Before we saddle up for a new season of ‘House of the Dragon,’ we try to figure out how the dragonriders saddle up their mounts
On Sunday, House of the Dragon will return, which means it’s time for another Westerosi tradition: HBO will do everything it can to obscure the logistics of how everyone’s favorite incestuous family members get on and off their enormous flying lizards.
Yes, yes: The physics of a mythical creature from a blockbuster fantasy series does not offer the firmest ground for nitpicking. But George R.R. Martin, creator of the Thrones-verse, has written about going out of his way to portray his dragons’ anatomy with would-be accuracy. And with the greens vs. blacks civil war looming, it seems likely that dragons—particularly the really, really big ones—will decide the victor. This means, in turn, that we’re likely to see a lot of Targaryens and Velaryons suit up and saddle up—which is to say somehow scramble on top of colossal monsters, over and over. Or, at any rate, we should, because—forgive me—the Targaryens are absolute dorks, and we deserve to see it.
Consider, if you will, the preposterousness of the situation. To get on a horse, you have to lift a foot into a stirrup and cantilever your body over the saddle. To get on a camel, you have to convince the spitting 9-foot dromedary to sit politely on the ground so it can violently heave itself—and you—up into the air. To get on an elephant Succession credits style (you probably shouldn’t!), you’re likely to climb down from a raised platform beside the animal. To get on a dragon—well, I wouldn’t put money on John Wayne’s ability to make it look cool.
How big is a dragon, anyway? In the case of House of the Dragon, many of the dragons—Aemond’s Vhagar, Rhaenys’s Meleys, Rhaenyra’s Syrax, and Daemon’s Caraxes, most notably—tower over their human riders. In The Ice Dragon, a 1980 novella written by Martin that he has said does not take place in the world of Westeros but nonetheless features many commonalities, the titular serpent is described as being much larger than another dragon that is “five times the size of a horse.” But in theory, there’s no upper limit to dragon growth: “A dragon never stops growing, Your Grace, so long as he has food and freedom,” Arstan Whitebeard told Daenerys Targaryen way back in A Storm of Swords. When Dany first rode Drogon in A Dance With Dragons, Martin wrote that the dragon’s “wings stretched twenty feet from tip to tip.” And he kept growing.
But how does House of the Dragon’s legion of blonds (and some very, ahem, strong brunettes) get on and off the dragons? We don’t really know, because the answer is most assuredly silly.
For the most part, we see dragonriders only when they’re already in the saddle. There wasn’t a single dismount featured in Season 1; instead, we had some rapid cuts and a whole lot of yada yada about the logistics. Here, for example, is Rhaenyra in Syrax’s saddle as she arrives for a showdown with Daemon at Dragonstone:
And here she is moments later, apparently having made it down from the saddle—some 20 feet in the air, by the look of it—without impaling herself on a dragon spike, slipping off the undoubtedly slippery stone walkway and tumbling into the abyss, or, I don’t know, generally eating it:
Did everyone just … wait … while she made her way down? Shouldn’t the Kingsguard have been maybe just a little bit worried about the heir to the Seven Kingdoms’s battle with gravity? Is there any world in which Otto Hightower didn’t roll his eyes? Notably, we don’t see Rhaenyra get back into the saddle before she flies off—she’s just back in there somehow. And here she is once again landing at Dragonstone in the Season 1 finale:
How does she, now grown with an even bigger mount, get down? The only thing we know is that it is accomplished very, very quickly, because she’s strolling down the parapet a few frames later, perilous scramble down the side of a living creature on a precariously narrow bridge be damned—and that’s not to mention the fact that Martin wrote in Fire & Blood, the series’ source text, that riders typically buckled themselves in with “four short chains between belt and saddle.” Fussing with buckles like some trainee goth: decidedly not metal.
The few other disembarks we see—not many!—take the form of feet that somehow plop down on the earth, a feat that was believable for Luke on wee Arrax but that would all but certainly cause serious injury off of any bigger beast. Consider the crash pad!
There are just two instances in which we get a look at what climbing into the saddle entails. Luke’s final ascent on his dragon began when the doomed tween hopped sideways onto Arrax, whose petite stature took about as much finesse to tackle as a resting camel’s might. It was a different story when Aemond claimed Vhagar: He discovered that the biggest, baddest dragon in the land had a handy little climbing net draped down her side (which does not appear particularly fireproof, but I digress). I promise that there is a net in this tableau of shadows—the darkness’s impenetrability is absolutely because of your lousy TV settings and not deliberative creative choices that we simply do not need to repeat in the coming season:
Part of the Targaryens’ work with their scaly friends seems to entail some innate cooperation on the part of the dragons. In A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys’s first flight on Drogon comes during a frenzied exit from the fighting pits of Meereen. “The dragon gave one last hiss,” Martin wrote, “and stretched out flat upon his belly.” And so she climbed aboard—sans saddle, no less.
(Quick quibble for the horse girls of Westeros: Do dragons not need to have their saddles removed? Isn’t this a hygiene issue, particularly when the blood of foes and pillaged livestock enters the mix? Wouldn’t famously ornery beasts with built-in flamethrowers perhaps take issue with having doodads tied onto them by apes? Do dragons whose riders have died just sort of fly around with empty saddles forevermore? Can we please give Vhagar a bath?)
With all due respect to the descendants of Aegon the Conqueror, having a dragon stretch out flat on its belly does not seem like it will be sufficient for getting on top of Godzilla with wings. Every time a dragon dramatically lands somewhere and everyone turns to look—the gasps! the cries!—imagine all those in attendance then having to wait in awkward silence as the rider spends a few minutes fumbling with their buckles and gingerly clambering down, perhaps twisting the odd ankle en route. Dragons are cool; dragonriders, on the other hand, most definitely have to make some terminally uncool adaptations. Do they have little wheely staircases to help them get aboard? Do the perpetually burnt minders at the Dragonpit have to push the buttocks of out-of-shape princelings up and up? Is there a pulley system? Are we sure the dragons are OK with all this?
I’m just asking questions. Be honest, HBO—let’s see some Targaryens huff and puff their way up their noble steeds.