'Game of Thrones' Targaryen Prequel Could Solve a Huge Season 8 Plot Hole
We're still upset about how easily Euron killed that dragon.
HBO is already working on one Game of Thrones prequel set in the very early days of Westeros, but another spinoff could offer a look at more recent Westeros history — and solve a major GoT Season 8 plot hole in the process.
Deadline and Entertainment Weekly both report that HBO is almost ready to order a pilot for this second GoT prequel set 300 years before Game of Thrones. The show, which is based on executive producer George R.R. Martin’s prequel book, Fire and Blood, would focus on the “beginning of the end for House Targaryen.”
Fire and Blood is best known as the book Martin wrote instead of finishing the main series of novels that GoT is based on. It’s a historical account of House Targaryen and their invasion of Westeros, but perhaps most interesting is one specific quote from the book that was shared online during the final season of Game of Thrones as a critique of the show’s hasty finish.
The quote, which details the doomed Dornish attempt to kill Targaryan dragons after one arrow luckily struck a dragon in the eye and felled it, seems to directly contradict the way Euron Greyjoy was able to easily defeat one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons in Season 8:
As Morion’s fleet beat its way across the Sea of Dorne, the dragons Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar fell on them from out of the clouds. Shouts rang out, and the Dornish filled the air with scorpion bolts, but firing at a dragon is one thing, and killing it quite another. A few bolts glanced off the scales of the dragons, and one punched through Vhagar’s wing, but none of them found any vulnerable spots as the dragons swooped and banked and loosed great blasts of fire. One by one the ships went up in gouts of flame.
During Season 8, critical fans pointed to this quote and the canonical detail that adult dragon scales are “harder than steel” to argue that Euron’s ballista weapons would have been no match for a dragon, even though it only took a few shots to tear Rhaegal to shreds on the show.
By revisiting the history that Fire and Blood makes canon, perhaps HBO can finally set the record straight on how tough those dragons really are. At the very least, this prequel will be an excuse to bring a whole bunch more dragons back to HBO, which is something GoT fans have probably been missing ever since the series ended earlier this year.
