House of the Dragon is determined to ride the streak of its successful debut to the end, and with only three episodes of the first season released so far, the show hasn’t stumbled for so much as a minute in its runtime, even if stray green screen CGI gloves are already giving the producers a lot of grief. Here’s your daily news roundup of everything significant that happened to Westeros and its live-action cinematic canon on HBO.
Viewers have a field day with a CGI blunder as HBO promises a quick fix
Just as fans were getting over Coffee Cup Gate and once again finding the mental strength to suspend their disbelief for Westeros in House of the Dragon, the show dug another pit by forgetting to replace Viserys’ green screen CGI fingers with their appropriate effect. Fans seem to find the whole ordeal hilarious, but HBO is taking advantage of web streaming to fix the error for any of your future rewatches. Something tells us the damage has already been done, though.
Cable ratings take a nosedive, but WB remains unfazed
The accumulated viewing figures for House of the Dragon are already huge enough to rival Game of Thrones in its final years. Perhaps that’s why it was startling to learn that HBO’s cable channels lost more than one million viewers for the third episode, a 28.6 percent nosedive that would have boded ill for the series were it not for the streaming numbers more than making up for this staggering decrease. According to Warner Bros. Discovery, the viewership for episode three on HBO Max increased by 27 percent, bringing the racked up number to a whopping 16 million views, a sharp uptick from the first two episodes, which drew in 9.9 and 10.3 million, respectively.
Fans realize Daenerys is a badass and ponder if Dragon should bring back Melisandre
The Targaryen ensemble in House of the Dragon might impress you with its numerous dragons, each ready to rend whole platoons of soldiers into a thousand pieces if their fire doesn’t turn them to ash first. But fans have now realized that Daenerys was unwittingly the most badass dragonrider of all time, if for nothing besides the fact that she had to get on Drogon with no harness and quite literally hold on for dear life.
The Game of Thrones fandom doesn’t seem to want to catch a break from all of this online activity, and one of the more interesting questions posed in the last few days involved a certain red priestess who went by the name of Melisandre in the original series. As nostalgic and fan service-y as you might find the prospects of her return in the spinoff show to be, it appears that most fans think higher of House of the Dragon and don’t want it to stoop as low as that.
Paddy Considine continues to garner acclaim as ultimate “lonely nerd” in Westeros
Despite Rhaenyra already proving herself as a badass warrior-princess heroine and Daemon Targaryen stealing almost every scene he’s in, the fandom is unanimously hailing Paddy Considine’s King Viserys as the most well-rounded, nuanced, and poignant character thus far. Some Game of Thrones veterans simply can’t get over the fact that their current monarch has a hobby, and something he’s quite good at, too. There’s something profoundly tragic about Viserys, the king who doesn’t necessarily shrug off responsibility but is just too pure — for lack of a better word — for this world of political backstabbing and malfeasance.
That just about sums up everything you need to know about what went on in Game of Thrones world today. Tune in tomorrow for another roundup and even more intriguing developments from the Seven Kingdoms!