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While a major “Game of Thrones” plot point is the shocking arrival of new dragons long after they’ve supposedly gone extinct, “House of the Dragon” takes place in an age of dragons and dragon-riders. Based on George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire and Blood,” the prequel series centers on a terrible civil war fought by the ruling Targaryen dynasty called the Dance of the Dragons, which should convey how heavily dragons are involved in this brutal succession crisis.
During the show’s first season, which wrapped up Oct. 24, viewers got to meet many of the dragons that the Targaryens and their allies will use in the fight, but there are even more to come. Showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik told TVLine on Aug. 16 that the series will have a whopping 17 dragons. Here’s everything you need to know about the most important dragons we might see or hear about in “House of the Dragon,” plus where you’ve seen the dragons during the first season.
Why Are Dragons Different Sizes?
The season finale of “House of the Dragon” really drove home that not all dragons are created equal. Vhagar is substantially larger than Jacerys’s Arrax, and Rhaenyra laments that many of the dragons on the blacks’ side are too small and young to really impact the coming war. There are a couple of things contributing to this differential. First, older dragons are just a lot bigger than younger ones. And dragons have a massive lifespan; Balerion dies 94 years after Aegon’s conquest, making him about 250 years old. It seems that they keep growing for most of that time.
But in the world of “Game of Thrones,” the dragons also just got smaller over time, and there’s never a clear explanation given. Dragons apparently need freedom to thrive, and the Targaryens eventually built the Dragonpit to house them. Many believe that the restrictions on them made them grow smaller. The last ever dragon (before Danaerys’s dragons) was about the size of a cat. There are also some who believe that magic was leaving the world, which impacted the dragons’ size.
— Additional reporting by Victoria Edel
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Amanda Prahl
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