We still don’t know a lot yet about HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, other than that it’s going to be set 5,000 years in the past, long before the events and characters we’re more familiar with in the current hit show. But it’s to be expected that details are still slim at this point, since we still haven’t even seen the final season of Game of Thrones which won’t be back until April of 2019 on HBO.
Nevertheless, details are starting to leak out about the prequel, created by Jane Goldman and George R.R. Martin, and it looks like it won’t feature several familiar elements, including Targaryens, and maybe even dragons.
Westeros will be presented as a much different place in the prequel, according to a report from Syfy Wire. It will depict a time when “King’s Landing, the Red Keep, and the Iron Throne people keep fighting over did not yet exist. The Seven Kingdoms were still just that: Seven separate kingdoms with their own customs and rulers, not seven principalities governed by a single monarch. It took Aegon’s Conquest, in which the Targaryens landed on the continent and set about using their dragons to take it over, to change all of that and reshape Westeros into something more like what we found at the start of Game of Thrones.”
That conquest came about some 300 years before the events in Game of Thrones, but because the prequel will go back millennia, that means, per Martin himself in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “no Targaryens and no dragons.” In Martin’s words, regarding the prequel: “We’re dealing with a different and older world, and hopefully that will be part of the fun of the series.”
If you want to learn a little bit more about the pre-GoT world, you can pick up Martin’s new book Fire & Blood, which hits store shelves today. Granted, it’s specifically a history of the Targaryen dynasty, so of course it’s different from what the prequel will be, but both will help flesh out the ancient past of the world Martin so vividly brought to life in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Casting is now underway for the prequel series. And as a reminder, Game of Thrones returns for its eighth and final season in April 2019.
