George R.R. Martin has become more openly critical of HBO’s Game of Thrones in recent blog posts, but his latest complaint even caught House of the Dragon in its crossfire. The author made a lengthy post on Thursday, and while he praised House of the Dragon Season 2, Episode 4, it led him into a a tangent that has the whole fandom laughing. Martin is furious that the TV shows have adopted the wrong heraldry for House of the Dragon.
After praising the dragon fight in “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” Martin began to compare the dragons in his writing with others in fiction. He pointed out that his dragons have two legs and two wings, which he strong prefers over the designs that have four legs and two wings. He feels that the two-legged look is more true to nature, and more logical, noting that there are no animals in real life that have wings and four legs. Both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon got this right on screen as well – all the dragons from Drogon to Syrax have two legs and two wings, but the discrepancy comes on the Targaryen banners.
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Martin wrote that real-life sigils in medieval Europe often depicted dragons with four legs, but he didn’t think that worked in his writing. “In my books, the Targaryen sigil has legs, as it should,” Martin wrote. “Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and [count] their limbs?”
“[For what it’s worth], the show got it half right (both of them),” Martin went on. “Game of Thrones gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when Dany’s fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
To Martin’s dismay, this incorrect and inconsistent sigil continued for the rest of Game of Thrones, and it wasn’t corrected after that, either. he wrote: “A couple years on, House of the Dragon decided the heraldry should be consistent with Game of Thrones… but they went with the bag sigil rather than the good one. That sound you heard was me screaming ‘no, no, no.’ Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.”
Many fans related to Martin’s fixation here, noting that they could get just as granular about their own passions as well. Before long, social media filled with memes about dragons with four or more legs, many tagging Martin, HBO and the team behind House of the Dragon. Fans sympathized with Martin but did not seem intent on getting rid of their House Targaryen merch any time soon.
House of the Dragon continues on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max. Martin’s books are available now in print, digital and audiobook formats.
