragons rather than just following what was written exactly in the books.
Is That a Good Thing?
Based on how HOTD Season 2 was treated, it’s possible that further alterations of the established lore could just become a source of more toxicity from fans. Then again, as long as the story can stand by itself and has very consistent themes and characterization, it’s very likely that Aegon’s Conquest can still succeed without any major setbacks.
No release date has been announced for Aegon’s Conquest, but the next GoT spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is set to release on Max soon.