House of the Dragon - S02E03 Feedback - The Burning Mill

[00:00:00] This summer, we enter a new era of Star Wars. You mean the dawn of the Star Wars Canon Timeline podcast? Yeah, yeah sure, that too. But I was obviously talking about the Acolyte. We've got to cover that on the Lorehounds.

[00:00:18] Oh, but the Star Wars Canon Timeline podcast is exactly at that point in the timeline, the end of the High Republic 100 years before the prequel trilogy. We've got to cover it there. Why not both? Okay, deal. It's the first live action Star Wars outside the Skywalker Saga.

[00:00:37] Nobody can miss this. Listeners, kick off your Hot Lore summer weekends with scene-by-scene breakdowns of the Acolyte, found in both the Star Wars Canon Timeline podcast and the Lorehounds' Mother Feed. And the Lorehounds' Star Wars Feed.

[00:00:52] Wherever you like to listen, a couple of days after each new episode is released. Welcome back to the House of the Hounds. This is our first ever Feedback episode. I'm John. And I'm David. And this is feedback for episode three, The Burning Mill of HBO's original series, House

[00:01:41] of the Dragon. This is very exciting, David. And people can, of course, write in. They can. At hotd at the lorehounds.com. They could also go to the lorehounds.com, head to the contact page where they can leave a voicemail or a contact form entry.

[00:01:57] They can send a Discord message to us. Tag us in the Discord. Tag Nancy M to Kazoo Dogs in the Discord and she will get you taken care of. She is our Dragon Master or Hand of the Pod or something. She is our...

[00:02:12] Hand of the Pod, I guess, is trending. Yeah. We still gotta figure out your official title, Nancy. Write it. Write it. You write this whole document for us. You could write it yourself. She did write it earlier today. I'll read that a little bit later.

[00:02:27] After we get through this intro fluff stuff. Very nice. And of course, if you want early ad-free access to all this stuff, you can go to patreon.com slash the lorehounds. You can go to Supercast. All of that stuff is in the link tree in the show notes.

[00:02:40] And I'm going to plug the season pass really quick. Oh yeah. Ten bucks. You get all of our season one recap coverage. You get all of our season two early and ad-free access and you're done. There's no monthly subscription. Nothing. You're in your house of the dragon.

[00:02:57] You feel like you want to throw some bucks, support the community. Boom. Season pass is for you. You get the show guide as well. And the show guide is pretty awesome. It sure is. Now, David, we've got a slew of feedback. A whole dragon's dookie of feedback.

[00:03:13] Dragon's dookie. Yeah. That's one thing they never cover on the show. You think they have... So you think that when they fly by, they give a flyby? Is it white like bird poop? Ooh, it depends on what they've been eating, I would suppose. Kind of like whales.

[00:03:28] Like if they've been eating krill, it's red and stuff. Yeah. Do you want to do an aerial? I mean, she could have just pooped on Crispy Cole and Gawain while they were flying over the...

[00:03:40] Like she could have just come up over the forest edge and just sort of, you know, like the firefighter aircraft do, right? And just stopped that red slurry. Big time. Missed opportunity. I mean, I'd pay money. This podcast has taken a turn.

[00:03:52] I'd pay money to see Crispin Colby pooped on. Yeah. Well, that didn't come out right. Oh boy. All right. All right. I feel like we're already in the late night stage of this. Way in the gutter here. All right. It's been a long day.

[00:04:08] Let's get on with this. You're going to lead us through the feedback, right? I am. And I thought... I started us off with a little message Nancy M posted in a chat that we have to coordinate feedback and stuff like that.

[00:04:22] And we were praising, we were singing her praises and she says, oh shucks guys. I'm just so thrilled to be helping! Triple exclamation point. I'm boasting to all my friends and family about being hand of the pod.

[00:04:34] Unfortunately, they look back at me blankly as they don't get this online community that we've all created. I don't know what I would do without this. I would have no one to talk about Star Wars, House of the Dragon, Game of Thrones, Tolkien.

[00:04:49] I spent the majority of my career in government communication offices and one of the things that I was very good at was taking the words of politicians and bureaucrats and making them sing. And when it came to brochures and other materials, the design and organization of content is

[00:05:03] just as important as what the words say. So when I saw your feedback document, I rubbed my hands in glee. God help me, I'm procrastinating. I really don't want to go out and mow the lawn.

[00:05:15] So, Nancy, we are so pleased and privileged to have your help and support. And the document that you put out together, we've been refining our process and workflow and figuring out how to use the different outlining text and everything. I think we got it really dialed in.

[00:05:32] Nancy's been taking your emails and your Discord messages and then chopping them up. Normally what John and I would do is we just read through an email as it was presented to us. But Nancy has taken this and broken things up thematically.

[00:05:46] So you have all these theme headings, and she then breaks up the material and puts it all into the different places. So if you wrote in an email, you might hear your email broken up into multiple spots.

[00:06:01] And we've heard back from multiple people saying, this is a cool format. This is really good. It keeps us moving. It keeps some interest and liveliness in the feedback episode. I think we've kind of hit on a new thing. This is great, right?

[00:06:16] A new innovation in podcast technologies. Well, I don't know if I'd call Nancy a technology, but certainly podcast skills. Techniques, maybe. Culture. What would this be? I don't know. It doesn't matter. We're going to go forward and we're going to do this feedback. So start us off, David.

[00:06:34] I don't want to add another of my own comments, says Nancy, but I found this item online for you guys to drop in that apparently in the tapestry, there is the baby Jahaerys lying

[00:06:47] in state with a vine that creeps along and slices across the neck and the executed rat catchers of King's Landing hanging from the walls of the city. Have you been paying attention to the tapestries, John? I'm skipping. Oh, you've been skipping them. I'm straight up cold skipping them.

[00:07:08] Oh my gosh. I'm just to get to the show. I really, I heard this week that they're adding to it and now I have to go back and I have to start watching them again. Yeah, for real.

[00:07:17] I haven't been watching it enough, closely enough to actually be able to go, okay, this was the new bit. This was the new bit. But I can sense that it's changing obviously a message like this.

[00:07:28] So I think it's really cool that they're taking in Helena and the tapestries from the walls from season one and are telling us the past story that we have been watching. I think it's really cool. Is very nice. Very nice.

[00:07:43] It's a lot of coordinating work post-production to get that done. Yeah. All right, so first topical heading, Seasons Pass and the Hot D Show Guide. Partial email from Danielle. Got an idea for the new quote unquote mildly interesting. You ready here for this, John? I'm ready.

[00:08:01] Some jazz with hot lore. After this, David asks a pointed question and John replies, hmm, that's some hot lore. Some hot lore. What do you think about that? I'm going to have to mull this one over. Okay. I'm going to mull it over. I still like Wafo.

[00:08:17] But I'm not saying I'm not going to take Hot Lore. Maybe I'll alternate them, you know? Yeah. Wafo is not sticking in my head. It's not great. No. I was walking around doing some chores and stuff today and I was like, wait, what was that thing? Blafo?

[00:08:31] I was like, Wafo? I couldn't. It didn't work. All right. Thanks, Danielle. That's a fun suggestion. I like that as a suggestion. It could work. I mean, as a stand-in, I mean, we could still play it around, but I like that. That's some hot lore. All right.

[00:08:45] Shane on the Discord, the show guide rules. We should have a little horn of the devil emoji in there. As a self-proclaimed maester of the Song of Ice and Fire universe myself, I couldn't have done any better. That's saying something. Shane is appreciative of the show guide.

[00:09:06] I am appreciative of Shane. I'm loving the episode guides and the visual stuff and you figured out how to get... When I was doing Shogun and True Detective, I was taking pictures with my iPhone and I

[00:09:22] had to make sure the room was dark so I wouldn't get room reflections and all this kind of stuff. But you've been able to finagle some technology and to be able to put it to another thing

[00:09:32] to get to another thing and actually get a really nice clean shot of screenshots. So it's great. I just tricked my computer into not telling HBO that I'm taking a screenshot. I love it. I love it. Kathy W by email. Hey, Lorehounds crew.

[00:09:45] Great to be back for another season of Hot D. I just wanted to get in touch to say that I'd be in favor of a separate feedback pod. There you go. For purely selfish reasons, I live in Ireland and the show airs in the middle of the night

[00:10:00] here. I could watch it before I go to work, but then I feel like I'm not savoring it properly. So I wait until Monday evening to watch it, usually at a friend's with wine, you know, to savor it.

[00:10:11] Wait, is this Kathy who is our physician who wrote in from... Oh, I don't know, but Kathy is a lore master. Yeah. So I start listening to pods on my drive to work on Tuesdays, and then it's usually too late to send feedback for that week.

[00:10:28] So more often than not, I don't. I only routinely had feedback for The Last of Us. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. I think you're right. Thank you, Kathy, for coming back. Because you guys had specific questions for me, so a little bit of breathing room would

[00:10:42] be lovely for us non-US folk. It would also be more podcasts, which is not a bad thing for us. Well, there you go. The Europeans are really busy on Sunday nights sorting through their multicolored money. I've been poking fun at them on the Discord.

[00:10:58] We've been having a funny chat. It's like veered way off into all kinds of funny stuff. When you can't... You know, again, I think Cyrus, I think, made a good point. Make it multicolored, sure. I understand ease of sorting. Why does it have to be different sizes?

[00:11:16] Come on, guys. And they're wildly different sizes too. They're not incrementally different sizes. It looks like a toddler shoved a bunch of bills together. Do you know Australian money is plastic? I don't like that. It lasts a really long time. And it has little translucent things in it.

[00:11:31] It's really weird. Arr, narr. I don't like that. Kathy continues, also had a funny conversation. This show is actually ridiculous with my cousins a couple of days ago about Hot D, which kind of played into the maybe just name people different names thing.

[00:11:48] I'm listening to a bunch of show podcasts usually when I'm driving and find myself gently correcting people when they get the names wrong for characters as if they might hear me. I was trying to explain this tiny peeve to her, and she doesn't watch any Game of Thrones

[00:12:00] content or isn't a fantasy person at all. And she asked me what did I mean? So I told her, well, I guess there's a lot of similar names. There's Reyna and Rhaenyra and Rhaenys and Daemon and Aemon and two Agons and the two Viserai, Viserum.

[00:12:21] And obviously, Erik and Erik, not to mention Jacaerys and Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. And nevermind. I see the issue now. She just laughed at me. Anyway, looking forward to next week.

[00:12:34] Yeah, I remember when you asked me if I had a typo in the show guide, but it was just that I wrote Jaehaerys. I don't remember. I wrote one of them and you thought I meant the other, and I was like, oh no, yeah, Jaehaera is still alive.

[00:12:48] Which would have been very unusual for you because you're a much better typist. You're a bit more precise than I am. I try to. I try to. I mean, I make a lot of mistakes. I just backspace a lot. Well, you hide them well. You hide them well.

[00:13:05] I think I was trying to explain to my spouse a couple, not this episode. Was it the one before? I think it was. And I was trying to explain the whole thing and, you know, oh, and she slept with him and then this and then what.

[00:13:20] And I was just, I think I mentioned this on the pod too, that like, I felt like I was trying to explain days of our lives or something like that. It really is. It's like, it's soap opera for nerds. This is soap opera for nerds with dragons.

[00:13:32] I've been having a fun time doing the stupid memes with all like the names. I was like, you know, Damon, when his niece, wife, sister says he's pathetic and it's all the family trees are messed up. It is. Kathy, good to hear from you.

[00:13:47] And we are happy to accommodate you with a little bit more spacing. I don't know. We don't have a specific day this day. We're definitely recording on Wednesday because tomorrow is a national holiday for us Americans.

[00:14:01] You might've heard of something about, you know, fireworks and people losing digits and things like that. It's national hand surgeon day. That is like so perfect, isn't it? Yeah, I was going to make another joke, but I'm going to stop myself and not get added at.

[00:14:20] Anyway, so whether we record Wednesdays or Thursdays going forward, we'll kind of see. But yes, you'll definitely have some more space. So we'll have the hot takes out for subscribers right after the episode airs. Main podcast on Monday nights and then feedback like Wednesday, Thursday,

[00:14:35] Friday, before the weekend for sure. All right. Next topic, feedback specific to the structure of the pod about the pod answers to questions you asked of listeners. Uh, Athena on the discord, no cap. This was an amazing podcast. All our hosts have Riz. Okay.

[00:14:56] I'm out of cool kid slang now. No phantom tax for you, Athena. I was wondering if, if you took a group of this is Gen Z, right? Uh, that we're talking about it.

[00:15:08] Well, there was some debate about that on the discord, whether it's a Gen Z or if it's, if it's the Gen Alpha stuff leaking into my vocabulary now. So if you took a group of Gen Z alpha, you know, younger millennials.

[00:15:25] No, no, don't, don't lump us in with this. We're not involved. I make fun of it, but the words are just ridiculous. And if you just, uh, played some, uh, uh, sixties, you know, jazzy bebop stuff where the people are doing the, uh, what is it called?

[00:15:41] A scat and, uh, you hear old sport. See, and I think they would just get it right. They would just be like, Hey there, old sport. We got the skibbity toilet in the Rizzler and the Rizzler. Have you ever seen, uh, the original airplane movie? Yes.

[00:15:59] The comedy and when I, when I used to, um, do sound for like venues, I once screened it outside in like a, like a drive-in kind of thing. Perfect. And it was awesome. It was a really funny movie. Such a funny movie.

[00:16:11] That was the first time I saw it too. And I got paid to watch it. Even better. And then there's the whole thing. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English. I speak English.

[00:16:21] I speak English. I speak English. There's a whole thing. I speak Jive. Uh, you know, I just see it. Don't call me Shirley. So good. Uh, Abigail email. This is, uh, Abby, I believe. Greetings house of the hounds and septa Nancy? Question mark.

[00:16:39] Is that a, another term for Nancy? Don't lump her in with the septa. Yeah. Thanks for giving me for a bit more time to send in some thoughts. I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge. Uh, quite the pressure there, David.

[00:16:54] I was glad to be of service with the strong sigil. I was prompt with an answer only because I was also curious about it and digged a bit more, not because I'm any kind of expert in house sigils. Heron Hall's design was so good.

[00:17:05] It really leans on the sinister vibes. So that was, uh, I posted something in the discord trying to figure out that cause there was a couple of tattered sigils hanging in the, in the great hall there when Damon was skulking about with his sword.

[00:17:20] I was listening to another podcast. I think it was the watch, uh, one of the ringer ones. And they were saying the thing that we didn't see was, yeah, okay. Damon's got a dragon, but they didn't show us him trying to spend like 20

[00:17:31] minutes climbing down from the top of that tower up there in the rain in his armor, you know, down wet stones. So, you know, dragons are cool and stuff, but, uh, anyway, that's, that's what that was and that, yes, it is a very cool looking sigil.

[00:17:46] Um, you asked me about the pronouncing of pronunciation of, here we go. Just J is it Jacaerys? We don't know. And oh dear, that's a tough one. I do remember coming across a Valerian lesson that mentions him.

[00:18:00] I was also, uh, it was also a sentence that went, I'm going to say just Jacaerys, Jacaerys roared with Vermax translated as Jack, Jackery, Ver, Jackery, Vermasco, Grutas. I'm guessing here. So we might think it might be Jacaerys, but his mother calls him Jace, not Jake.

[00:18:24] So it's fair to go with Jacaerys as we heard in episode three, whichever works for you. Ha ha. So Jacaerys. Is that where I'm just going to call him Jason. I'm going to call it a day. Folks. We broke game of Thrones.

[00:18:39] We broke ourselves trading and trying to fix game of Thrones. Thanks again for encouraging my ramblings. I'll continue to try and answer any questions if, and when they arise here to serve Valar Dohaerys. Abby, thanks Abby. Uh, always good to have a, um, Valerian translator in the house.

[00:19:00] And, and thank you Abby for writing in after I said, here's more time, Abby. All right. Email from Chris M on a similar question and Chris, yes, your email did arise, arrive in the right place. Chris got confused with a couple of other podcasts because everybody's got

[00:19:18] HOTD as the, you know, before the at sign and a lot of things. So, uh, Chris, we got your email and on the Jacaerys, Lucerys pronunciations as someone else who's been bothered by this forever. First off, Gurm says pronounce stuff however you want. Obviously that's not satisfying though.

[00:19:36] Unlike other fandoms where you get in a lot of trouble. Oh, Robert Jordan has like glossaries in the back of his books where he'll tell you how to pronounce things. Oh really? He is very, very intentional about how he thinks things should be pronounced.

[00:19:49] I remember when I was a kid and I'd be reading, you know, fantasy stuff and I would just bracket that. I just go, okay, it kind of sounds like this in my head and I'm just not even going to bother. And I would just move right past it.

[00:19:59] Uh, cause I can't, I just couldn't spend the time trying to break that down. Mm hmm. Chris continues. My understanding is these are hereditary Valerian names. So looking at the pronunciation of David Peterson's in universe con Lang, it

[00:20:15] should be a hard to see a bracket K for both. Also technically according to con lag, the a E sound should be pronounced like a I the vowel in sigh and R as in flap like in Spanish. Hmm. Okay. This is, this is breaking my brain.

[00:20:38] No, you'll notice that in a hot tea and a G O T in game of Thrones. Now in speaking high Valerian characters pronounce Damon and Daenerys. Daymon and day nearest respectively. That would give us Jack Harris, Luke cares in turn, since Gurm reportedly

[00:20:59] consulted Peterson for book translation for future book translations. I guess we can call the con Lang cannon that said being a second gen immigrant in the U S I'm pretty used to people adapting ethnic quote unquote ethnic names, words to suit English pronunciations if they don't

[00:21:17] know how to say it in my head. Cannon is that since Valerians themselves are relatively recent immigrants, the fact that Westerosi characters can't settle on proper pronunciation for the foreign sounding names in the common tongue is the same thing.

[00:21:33] I usually just say, Joe care is and either Lou Sarah is or Lou carriers myself. So I'm, I'm sounding out the phonetics that the way that Chris wrote in on in their email thoughts, John on pronunciations. I'm,

[00:21:50] I'm less sure about the pronunciation after reading these two emails beforehand. And I think that's an accomplishment. I think, you know, can I just say I pride myself on being pretty good at pronouncing things like yeah. Yeah. The wheel of time. Like I'm, I, I,

[00:22:06] I can see near Nath are annoyed yard when I'm talking about the un, unnumbered tears. Right. And you can say it not unironically, you can say it very seriously. Right, right, right. And I, I even did a whole segment on conling in my last Shire side chat.

[00:22:22] Wow. Okay. And yet I can't fucking do this. I just can't do it. I just can't do it. George, you've defeated me. Well, this is dude, I'm never going to get dude. I was just going to bring up June. I was gonna,

[00:22:34] I was going to make fun of the whole dune thing. You can do Robert Jordan till the sheep come home, but you can't do quiz that's hot rack, which is a Jewish rooted word. That's a word rooted from Judea, our modern Judaism. So well,

[00:22:46] ancient Judaism, but you know what I mean? Well, you know, I, I, I have doing downloaded on my Kindle and over times. I've been like, should I open it? And then I go back and I, I just don't want to go. I just don't want to do it.

[00:23:02] I just don't want to do it right now. Cause then I go to Terry Pratchett and he comforts me, you know, he's nice and easy. But you know, you gotta, you gotta love a fantasy series that goes from the quiz that's how to act to Paul. Hey Paul.

[00:23:15] Well, it's, it's the same thing in, in Tolkien, right? Like yeah. Tom Bombadil and, and uh, what do you think Tom Bombadil could speak to a Gen Z and skibbity bebop language because he's got Tom Bombadil speaks whatever he wants. I don't think that,

[00:23:30] I don't think he's bound by the rules of generations, but he used to, you know, he's got that sing song. He's sort of a dialogue, doesn't he? Isn't that accurate? Yeah. So Hey doll, Mary doc ring a ding dillo.

[00:23:42] See that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. All right. Need in the discord. Oh wait, I'm calling you out. Hey doll, Mary duck, ring a dong dillo. It's Tom Bombadil. Oh, all right. Now you can go.

[00:23:54] That sounds really good. It sounds really good. I just, so listeners know, I tried to get John to play some light jazz underneath the whole feedback show, but he was not having it. So I didn't want to torture everyone.

[00:24:06] And these, these soundbites are only like two minutes long. That's true. That's true. Nate's calling you out. He says, I've got some things to say about John's comment re show gun. But of course he

[00:24:16] doesn't, you know, that's the call. He didn't say it. Where are you at Nate? Where are you at? He's coming for us. Say him to my face. Yeah, we don't need any. Yeah. I was trying to think of some some Shogun related humor,

[00:24:33] but I couldn't it failed. So the world of hot D general impressions, Chris M another part of Chris M's email in general, my impression is that the show is doing a better job of building character motives that fit the events of the books where

[00:24:49] the characters are sometimes flat thin sketches, which given a FNB is Oh, uh, fire and blood, fire and blood is an in-universe historical chronicle, uh, from biased second, third hand POV is not our main characters heads. That makes sense. The Raniera Damon, uh, Raniera Masaria, Damon, uh,

[00:25:14] Renease everyone and Raniera Raina interactions in this episode, gosh, uh, in this episode in particular, make related events really ring true, really just a shout out to the writer's room and the cast for creating messy, nuanced characters out of limited source material. John.

[00:25:35] Absolutely. They are seating so much stuff right now. And as we talked about last season and early this season, like there are things that you can look back on that were seated several episodes before and it felt natural. Great job all around.

[00:25:49] And I think Abby has something to say about that later too, in terms of the whole book, uh, interaction and whatnot. And so every time I see in the community reactions to things that people are like, Oh wow, that's how they did that.

[00:26:03] Or I didn't think we'd get it this way. Or it's interesting that they did it that way. Like I enjoy people exploring like, Oh, I had it in my head this way, but then they did it that way. That's really cool.

[00:26:13] And then there's other people like, you know, hands on first and faggy fingers and like, well, that's not blah, blah, blah. But this is not from my understanding what the book, the books are.

[00:26:22] The books are very thin sketches in most cases, right? In, in, in fire and blood. They are, there's, there's some intention stuff, but it's mostly, again, it's not, it's not a firsthand account. This is all supposed to be the maestros writing 200 years later.

[00:26:38] Was the, was the cheese, the blood and cheese thing more, because people would talk about it like it had a lot of detail to it. The blood and cheese thing. The reason that it's so, so the, the idea is maybe the greens got their narrative put into history.

[00:26:53] Right? Because one of the, one of the maesters forgot the name of the maester, but one of the maesters that wrote the histories that are, they're being relying on relied upon the firsthand accounts that are being relied upon was, I believe on green. Okay. And so,

[00:27:08] so some of the things are biased a little bit towards them. And so I think that people are saying it was probably exaggerated the depravity of which blood and cheese did what they did, even though it was already pretty depraved. The thing that I wish they had done,

[00:27:22] which I understand why they couldn't is in the books, they had two sons, which they didn't have a second son in the book. Right. And I think you talked about that in the episode, right? That there was a historical timeline stuff that they decided to do.

[00:27:36] They compressed the timeline. They couldn't fit another son and it's fine. It's fine. Right. But I do wish they had figured out some way to give Helena a choice because that was the most traumatic thing I think for her was they,

[00:27:49] they had two kids in front of her. They said, pick one that you want to die. You know, you were going to take a son, pick one son to die. And she picks one which is not the air and they go, okay,

[00:27:59] now we're going to kill the other one. And they put him right in front of her and they say, your mom wanted you dead. Isn't that so much more traumatic psychologically? Do we need that on screen?

[00:28:13] Did we need, are we, are we shying away from trauma in game of Thrones? Are we kidding? But we can play a lot about physically. It's not more physically traumatic. It's not more gory. It's not, it's not more horrific in terms of physicality. It is psychological horror,

[00:28:30] which I think is something that the red wedding had that I really, this version of absolutely. I think so. They are the red wedding. I mean, all these betrayals, Lord Bolton, the reigns of Castamere playing where all of a sudden it's a,

[00:28:47] it's a sudden betrayal. Uh, I, I really think, and there were other horrific points, right? Katlin Stark takes Walter's wife by at knife point and goes, if you kill my son, I'll kill her. And he's like, I can get another wife.

[00:29:02] It's fine. Right. All these, all these things that are layered. And I do think that the way they did blood and cheese did not capture all the emotional layers that were in the book. It was a pretty short scene, relatively speaking.

[00:29:15] And it still could have been his choice. It still could have been. But, but again, this is something that I'm not going to keep complaining about as we go forward. But I, you know, I try to be on the level with my critiques and

[00:29:27] I think this shows operating at a very high level. And so I'm going to judge it on a high level. That scene could have been better. It just could have been, it could have been more dramatic.

[00:29:35] And I think that this was one of the few times that they changed something from the books and it was for the worse. Interesting. Worse like, um, that's, that's saying it was a negative as opposed to, it was a negative change for me. Okay. That's interesting.

[00:29:51] I think that most of the changes they take from the book are positive. Right. It's interesting. Okay. Just don't go kicking any dogs. Uh, the world of hot D echoes of history. Brian, 80 63 on the discord says, this is like seeing the European leaders stumble towards world war one.

[00:30:09] Uh, that I think is an interesting comment in the sense that the, the certainly moving the children away sort of spoke to me of, of world war two. And the, you know, the, the air campaign against England,

[00:30:23] but this idea that there's a whole bunch of people out there who have a lot of power and a lot of imperfect information and they keep misreading things or getting little things wrong or, uh, things are maybe a little bit more nuanced or opaque and then they make

[00:30:40] decisions on this imperfect information. And then that those, all of that, the culmination of all of those ends up leading to war, like in an inevitable sense that we cannot get away from it. Like we,

[00:30:53] how can we not veer away? How can we not veer away from war? And it's interesting cause I'm thinking now about some of the opportunities and opportunities, whatever circumstances in the modern era,

[00:31:05] in a more modern era in the cold war where it could have very easily led to nuclear confrontation. And then they installed the, you're even giving us the George Bush nuclear. Nuclear, uh, that they even installed the, you know,

[00:31:20] a hotline phone between the Kremlin and Washington DC so that, you know, the two leaders on the either side of the cold war could have a one to one communication to deescalate. And that's absolutely what we don't have here is, you know,

[00:31:37] Raniera had to sneak in as a septa to be able to have this face to face with Alison. Uh, and then they're both, they're both like, we don't have the power. Well, Alison is, she's like, it's too late where it's going to happen.

[00:31:51] Right. I think, I think she, the tragedy of Alison here, and I think that they wrote this scene really well. I've seen criticisms of how they did this, of how they had Raniera talk to her about the song of ice and fire.

[00:32:03] But I think they really sold me on Alison will mold. I did a tick tock on this. Actually, I did a tick tock on where I actually just spoke to the camera and I talked

[00:32:13] about how the greens are trying so hard to mold a gone into what they want him to be. And they're trying to make the Sarah's his words fit him. They're trying to make the conqueror's armor fit him, but it's ill fitting.

[00:32:26] Yeah. Yeah. Good point. They're putting the crown on. They're so focused on objects and items and words. They're looking for the semiata. They're looking for the symbolism and the ritual and the trappings of it. Yeah. But he's just not it. Right. Right. He's just not it.

[00:32:40] And so Alison realizes looking back, I think her whole image of this is shattered. She knew that he was going to be a bad King, but her whole mindset was if I can just hold on to this,

[00:32:52] naming him air, then I'll know I did the right thing. Now that's gone. Now she's absolutely gone with that and she has nothing to hold back on, but they've already gotten rid of her dad. They've already pushed her to the side. She has no influence anymore. It's over.

[00:33:10] And she said as much to auto at one point, you know, if you quit undermining me between the both of us, we can continue to be friends. We can control this kid. We can manage him. And then, and, uh, Agan says to him, I have trans or what?

[00:33:29] I forget what the line exactly was, but it was, I have dared. I have tasted that, that sweet wine and it excites me. I like it. I like pushing boundaries. I like being wild and not having forbearance, unlike my father who I have no respect for.

[00:33:47] Um, so, and so they thought they could control him. And they had, they never had control. Well, but, but he did, he did ask his mom a couple of times like, Hey, you know, what do you think? Or how should I handle?

[00:34:00] And then of course in his greatest need after his son is murdered, she can't handle sitting down with him. Even that's not a one time event, right? I mean, you look at the carriage ride to his and his, to his,

[00:34:15] uh, or she's talking about one point. I don't think it was in there. No, it wasn't there. It was, that was after he assaulted Diana who, by the way, somebody did bring up, she was in the last episode. I didn't say it in the pod.

[00:34:26] It's in the emails. We've got emails about it. Yeah. Um, it's in the show guide. Actually. I wrote it in the show guide. I just didn't. Nice. Didn't say it on the bot. But the, um, the carriage ride to his crowning was, uh, he goes,

[00:34:43] do you love me? And she goes, you imbecile. That's what she responds with. It's so hurtful. She doesn't ever inspire trust. Right. And that's just unfortunate. It's just unfortunate. And the, you know, the two people,

[00:34:58] like if you're fortunate enough to have two parents and I know not every, we know we all have different circumstances and situations, but one of the things that you want from your parents is at least some kind of unconditional love or support. Yeah, you committed, you know, atrocities,

[00:35:15] you're going to jail or what have you, but I still love you. Right? You're still my child. I still hold you in my heart in some way. And that's really important to the formation of our identities and for us to be

[00:35:28] able to feel like we can go out in the world and not hopefully not commit genocide or unspeakable war crimes. But that it's, that's an important part and she's just never been able to give that to him all

[00:35:41] the way back to season one where she's holding him and he's crying and being colicky. And she's like, get this thing away from me. Like she hands it off to a nursemaid like, right. And Viserys is barely aware that he has kids other than Ranira. Yes, it's true.

[00:35:55] He ever see that meme where it's like the, uh, the one kid's like drowning at the bottom, like drowning in the water and another, and there's a skeleton at the bottom of the pool.

[00:36:05] And then the one mother is like holding her baby in front of her, like, yay. You, uh, somebody made a movie with that where it's like the mom admiring Ranira. Well, Agon is drowning and Amon is at the bottom of the sea.

[00:36:23] Good times. Good times. Marilyn, our favorite Tolkien scholar, send an email. She says, hello, David and John. Hello, Marilyn. Um, maestra Marilyn here. Okay. That's an interesting tie. I like this, uh, to give you just a bit of tidbit about something that occurred to me relating to

[00:36:40] English history. She was called Margaret of Anjou. And she was definitely not thought well of by most people outside of her own faction. She was young and beautiful when she was when she married an old King who had occasional bouts of insanity and catatonic states.

[00:37:01] There was a suggestion that the son she bore him was the result of an affair with a noble who supported her most strongly, strongly strong. Uh, she was bound and determined that her son would become King,

[00:37:17] even though there was a strong faction in opposition who had at least as good a claim to the throne as did the, uh, Lancastrian line she represented. Yes. We're talking war of the roses here. I want to make a,

[00:37:33] just a quick interjection here too. Marilyn is not watching the show, but she's listening to the podcast and she is reading the show guides. So she's like fully aware of the pamphlets. She does. She gets the Dick Turpin pamphlets. Uh,

[00:37:49] she's fully aware of the story and plot line and the show as it's being reinterpreted by us. And yet she's dropping war bombs all over the place. So I love it. I think it's great. Uh, continuing,

[00:38:02] she was praised for her beauty and her courage and vilified for her ruthless persecution of the war, inviting the Scots to cross the border and ravage the Northern England among other poor choices. Her son, Prince Edward, was killed in the battle of Tweaksbury. Uh,

[00:38:20] and she was imprisoned, imprisoned for, I'm trying to say Trixbury now, uh, in prison for 10 years or so. After which she was shipped back home to France where her noble father did his best to ignore her. Any of that sound familiar?

[00:38:35] John already know of Laura, the road reward, the roses, the roses. I don't know if you and Marilyn are aware, but the first three game of Thrones books are based on the wars or the roses. Oh really? I had no idea.

[00:38:47] This is George's inspiration for the whole war of the five Kings. There you go. I mean that's not this story, but it's in this universe for sure. I mean, the whole Robb Stark thing is the politics between the, the,

[00:39:00] the, the, um, Lannisters and the Starks and then everybody else that is based on the wars of the roses. That's there you go. So I think Marilyn has, uh, it's, it's enough of in the DNA that she's. You nailed it.

[00:39:13] You did. Do we have any kind of, well, yeah, do we, she wins internet points I guess. Right. Yeah. A bowl of cereal. A bowl of cereal. I, you're heavy handed with the cereal lady, but I gotta say you just throw. I'm not heavy handed with the cereal.

[00:39:27] Are you a, are you working for General Mills or something? I made one comment on the discord in acolyte and then you're accusing me of. I'm suspicious of you now. I think you might be working for General Mills now. You're sus. You're sus. Skibity.

[00:39:44] Nate, our favorite Japanese scholar on the discord. The conflict in house of the dragon is a metaphor for the own in war of 1467 to 1477 with the succession disputes between two heirs in the, uh, she, uh, she, Kaga Ashikaga line of shoguns and their various subordinate military governor families.

[00:40:12] I know nothing of this particular war. Interesting. I love the fact that we have war of the roses and a shogunate era war, uh, as primary sources. I don't know where it was also know the upheaval of the own in and, uh,

[00:40:29] it was a civil war that lasted from 1467 to 77, right? On a first, the Japanese years during which the war started. Okay. So that's just the Wikipedia. There's, um, yeah, it's a very long article. Uh, we need a summation of this. Nate,

[00:40:46] I know you're on it already. By the time you finished listening to this sentence, you'll be writing an email. Uh, yeah, there's some stuff here, uh, on young regents, uh, stress succession and things like that. So, okay. Yeah.

[00:41:01] Give us a, um, give us a quick breakdown, Nate. And, uh, I would love to compare that. Thanks, Nate. All right, moving on. Gurm stealing from Shakespeare, triple question mark. The dreamer. Look, everybody steals from Shakespeare. Let's all calm down now. Source. Uh, Denise, the dreamer,

[00:41:20] it seems episode three had so many Shakespearean parallels. Did anyone else pick up on that? I'm unsullied for the most part as far as fire and blood goes. So some of my impressions may be fleeting or wholly incorrect. Blackwoods and brackens as Montagues and Capulets called it,

[00:41:38] two families feuding for ages with no true reconciliation or recollection of how it all began. Very much the vicious, uh, sin begets sin cycle. Okay. Very good. And of course you have, you know, speaking of that, that whole thing of we forget how it all began.

[00:41:55] Think about conversation with for any saying, look, there are a lot of points we could say are the beginning of this and nobody's going to remember at the end. We're just going to know that a war happened.

[00:42:03] Right, right. And uh, go back to Corliss too, right? The, it doesn't, what happened in detail doesn't matter, but it's like, does, do you remember the names? Yeah. History remembers names. He's got a great voice. The grave diggers from Hamlet.

[00:42:18] There's a bit of back and forth between them regarding whether or not Ophelia deserves a Christian burial after dying at her own hand. Not unlike Jace and Raniera's conversation though, with less comedy, a lot less comedy, I would say.

[00:42:34] Hamlet's encounter with the grave diggers also leads to the iconic to be or not to be, which could easily be parallel for Raniera's path in this episode. Okay. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that at all actually.

[00:42:48] And that is, uh, I think that I want to hear right in again, Denise with some, with a few more thoughts around this. I want to, I want to hear you talk, talk a little bit more into this, that, that idea. I think it's interesting.

[00:43:02] Damon's dream at Harrenhal coupled with the appearance of Alice Rivers is similar to Macbeth being haunted by Banquo in part as a representation of his guilt, which ultimately is just part of the supernatural surroundings that keep him from

[00:43:21] attaining his goals. I like this. I liked a lot. It's very cool. It's good stuff. Cause yeah, Harrenhal is, is spooky AF. And uh, he's certainly him seeing a young Raniera at Millie Alcock was absolutely some guilty feelings, right? A little bit of raven. Raven.

[00:43:41] It's the first time we've seen him show regret of remorse the entire show. Ooh, that's interesting too, because then we see his nephew. Um, uh, because there's too many, there's too many things going on here. Uh, Agen's younger brother. Oh, Amon. Amen. Thank you.

[00:44:02] We see Amon's expressing his remorse and guilt to Sylvie. And so when he's less burdened with that, where Damon is keeping it in and keeping and holding onto to that stuff. And so now it's coming out in, in different manifestations. Yeah. I like it.

[00:44:22] You know what else is coming out? I've decided to start going back through the Matt Smith era of Dr. Who pulling clips that are like out of context, Damon, and putting them on. So right when the 11th doctor first regenerates,

[00:44:37] he does this whole bit where like nobody can make him anything that he likes to eat. And I put a whole meme together of like Damon, trying to get a good meal at Harrenhal. And he even says at one point,

[00:44:47] he's like, are you trying to poison me? And I was like, this is perfect. This is just the scene. It's perfect. That's great. Uh, and lastly, perhaps Alice, like the three witches will ultimately be the demise of Damon. Hmm.

[00:45:01] John, is that some hot lore? That's hot lore. Summer. Is that some wafer? What is it? What's your waffle? Watch and find out. Okay. Yeah. I can't tell you if, if, uh, I can't tell. I know how Damon is. I'm not going to say,

[00:45:16] I'm not going to say died because maybe he doesn't die on screen. We're all mortal. He's mortal. Yeah. Um, that's some hot waffle. Sure is. Does that work? Some hot waffle. It sounds like we're making the Texas shaped waffles we're talking about on

[00:45:31] second breakfast, right? That's right. Uh, switching quickly to the opening credits Marine D on the discord, the theme of weaving in the episode intro extending to young Raniera stitching the head of generic back on. All right.

[00:45:47] So she was just sort of calling out what, um, Nancy had mentioned earlier that, uh, we're getting a lot of, uh, stuff. I think we need to, you need to stop skipping John. You need to pay attention.

[00:45:58] What do you mean? Oh, the, oh, the, the stitch. I was like, what, what am I skipping? To the, uh, to the, uh, um, the tapestries. Right. Right. I always think of the, uh, what is it? The Indiana Jones,

[00:46:13] which one was that in when they, when they go to see the tapestries, when they go to the castle? Oh, I don't know. I've only seen tapestry. I've only seen the second one actually in my adult life. I'm sure I've seen the other ones as a kid,

[00:46:25] but I've only seen temple of doom because I had to again, screen that for my audio jobs. I'm having an aneurysm. I don't think you are. I think you're all right. I'm shocked. Shocked. You haven't, you've only seen the second one.

[00:46:39] Oh my God. Eventually I'll watch. What's wrong with your generation? Well, have you seen Indiana Jones throughout my lifetime? It's not good. Yeah. The third one was good. Third one was good. The first one, the second one had its, the Latin.

[00:46:55] I'm talking about the ones that have come out in my life. No, yeah, no. The, those two are, are hot, hot garbage. Oh, I'm going to get added now. I'm in trouble. I know some people did like the, uh, the most recent one. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:08] Production comments read Zippy three 30 on the discord. I'm thrilled to type, quote, it's a dark scene, but I can see, thank the seven gods. I can see. I think you were also rejoicing that they fixed their production issues around.

[00:47:20] They finally got it. I'm getting my new TV by the way. Oh, are you? When's that? Super excited. It should arrive Saturday. Very exciting. I couldn't get to a, I could not afford a, uh, OLED. That's just a crazy expensive. Yeah.

[00:47:37] You can find them used on sale sometimes, but it's, it's tough. It's tough. I'm not going to buy a used TV. Yeah. Especially cause you got the burn in with OLED so you don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:48] And also I don't have a, we don't have big enough wall space in our house. We have a huge house, but we don't have the wall space for a 50 anything larger. I like, I got a 43 inch Q led. Uh,

[00:47:59] I forget what brand I got. I think I got a TCL. Okay. Which had a, it was a good price. It had good reviews. Like I, it took me like weeks to figure out what to buy. And so,

[00:48:09] cause our old Samsung, which has like a one inch bevel around it. And it's like, it's very dark. So it was even worse. It was like, darkness upon compound darkness. So. You know, it's, it's interesting. I have my, it is 4k,

[00:48:23] but I have my old 4k like regular LCD in my basement office now. Oh, right. And I fired it up for the first time in a while recently. And I was like, man, the newer TVs just are a different level of stuff.

[00:48:41] And that's what I was even thinking. Just if I just got a regular led, that's going to be so much better than what I have now. So, which is just an old led basically. Anyway, Easter dragon eggs, quote unquote, Easter Cyrus face palm on discord.

[00:48:56] For those who are wondering, it seems like the show is confirming that Danny's eggs are laid by Cyrax. This looks to be a quotation. Possibly. It appears the show is making a major if completely understandable change from the book. Those are Danny's eggs.

[00:49:12] The episode director Gita Vansant Patel told Mashable, all of us who work on this show are big game of Thrones fans. So it was very exciting to shoot that scene. I'm not a fan of that theory because Danny's dragons look nothing like Cyrax.

[00:49:29] Maybe, maybe Vagar will tell Cyrax, keep trying Cyrax. Eventually it will look like you. There's lore in the books where the physical characteristics of dragons tend to match its mother in looks, not necessarily in the color or hue, but in terms of some key aesthetics.

[00:49:49] And we've got a whole bunch more of dragon stuff coming up as well, especially about dragon bonds and things like that. Any thoughts on Cyrax and eggs? I'm fine with them making, I just think that you're going to have these member berries to fund the show

[00:50:05] guys. You know what I mean? The same way that you're always going to have a Skywalker mentioned tangentially in star Wars, right? You just need, you need a lightsaber in your star Wars. You need, it's just,

[00:50:16] it's going to be there because you need somebody to point out the screen and do the Leo meme. The newest trailer for alien Romulus, so the newest film in that franchise, there's one blip of a sound from the motion tractor of the,

[00:50:31] of the movie of aliens. And when you hear that man, it is so activating and it's, they don't overblow it. They don't, you know, go crazy with it, but they give you that one little ping sound.

[00:50:44] And it really does work. And I think it's, I think it's fine. I think the thing that drove me crazy about star Wars animated stuff was that it was like every episode, eight or nine times an episode of sound. I'm fine with that. First of all, the sound,

[00:51:01] like why wouldn't it sound the same in the same universe? Yeah, but they were using sounds from different ships for different. It just didn't, it was just the, every time. And it was like, a laser sounds like a laser.

[00:51:11] Sound like they actually took the sound itself and not even made a new sound for it, but like took the record, the original recordings out. All right. All right. It was just too much. Mr. Cranky pants. Let's move on.

[00:51:22] Put grandpa to bed. So there was something else I was going to say too. Oh, well moving on. Abigail Abby said by email, this is Abby's email about those eggs. Oh, I know what I was going to say. We'll finish our email.

[00:51:35] I'll finish our email. I'll finish our email. I'll finish our email. I'll finish our email. About those eggs. Oh, I know what I was going to say. We'll finish our email and then I'll make my point about those eggs.

[00:51:43] I am not a huge fan of the show theory, but I understand why they went with it. You got to give a wink wink from time to time to game of Thrones show fans. And it kind of works.

[00:51:53] It also says to me that they will not adapt anything earlier in the timeline. Egg number four. Is there a chance for Raina to finally get a dragon? Bela hinted as much when they parted. And this was, uh,

[00:52:07] my point. Oh, I know what I was going to say was, I actually don't like the direct, did the director confirmed it or that they confirmed the Eric and Eric who was who, who fell on the sword.

[00:52:20] I liked the ambiguity and I liked the engagement. Like we were all like, well, is this, and this reason why? And yeah, it's, you know, I liked the discourse. This is listen guys,

[00:52:33] we do a podcast where we enjoy the show and we do this out of the joy of it. And all these companies, they go out and they're like, let's make an official podcast. And they totally forget why people listen to podcasts,

[00:52:47] which is so that they don't just get the show sold to them, but instead get to hear an honest critique of it. Do you rise and stargaze and yeah, right. There's something about the, the hodgepodge nature of podcasts,

[00:53:01] the sort of CD or pants nature of podcasting that I think that these official podcasts are kind of just like totally missing the Mark on. Don't even get me started on the, uh, the rewatch my old show thing with all of the, all the,

[00:53:16] all the casts of like the B-list actors who go back to their old shows. I'm like, all right, enough of that. Everyone go, go back to work. The muck up our ratings for our show reactions there. Cause they're in the same category and Apple podcast.

[00:53:31] I'd be nuts to the bros guys. Yeah, it's crazy. All right. Heron hall, David Mack on the discord. I love the meal at Heron hall and the awkward back and forth. That was a lot of fun. I, the humor was perfect. Simon, uh,

[00:53:45] Simon, the Castellane was an absolute breath of fresh air and just a perfect counterbalance to Damon's seriousness and stalking around the castle and stuff. And this was a fun subversion of expectations, right? Because looking back, it makes sense.

[00:53:59] Like obviously Laris is going to move somebody and rub somebody the wrong way. He's, he's constantly a weirdo to everyone and he's constantly clearly out for his own ends. And I do think that will something that we learned about Laris is this whole

[00:54:14] interaction is that he's very smart, but he's not as smart as he thinks he is. And people notice that he's slimy, right? Anyway, that's my, that's my Laris spiel. Ready for some girl talk. I'm ready for girl talk.

[00:54:28] Red Zippy three 30, a part of her email, a quick email today. Excellent episode. I love that the writers gave Alison and Raniera a chance to talk about what Viscera said on the deathbed. If it were to happen in game of Thrones,

[00:54:40] it would have taken an entire season to land. Now Alison has the weight of doubt added to her burden as a, and as a, Emma Darcy said in the inside, the episode, it moved Raniera to choosing her title instead of just inheriting it.

[00:54:57] Her father did want her to be queen. That's an interesting thing. I didn't listen to that. I like this, that Raniera now, she might've had, there was always maybe like a one or 2% doubt. Like did he really give me up on the, on his deathbed? But now it's,

[00:55:14] she's not going to give up. Give me up on the honest right bed. But now it's, she's clear and she, that's going to change her, um, her positioning with all of this stuff. Okay. But at the same time, do you think if, and here, here's,

[00:55:30] here's a real question. Do you think if Alison didn't say the Prince that was promising and Raniera walked away thinking that her dad actually did disinherit her? Do you think she would have considered surrendering to avoid the war?

[00:55:48] Like as much as she found personal joy and personal fulfillment in this, this was a net negative for the realm. I think that's a good point. That's a really good point. I, my question while they were having the conversation up into the point where the

[00:56:04] whole, you know, uh, uh, song of ice and fire clues got dropped was how the hell is she going to get out of there? And I think that, uh, and then that would have had big repercussions, right? Uh,

[00:56:18] and, and I don't think she would have gotten out of the sea. She might've got it out of the, the septa safely, but like getting out of the city, I don't think she would have made it. And so that counterbalanced Alison's because now that she's like,

[00:56:31] you gotta get out of here because they both know that, Oh, you know, something's wrong. But what if they didn't say that? Right. And, and what if, what if Raniera did get away and she was able to, to get back, would she pursue a strongly,

[00:56:49] a course of war or whatever her stratagems are? I think she would always be compromised. I think there would always be some doubt that would affect her decision making. Yeah, I think so. I think she might because we've already seen her expressed out and,

[00:57:04] and clearly after Luke died, she was, she had more resolved to fight. But if she gets here, cause I don't think she ever believed that Viserys disinherited her. Sure. She doubted, right. But when she gets here,

[00:57:18] I think she would have walked away being like, all right, well, you know what? If, if my dad really did disinherit me for whatever reason, maybe because I didn't visit him for so long. Like remember they had to introduce Viserys to him for the first time. Yeah.

[00:57:33] Maybe Viserys. I think there's a real chance she goes back to her war hungry black council and says, look, I'm sorry for wasting your time. I'm going to go pledge fealty to Aegon just to, just to get this over with.

[00:57:45] I don't, I don't want to fight dragon versus dragon. Now of course she's like, well, this sucks guys. I mean, you're going to take my inheritance right out from underneath me. Absolutely not. And that's it. And give it to Aegon.

[00:57:57] A net negative for the realm. Who we know is, you know, bloodthirsty. Right. So now you have, you have the awful Aegon. You have her having a rightful claim. Yeah. And you have her blatantly seeing the hypocrisy of Alison. Yeah. It's a problem. It's a problem.

[00:58:17] And people are going to, yeah, people are going to lose their lives because of it. Nate on the discord. Raniera is right. Alison's is not an Alison knows that. Yeah, for sure. Abby by email. We got a cool scene with fave characters interacting with another,

[00:58:33] with each other in great disguise. Raniera looked amazing in that outfit. So I didn't need to, uh, didn't need to be extremely smart. It made good television. Agreed. It was, uh, I was really amped up during that whole thing because I had no idea what that

[00:58:45] was going to result in and how they were going to get out of it. Athena a on discord. I know Raniera was likened to the conciliator Targaryen, but I was a little disappointed that she didn't offer Alison anything to barter

[00:58:59] with. That's an interesting point. She was just like, can there be peace? But then the only option she gave was put me on the throne or fight. No middle ground. Like, Hey, marry our kids. Otherwise I liked that they had this conversation.

[00:59:13] A lot of times you ask the question, if people could have a frank conversation, could they come to an agreement? And in this case, both sides, both sides have heard each other too much for that to happen. Yeah. As always Raniera should be queen.

[00:59:27] She just has this gravitas and rationality that is so refreshing. Oh, Raniese, sorry. Raniese as always Raniese should be queen. God, I can't even read these names. She just has the gravitas and rationality that is so refreshing.

[00:59:38] She doesn't hold back a hundred percent agree. I'm here for rain, the reign of Raniese. Yeah. And just to respond quickly, they will never, these people will never be able to live in King's Landing together at peace. Right? Like they just will never trust each other.

[00:59:53] Someone's always going to be around the corner with a dagger and you can't live like that. So war is here. All right, David, let's take a quick break. When we get back, we will resume our conversation. We'll be right back with more house of the dragon.

[01:00:13] We've got more feedback with house of the dragon. Okay. Let's get into some character talk. Team green, Alison, Vanessa on the discord said, Alison thinks the entire affair was this was a sin and now she's being punished for it by what happened to Helena. Yeah, that's, you know,

[01:00:34] she tried to confess, but her dad just didn't want to hear it. Agon, Nancy M this is our hand of the pod episode one. I had good thoughts about Agon last episode. They started to waver,

[01:00:47] but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He had just lost his son, his legacy and who wouldn't want to stand up to Otto? Well, after episode three, he's definitely back in my bad books. Who hires their drinking and carousing buddies to be their security?

[01:01:02] A 20 year old. Did you ever watch entourage John? Entourage? No. I just know Michael Scott saying it like that on the office. It was a fun show. It was a very interesting look into having an entourage like that. Helena Abby says, what do we think of?

[01:01:20] What do you, what do we think Helena is forgiving Alison for the fling with Kristen Cole, the crowning of Agon, getting him in the position of King was indirectly the reason why her kid was murdered or for some other sin. She was never warm towards her mother before,

[01:01:36] always avoiding being touched, et cetera, or something bigger yet to occur. And I think we talked about this on the main pod that this, yeah, I love this idea that she's forgiving her in advance. Yeah. Cause Helena's living in this past present future smear of time thing.

[01:01:53] And, and of course, Alison is super good at making sure that whatever she hears will be molded to what she wants it to be. Abby by email. I will not add anything else about Helena. I like Nancy's interpretation of the forgiveness being for the ordeal of the

[01:02:10] funeral. Okay. So Nancy had said something that about that, about the small folk and the mothers who lose lose their babies. Then again, it's Helena. So it can be something else entirely. Fascinating character. I do love that some things are left ambiguous.

[01:02:24] I do too. I like a little mystery. There was a, the whole thing about things floating in the air last, not last episode of the episode before last that we don't have it here and it's

[01:02:34] still sort of left ambiguous. I like it when they do that. I liked, I like a little questioning. Right. Speaking of which Vanessa on discord, when Helena looked up at the people, she saw snowflakes. She is a dreamer,

[01:02:48] so maybe they will make her a Cassandra ie say more things to more than one person and they will not think that she's just an enduring mystery per a guy. And I too,

[01:03:01] I truly think that Alison was checking in on Helena as it only has been a few days. I'm not sure if she blames her mother for being with Sir Christian Cole or for making her do the funeral.

[01:03:13] She was talking about it and no longer being sad about the murder of her son. I don't know how she is walking around, but Alison thought it was for being in bed with Sir Christian. But can the queen please have guards?

[01:03:27] I don't understand why we never see her with anyone, especially after the murder. Seriously. Right. Big problems in that Agon let not only let Kristen Cole who is a very good and that Agon let not only let Kristen Cole who is responsible for,

[01:03:46] you know, the posting of the guards and the behavior and the G he's the captain of their ship, right? He's ultimately responsible. He really failed upwards. Right. He got promoted to end of the gang. What is that called? When you when you constantly visit there's some, yeah,

[01:04:03] you get promoted to the point of incompetence. That's right. All of your incompetence. Which is, I think what auto sees, which is why I said that he says you're going to regret this. So right, right. Otto is very competent at getting what exactly what he wants done.

[01:04:19] Speaking of Kristen Kyle M by email, Kristen Cole, I know he has other responsibilities of the hand now, but I still feel it speaks poorly of his command that Raniera got that close to Allison and that Agon was stumbling around a brothel whipping

[01:04:35] open curtains that any reasonably competent assassin could have been hiding behind with a sword to run through the dumb king's throat. It's no small feat to be considered the most incompetent character on the show, but man, this handsome goon is making a heck of a run at it.

[01:04:53] This is what drove me crazy was, uh, Agon run around with what did you say? The bros guard? Was that what you called it? Yeah, I think the bros guard. The bros guard. Maybe the boys guard. No, I think it was the bros guard.

[01:05:04] Um, but without any sober, there was no designated driver with this crew, right? There was no responsible person who like is an actual real soldier thinking about this stuff. There's no secret service sweeping the area beforehand. Right.

[01:05:20] And you're at war and you've already had two assassination attempts, one each way. It's, it's wild to me that they're, they're this loose with their security.

[01:05:29] DJ Miwa on the discord was listening to the pod and I think Kristen was being utterly naive by thinking that killing Raniera would quote unquote end the war. Firstly, Jace would stake his claim, but more importantly, there would be absolutely nothing stopping Damon.

[01:05:44] This is a really good point. Nothing's stopping Damon from doing even more Damon things. Even alive, Raniera is barely keeping him in check. First off, good to hear from you DJ Miwa.

[01:05:54] I haven't, uh, we haven't seen you much around, but I know you've been active on the discord recently. Uh, who is in DJ Miwa as a lore master. So thank you for that. Oh yeah. Uh, but this is a really, really good point.

[01:06:07] The only, I mean, the only reason Damon hasn't gone and nuked King's Landing is because Raniera stopped him. Yeah, I, I totally agree.

[01:06:17] I think, I think he would have, he would have said everyone who has a fighting dragon follow me, let's go kill Vigar, pin him, pin her down. And then we'll go and burn the red keep until only the chair's left. As he would call it the chair.

[01:06:31] As a Renee says, uh, if only you were the King, right? That little line. Yep. Yep. All right. Uh, Amend Sid S we've got a nice good email here. Um, Hey fellas, mandatory long time lurker. First time poster here. Hey Sid, thanks for writing in.

[01:06:49] Good to hear from you. I've been listening to you guys since the Mandalorian. Oh, nice. Which I loved your coverage of. I kept up with you on Loki all the way through. Uh, your commentary and Shogun got me through a maddening 40 minute commute to work every weekday morning.

[01:07:03] Cheers to you guys and your dedication. Cheers to you Sid for hanging out with us. And it's certainly great to have you here. Uh, Sid has some things about, um, on not being able to offer a subscription, you know, support a subscription at this moment. Sid, you're listening.

[01:07:19] That's all that matters. And that goes just for anybody. Like we all have our different circumstances and whether we can subscribe or not. Seasons pass, regular subscription. That's what's important to us is that you're here hanging out for everybody.

[01:07:32] And absolutely those who are always welcome to come around. That's right. And thanks for writing in, uh, getting into his email ring, ring kissing aside, I have a theory about the scene in episode three.

[01:07:44] I think you might find interesting as it relates to this most recent episode, as you recounted the watchers bearing witness to the chaos of an undisciplined green council. You noted a man licking his chops.

[01:07:57] There's an interesting dynamic happening in the subtext that you didn't mention as it relates to the one eyed angry boys demeanor.

[01:08:05] When crispy presents his plan to write out to the river lands and to add to their host, as they venture forth to Heron hall, Amon is playing with a coin in his hand. This could be interesting.

[01:08:18] The last time we saw crispy discuss war tasks, ticks with vagar's alleged master. Amen was proposing that exact plan to Kristen as Amon moved coins about the map strewn in front of them. Ah, this is really good. This is a good pickup.

[01:08:37] Then suddenly as the council meeting to which Amon was, uh, on time and crispy was late, crispy likely feeling the pressure of the ring of golden hands around his neck. Bud, what is you doing?

[01:08:51] Presents the plan as his own to the council taking the credit for a glorious and clever plan from Amon right in front of him. This is a really good pickup. This is, I totally missed this. I saw him.

[01:09:05] I remember him playing with the coin because I remember him. I remember the scene of him like holding it in front of his eye and, and, uh, that was a very strong scene. All right. Continuing with the email, adding insult to engineering.

[01:09:17] Amen is excluded from his own glorious plan after being tasked with guarding King's landing as if receiving no credit for concocting the plan wasn't enough to hurt him as ego. I like to think this tiny detail is the epitome of the Craven opportunism.

[01:09:34] The green council was essentially established on backstabbing as they reach for power. It was a nice touch in my opinion of great consequence. I have no idea.

[01:09:47] I didn't read the books, but perhaps crispy's transparent shame and fear of losing what he's taken for himself will continue to fracture relationships with the very people who put them in this position. It's poetic in my opinion.

[01:10:00] Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my wordy analysis of the moment in this latest episode. Great episode. Fasten my seatbelt. Can't wait to see where the story takes us. Thanks again for your hard work that you pour into your content. Sincerely appreciated. Please don't stop.

[01:10:13] Uh, Sid, uh, do not stop sending in these emails and these two kinds of takes. This is quality. This was really good. John. Quality. Quality. I, I, I really love, I really love this take because I, I'm.

[01:10:27] It makes me re think about this scene where, you know, when, when Agon says, Oh, so you'll take Vigar then. And Kristen says no, a Vigar and Amond will stay at the city to defend it. And Amon looks at him. He's silent for a second.

[01:10:44] And he just goes good. He does. Right. Give some one like good. Yeah. I completely just, that whole scene makes sense now. Yeah. Yeah. It's so much better. It was a little weird to me at the time. So I appreciate you bringing this to light.

[01:11:00] So this makes a lot more sense now. Good stuff. Uh, red Zippy, uh, again by email, my take on the full frontal nudity of Amon was that it demonstrated that Amon's armor is internal. It is a state of mind.

[01:11:14] He does not need to wear his cloak sword or eye patch to step into the role of warrior capital W. The actor was able to convey that Amon can move from vulnerability to strength with a mindset and self-control without any of the quote unquote dressing of a king.

[01:11:32] That is also a very interesting take. And I think that's spot on because he just stands up and he's like, and he actually puts his crotch in front of his brother's face. Yeah.

[01:11:43] I mean, look, it's like if you, if you shit your pants in public, you don't want to clench because everyone's going to know it's you. You got to walk out with pride. Yeah. You've been on a poop train recently.

[01:11:56] I think that's like my first, my third poop story this week. It's because I have toddlers. Yes, it's true. You're in the phase. Yep. Yep. You're in the phase.

[01:12:03] Oh, I was going to say this the other day too, on the second breakfast thing, just cause you're quote unquote potty training now doesn't mean that it's over. You're finished. It actually extends for many years yet. There's a lot of bathroom stuff still to go. Yeah.

[01:12:15] I w I don't worry. I wasn't expecting somebody to hand me the certificate of you're done parenting. Yeah, exactly. Right. There's this whole expectation like you're done now. Anyway, it's ridiculous. Yep. Carrying on Laris, uh, Abby by email. I do find layers very interesting and every interesting feeling.

[01:12:31] We really can't define what exactly his goals are, but he's a master manipulator. He did get a promotion this episode. He will of course do what he always did. But in addition, he now gets a seat at the King's small council as master of whispers.

[01:12:47] As various had the same job description in the more recent, uh, or the, the earlier game of thrones, the seat was vacant because the Sarah's didn't want one. Uh-huh. That's interesting. So he'll have one of those little, uh, marble orbs to put into the little pocket.

[01:13:04] Oh, you gotta have an orb. Cool. I mean, so somebody said it's like, if you're a movement, they disappear. Right. They teleport away. Kevin C, uh, see this is about characters. Not, not likely, not on team green. Kevin C email.

[01:13:21] I'm sure I'm not the only one to point this out, but the serving girl who is called over in the off scene in the brothel. Isn't that Diana? The handmade who Agon raped in the previous season. The one Allison paid off and sent away.

[01:13:36] Seems like it focuses on her a little too much for it to be coincidence. I see a striking resemblance between the two characters. Uh, and Nancy M looks like Diana who took the moon T from Allison. That's a, that's a dumb. So that's her. That's her.

[01:13:51] I mean, I, um, yeah, you call it, I put it in her character entry in the show guide that she shows up in season two in a pub. So there you go. We're in a tavern. I think I wrote tavern because that feels more true to this universe.

[01:14:04] All right. Let's switch over to team black and Damon Chris M on, on their email. I've kind of had a different takeaway from Damon's taking Heron hall, which feel, which feeds into the friction of episode two.

[01:14:19] My read was that he's trying to establish his own base of support. All right. This is good. I like this take. In my opinion, the show seems to be making this messier like war of the two and a half.

[01:14:32] War of the two and a half monarchs, maybe plus another half, depending on what's up with a moment. Uh, I like this. The main factions are Agon and Ranira sure. But Damon and Amond are not a hundred percent loyal and are setting up their own mini factions.

[01:14:48] I don't think it's a conscious thing that Damon part, but he's just been booted out of the black council for being loose with his commands and has decided to claim his own seat of power.

[01:14:58] Just in case the way he keeps trying to insert himself as Ranira's equal rather than just her consort, maybe double down on this take. In my opinion, this sort of friction makes more sense for certain future events down the line.

[01:15:14] Some hot lore there, uh, some hot waffle the way the book has a Damon and Ranira faithful consort general from day one. It really emphasizes how fragile and tentative both coalitions are under the surface rather than a simple and clean black versus greens.

[01:15:33] And I would add that Renease even says that she says specifically everywhere he goes, he needs to be, you know, the math. I forget what she, how she phrases it, but basically says he's got to be the big man wherever he goes.

[01:15:47] He's got to be the dog, right? Like that's, that's the word. Say the word again. I miss my heart, you know? You know, I don't know that word. It's a big shot. It's a Yiddish word. Oh, okay. Got it. Um, like a Todrick. Yeah, sorry.

[01:16:04] Like the Baba ganoush. Yes. I'm just going to say a different word every time. Maybe one day I'll read it. Skippy be Bob. All right. Um, I like this take and I, I think Chris is very right. I think, um, Damon isn't taking this for Renear.

[01:16:22] I think he's taking it for himself. Yeah, it's, it's tough to say, especially without spoilers, but I think that waffle waffle, but also as far as what we know now, I don't think that somebody's ego disappears just because circumstances change a little bit. Right. Agreed. Agreed.

[01:16:43] He's not changed that much. I think he matured a little bit through his marriage to Lena, but he's still the same Damon we saw in early season one. Absolutely.

[01:16:53] And the same one who grabbed her by the throat and, and, uh, the same one who was knocking cops around. So that's all still. He's got the same core. He's learned to dress it up a little better. All right.

[01:17:07] Uh, Kathy by email, not specific to this week at all. Just had to give a giggle for myself.

[01:17:14] I don't know if anyone who's watched the crown is also finding it pretty funny that Matt Smith is kind of playing Prince Philip again, but with dragons, a very dominant type of man with a wife more powerful than him.

[01:17:27] Damon struggling with his place just one step behind her. I'm not complaining. He's very good at being petulant and petty. This is a good take too. I know. I don't think you watched the crown. Did you, John? I did not. I tried watching a couple episodes.

[01:17:39] It just wasn't for me. Sure. I just, you know, it's 2024 stop having monarchs. England. I mean, get over it. Says the man who's doing a week to three podcasts a week on the dragon. Oh, you know what? It's all fake. Just like the year.

[01:17:53] Just like the English monarch should be. Keep, keep throwing those darts at England, John. I mean, I really, I think I threw darts at Canada, Europe generally and England today. And I'm. Oh, by the way, happy Canada day. Take off your hosers. Oh, it was happy Canada.

[01:18:10] It's Canada day. Oh boy. Maybe I shouldn't have talked to them about their Tim Hortons today. You were petulant. Just got today. Uh, I like this take. It's very good. Matt Smith was amazing. Uh, the crown is an amazing series.

[01:18:25] The early seasons, I think I dropped off at around, I think four or something. But yeah, this, this dynamic of being, um, uh, in a, in a patriarchal society where he has to be the number two relative.

[01:18:40] So yeah, it's definitely a rule that he's played before and I think he's bringing some of that experience with him. A note from the hand of the pod, go to the show notes under episode guide for

[01:18:50] season one for a synopsis of the book by Gina McIntyre's House of the Dragon Inside the Creation of a Targaryen Dynasty. In the book is this quote from the show runner, Ryan Condal, that the show exactly, um, has, uh, how right Marilyn is.

[01:19:09] Matt Smith's work as Prince Philip on the crown made Condal think he'd be perfect for Damon. Oh, okay. This is nice. This is some serious confirmation. He did a lot of intricate and subtle work on that show playing a member of the

[01:19:21] royal house who constantly find himself as the also ran the second in line. All right. I like some, some good, you should, you should maybe just go back and watch that Matt Smith episodes of the crown. I bought some of it. I see what you're saying.

[01:19:36] And also like you gotta remember, I watched three seasons of Matt Smith is the doctor on Dr. Who. So I know the subtlety equate. I know. Yeah. But at the same time, I know that he has subtlety, right?

[01:19:50] The doctor is such a, I know everyone looks at it as like camp, but like it is a hard role to play. It's true. It is a really hard role to play. You have to kind of mimic. Yeah.

[01:20:01] Like 60 years of acting, but you also have to make it your own. The tiny whininess of the doctor, right? Right. He's right. You've got to incorporate all of that. You have to be otherworldly yet relatable. You have to be traumatized yet fun.

[01:20:14] It's such a, it's such a wild range and actually think Matt Smith is one of the best people who ever captured that emotional range. Nice. I believe that we took Nancy's cause so hand of the pod, Nancy wrote an article

[01:20:30] summarizing this book and we put that in the show guide, but I believe somebody took the link today and put it in the open discord. Cause I think that you can read that article for free.

[01:20:40] I think we made that one and we're, and that's going to go up. We're actually putting together like a blog site where we can have articles, written articles and stuff like that. And it's definitely going to go up in that. So look for that.

[01:20:49] We'll have some more information later in the season once we get that fired up. Moving on Miss Aria, uh, John P y'all keep saying Miss Aria is a book. Yeah. We think we talked about that. John, thank you. I said I would credit you on the feedback pod.

[01:21:03] Thank you for correcting. Miss Aria is a book character. I don't know why I started calling her not a book character. She is a book character. Um, Kyle M uh, regarding Miss Aria, say what you will about Miss Aria, but the

[01:21:16] woman is efficient also do not say anything bad about her. I will get very angry. She might be my favorite character on the show. Now. Uh, I love the fact in, in he continues on about the fact that he loves that, um,

[01:21:28] she went back and parlayed the, um, a warning of the guards into a position at court. So it's a good, Miss Aria would be a tremendous influencer. That's true. Very popular. She'd have that Riz. My cat is stepping on my keyboard. So if that goes anywhere, apologize. Stop.

[01:21:47] I think I should name my neck. I want a cat next. I've had dogs my whole life. Oh yeah. I think next time I get a pet, I'm going to get a cat and I think I'm going to

[01:21:53] name it after one of the dragons and house of the dragon. Oh, I like that. That'd be very cool. Yeah. All right. Team black, Raniera, Alicia on the discord, the under, oh, uh, Raina, sorry. My, my apologies.

[01:22:04] Uh, the underdevelopment of Raina and Bela is one of the, my biggest peeves of last season. Glad they're taking a more prominent role now, but we missed out on a lot. So they feel a little under form. John, do you have any comments about, uh, Raina and Bela?

[01:22:20] I agree, but I think we're, we, I think all of the kids were a little underformed and that's okay. Cause now we're starting to focus on them here. Now that the war is fully going, I think we're going to have more time with them

[01:22:32] and we're going to have a good time getting to know them. In this war. Yeah. Um, the, it w it was hard too, because we had to move season one around a lot and they were little, right? They were still going up. Actors.

[01:22:45] There were three sets of actors. Right. Right. I believe for some of these characters, at least. Abby on the discord, uh, Raina not having a tryout with C smoke is a good point. We still don't know how much of what exactly is going on with the dragon bonds.

[01:23:01] Maybe she didn't try because she was forever bitter about losing Vagar and it never crossed her mind to try. Also, it's a two way, two way thing. Question mark. It's not just the writer who picks a random dragon and hops on the dragon question has a choice.

[01:23:17] These creatures have a minds and moods of their own. And there was a whole bunch of conversation about like, yeah, what's going on with dragon writers and their bonds. And, um, you know, what happens with dragons if their writer has died?

[01:23:32] And I think we have some lane or stuff here. Yeah. I just want to say Rina could have tried to get Vagar before, you know, before her, her cousin, but she just didn't. And that's, you know, I, I do think that perhaps she's a bit overcautious with

[01:23:49] dragons at the same time. I don't want to walk up to Vagar and be like, let me on you. Not now. Certainly. Yeah. But yeah, even in general, I mean, it took a, a man quite a lot to, to muster up courage, right? Yeah.

[01:24:01] He almost got thrown off. Yeah. So, uh, more about lane or my only thought is if Rene goes to Rena, Rena goes to Pinto, she can find out what happened to lane or as they were obviously teasing that in the scene right before showing his dragon being restless.

[01:24:22] Uh, thoughts on that. Is that some hot lore or we, um. Well, it's not hot lore. Here's the, here's the problem is that the show, the book killed lane or at the time straight up, he, that whole dead, his death was faked in the show. Okay. Just dead.

[01:24:40] He was just murdered. It didn't, nobody knew which in the show you could read it as well. The death faking work. Right. But because of that, we don't have anything else to go on afterward. Right? So, so here's the fan theory.

[01:24:54] And I think you may have removed a comment about this, but the fan theory now is, well, if C smoke is suddenly restless, does that mean that lane or died in SOS? I thought I left that comment in, did I, did I exit out?

[01:25:08] It might be in a different part. Yeah. No, I see. I see that later. Actually. I see it on the dragon section, but we can talk about it now. What do you think? You think leaner is dead now? Honest speculation. Like it's not in the book.

[01:25:20] Look, the, the whole C smoke thing, the whole question, they're absolutely playing with it. You don't, the, these guys are playing at a level where you don't put that little stuff in unless there's some kind of hook. Yeah.

[01:25:33] And I think they're, they're raising the question of what it actually ends up being. I have no ability to predict that other than they're, they're raising a point and it's gonna get some, some, some answer to this question of what happens to a

[01:25:50] dragon writer and their dragon is gotta get resolved. And I was wondering too, is, is it geographic? Can, how far can they feel the bond? Maybe it's a, you know, so far away, maybe he's really far away and, and, and maybe that's why C smoke is.

[01:26:04] So regardless, they, they put it there for a reason that I'm a hundred percent sure about. All right. All right. Very good. Melissa by email. Hi, Laura Lorehounds. I hope you will talk about this minor point that confused me in episode three.

[01:26:20] This is all about where the kids are going and going to Pentos and the veil and all that stuff. And I think we, we worked it out, right? We did talk about that on the podcast. We have, we have a stopover, right?

[01:26:34] We have a, a layover flight here with dragons. So you've got, you've got Marina taking the kids to the veil, leaving Joffrey and his dragon there, then sailing across the sea. Right. I think that was, they, they did say it kind of confusingly in the show, but I

[01:26:49] think that's where we're at. Yeah. And that way a dragon in the veil and the kids and the eggs for lineage sake are in Ventos far from action. And, and another dragon in a social them too.

[01:27:02] And not a fighting size dragon, but so as you can one dragon left in the veil, one dragon sent over to SOS with them. That's right. All right. Abby by in regard, Abby, I'm getting, starting to lose it here. We're almost done here. I crossed out other things.

[01:27:19] Thank you. By email. I do look forward to how they explain and what they do. And to be clear, if we're crossing out stuff, it's like minor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was literally just like, if two people made the same point, yeah, we picked one. Sorry.

[01:27:33] I do look forward to how they explain and what they do with the new characters. Hugh, Ulf, Alan, Adam that are familiar to book readers, but we can't know for sure how they're going to be developed in the show.

[01:27:44] I would also be interested to hear more Valerian being spoken, getting some dragon names and Valerian would be nice. I mean, those who have common tongue names like moon dancer and see smoke sunfire and dream fire. Do you have Valerian names? Uh, Vez, pairs, Zeev, there's this. Okay.

[01:28:05] Don't try it. And EDI. Yeah. This, I remember I lived in, in Budapest for a number of years, man, trying to learn Hungarian that's unlike making my eyes cross. I speak one line in Lithuanian. Do you know that? I do. I do not know that.

[01:28:23] I can say, I'm sorry. I don't speak Lithuanian. That's a first show I snuck up with Lutuvishke. That is a tongue twister. That is a good one. I don't remember why I learned that. Yeah, that is a very strange reason. Anybody speak Lithuanian in the audience?

[01:28:38] Moving on to, well, we check the, uh, check the, um, the podcast thing to see if we have, um, listeners there. Dragons, Vanessa, Discord, George required that dragons look very different and they have definitely succeeded. I think that Raniera and Damon know their dragons by their cries.

[01:28:56] They have only shown Damon specifically calling Caraxes. He just shows up when he needs him, which is how it seemed to work in the books. No, they, they, they have only shown Damon specifically calling Caraxes. Yeah, not maybe not calling Caraxes, right? He just shows up, right?

[01:29:13] That's, that's what I'm getting here. Uh, I think it's implied that Raniera has the same control with Cyrax. The dragon's personality is said to reflect that of its writers. Raniera is very connected to her dragon as she started writing at six. Raniera hasn't been out.

[01:29:29] They haven't shown us her out. Oh no, she was when she was looking for, um, for Luke. So she was out. Yeah. Yeah. Did a little writing. Sadie on the discord. What if Lenor actually died? Is that why Seasmoke is acting up?

[01:29:43] Marilyn, our favorite Tolkien scholar on the discord. I'm interested to hear that not all dragons are quote unquote fighting dragons who gets to decide that and what other kinds of dragons can there be? Or is this more of a question of all dragons are naturally fierce, but only

[01:30:00] some of them or are, or can be trained to fight with humans on their back. Um, and we've got another, so those are two separate points. So yeah, we, we kind of talked about Lenor and Seasmoke, so got some hot lore there. Yeah.

[01:30:14] And, and I think the, the dragon thing got settled in the discord. Just, they're just saying that they're not ready to fight yet. Like they are pretty small. Got it. Got it. They're babies, right? Because they were hatched with the babies. Right.

[01:30:25] And then the, the, the, the baby and the dragon grow up together conceivably and in parallel. All right. Nate on the discord thinking about Bailon or dragon, you'd want to assess enemy dragons before any combat, even if all the dragons are eventually fighting

[01:30:42] dragons, Baylor's dragon is big enough to fight and could have roasted crispy pole in his group. But there's a reason she's been given a recon missions and told to stay far, far away from any serious dragons.

[01:30:55] I think of it like a reconnaissance plane versus a fighter jet, a Vegar or a craxys would easily take down some of the smaller, younger dragons. So for Baylor's instructions were stay high and far away, but when she saw

[01:31:09] the glint, and then there was some question about this, like, how did she see that glint? I think her dragon saw it and turned its head and then she followed the line of sight and then saw that glint. And it was too far to know what that was.

[01:31:22] So she had to go down and get a closer look. Now, did she, you know, have a little fun getting Gawain to piss his pants? I think so. Oh, he definitely pissed his pants. Like I'm so convinced on that. Yeah. And she had fun chasing him, right?

[01:31:35] She was like, ah, let's go see what these guys do because it was not a, a big, you know, it wasn't a big group. It wasn't a large army that she was coming down on.

[01:31:45] It was just a handful of writers and she needed to identify who they were. So it was exceeding her orders a little bit. Um, you know, to get the good intel to actually know, not more than her dad. Right. Somebody called her Damon jr.

[01:32:00] On Twitter and I was like, no, I don't think so. I don't think so there. I mean, look, she is Damon's daughter, but I don't think so. And it's a good point though, that, that Nate brings up about, you know,

[01:32:09] recon and understanding the role of observe and report versus engagement and picket lines and all these kinds of things. So yeah, I think, I think the show runners are smart enough to work this stuff. Uh, Kyle M's email about the twin bowl burial, Eric and art Cargill.

[01:32:27] I chose to believe that they were buried in the same grave because none of the characters on the show knew which one was which. Ouch. I like it. I like it. They're like, I don't know. We can't figure it out at this point. So right.

[01:32:40] Last topic, poison pee leftovers from previous episodes. John M on Patreon. Okay. The dust in the air brought up two things to mind. Ashfall from the dragons burning everything down and snowfall warning of winter. Remember in episode one, there was a line about the summer ending that combined

[01:32:58] with the Starks keeping close eye on the wall tells me that this will be a double threat. The Southern kingdoms in flames from war and dragons versus the Northern kingdoms holding back the others. I have yet to read the book, so I may be completely wrong.

[01:33:13] I like it. Seems good. There's a lot of rhyming stuff there. Yeah. Uh, Abby gets the last question, uh, comment, uh, from a discord note as a book reader. Uh, I'm unnaturally, uh, not up in arms about the production choices as I think it doesn't change the outcome.

[01:33:29] So this goes back to the larger issue of in, you know, inspiration versus adaptation and blood and cheese re yes. Blood and cheese and reinterpretations of these things nor diminishes the tragedy of it. People are equating dislike in from informed by an overhyped expectation.

[01:33:46] Methinks with bad writing and bad acting. We agreed last season that this is an adaptation retelling of a book written from, from some very biased viewpoints baffling how now they're baffling how now there is this particular scene that people are wanting to be exactly like in the book.

[01:34:04] Yeah. Again, I don't want an exact like the book. I would have liked the choice element. I think that was that, you know, if we're talking about like the recipe for a good adaptation, I think that was one of the seasonings that I was missing. Right.

[01:34:17] You know, it with a little extra psychological horror. There you go. There you go. We've in some more choices, put some more hearts into conflict with each other. Yep. Have some more cereal in Saturday mornings. Well, this was fun.

[01:34:29] We did our first feedback episode for House of the Dragon because we had, we just had too many. We did. And we have a hand to the pod who's doing a great job of plucking great comments from the discord as well. So that that's been fun.

[01:34:42] Uh, this is a good length too. I like this. I think it's, I think it makes sense for the show. Yeah. I mean, what are we up to? Like four hours of just main pods now for House of the Dragon plus another 15 minute exclusive one. Yeah.

[01:34:57] Something like that. Jesus. All right. Not including the show by the seven poured into the, by the seven. All right, let's get into our programming notes here. I'm going to go to our schedule or a schedule we have on the discord server.

[01:35:12] You can get that physically or not physically, but digitally you can read it on the discord server. House of the Dragon. You're here. You know what's going on there. We got the weekly recap. We've got the hot takes on Sunday nights. We've got the feedback episode now.

[01:35:29] Very exciting stuff. The acolyte is still going strong. We just had a new episode last night. It was really good. Had a lot of juicy lore. I can't wait to hear what Alicia has to say about it because she knows a lot more about that than I do.

[01:35:40] And you've challenged me to, to show back up on the pod. So, uh, yeah, you had some takes I wanted to take issue with. So I haven't had enough arguing with you this week. We'll have some fun. I have some thoughts.

[01:35:54] I stitched together a four part recorded two and a half hour second breakfast. But that is now out for our patron and supercast subscribers. And that was, that was crazy. That was a huge record.

[01:36:06] Can I just say you use the term raw dogging and I was not expecting it and anything can happen. I didn't like it in breakfast. I didn't like it. Uh, and you didn't use it in an inappropriate way either. I just, I didn't know.

[01:36:21] I didn't know that you could use it in an inappropriate way. So I'm, I'm just very disturbed. We talked about poop. We talked about potty training. We talked about hotel breakfast. We talked, I debuted my song. Yes, that's right. Summer.

[01:36:34] I even put it up for download for everybody in the, in the attachments to that episode. So we're having a great time here and 11 Z's we're recording that tomorrow. So, uh, I got the day off where we're celebrating the 4th of July with some 11

[01:36:48] Z's on the fifth element, which is an absurd movie that I cannot believe I watched. Absolutely utterly absurd. Uh, rings and rituals next week. I'll be back with Marilyn on her feed to talk about the music of the rings of

[01:37:02] power season one and the star Wars complete Canon timeline podcast is not only just doing the accolade this week, but also doing an episode on the Canon ancient myths of Batu, which I have no idea what that means, but soon I will. And so will you.

[01:37:16] Radioactive ramblings is continuing through the boys this week doing a season for episode five, beware of the Jabberwock my son. So it's a wild title and I know why it's that now. And that's it for what's happening right now.

[01:37:30] Probably Howard and we'll shift dust on break, but they will be back soon. Can I plug, um, the bear? No, we're going to, you, me, and Ron are going to do a bear thing once you're caught up

[01:37:43] on the show. And I have a, yeah, we're going to do a one shot on it. We're going to talk about some, talk about some themes and stuff like that. Plus, uh, all the alien content that I've got coming up next month.

[01:37:54] So hang tight cause we got a new movie coming out. That's it for me. All right. Cool. You want to do these shout outs here? No, you do them. Okay. I'll do it with my music. You told me to get music.

[01:38:05] So now I have music and I'm going to torment you with it every time. It's fine. All right. I like it. People like it. I think. Do they have nobody's mentioned it. So maybe they haven't gotten that far into the tool.

[01:38:15] If they didn't like it, we'd hear about it. That's true. That's the truth. Let's see which one, which one do we want? Do we want? No, no, no. Let's do the other one. It's a little, yeah, let's,

[01:38:24] I'm going to delete that from the soundboard. All right. All right. Or I have, there you go. That's nice. That's real nice. Smooth. Discord server boosters. I even muted my mic because I got too close to it.

[01:38:39] John Lorehound coming to you at the 11 o'clock hour of the smooth jazz. This is too late. All right. Narls, Aaron K. Tiller, the thriller door of the ninjas. Doob 71 Captain Ginzy 56 and Athena a four masters. Some Marchan Michael G. David W. Brian P. S. C. Peter O.H.

[01:39:06] Bettina W. Adam S. Nancy M. Doob 71. Brian 80 63. Frederick H. Sarah L. Gareth C. Eric F. Matthew M. Sarah M. DJ Miwa. Andra B. Kwong U. Dead Eye Jedi Bob. Nathan T. Alex V. Aaron T. Sub Zero. Aaron K. Dally V. Mothership 61. Narls?

[01:39:32] Aaron, I'm skipping people now. Uh, Kathy W. Stuart B. And Adrian, thank you all for dealing with our ridiculous humor at this hour. It's hot or summer. I feel like we're becoming on hinge now. We are. It's, it's we're having fun. We're having a good time.

[01:39:51] All right, everyone do it all for you. We'll see you for episode four. Bye. The Lorehounds podcast is produced and published by the Lorehounds. You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at the Lorehounds.com slash contact.

[01:40:05] Get early and ad free access to all the Lorehounds podcasts at patreon.com slash the Lorehounds. Any opinions stated are ours personally, and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.

[01:40:15] Thanks for listening. This summer we enter a new era of Star Wars. You mean the dawn of the Star Wars Canon timeline podcast? Yeah. Yeah, sure. That too. But I was obviously talking about the acolyte. We've got to cover that on the Lorehounds. Oh,

[01:40:37] but the Star Wars Canon timeline podcast is exactly at that point in the timeline, the end of the high Republic, 100 years before the prequel trilogy. We've got to cover it there. Why not both? Okay. Deal. It's the first live action Star War outside the Skywalker saga.

[01:40:55] Nobody can miss this. Listeners kick off your hot lore summer weekends with scene by scene breakdowns of the acolyte found in both the Star Wars Canon timeline podcast and the Lorehounds mother feed. And the Lorehounds Star Wars feed.

[01:41:09] Wherever you like to listen a couple of days after each new episode is released.