House Of The Dragon: Dragon Magic Explained and Game Of Thrones Easter Eggs
Every fantasy writer one of the basic questions you have to settle when you start out writing your books is how are you going to handle magic sorcery the the fantasy elements you see a lot of people writing in secondary world universes that are very high magic it’s something that anybody can learn and anybody can do i can make it you can make it you have the recipe it all comes out right to my mind uh that took the magic out of magic in magic it’s not just the recipe or the words of the spell it’s
who you are who’s doing it and what are you feeling when you’re doing it the valyrians while practicing their blood magic and their fire magic notice that it didn’t matter whether you pronounced the words of spell right whether you made a correct sacrifice to the correct guard all of that may have had some importance but one of the big things was who you are and what was your relation particularly to the dragons what are the dragons like they’re flying beasts they have to have very large wings and a relatively slender serpentine body a long tail
a long neck two legs two wings in front they’re made to fly and just strike at their prey from from the air but then there’s the
different from the magic that melisandre the power of the red god that she draws on it’s different from working like the people of the north the children of the forest even the stark children do including jon snow jon snow is also a warg it’s also different than the magic of the children of the forest that bran is now using as the three-eyed raven so we’ll break it all down if you’re brand new to the channel house of the dragon episode 1 is starting now i’ll be doing videos for all the episodes just like my videos
for the game of thrones main series so be sure to subscribe to get them all i’m also doing a giveaway for hbo max subscriptions all you have to do to enter is be a subscriber and post your favorite moment from all the trailers on the video so as george rr martin says when he wrote a song of ice and fire he wanted magic in the world to be very different very complex much more complex than your traditional type of fantasy magic like it’s not as simple as just reading a spell and activating its effects it’s
not something that everybody can pick up and do so there are at least nine unique types of magic in game of thrones with a couple subsets each in different terms for what you call people who practice each type of magic but some people like melisandre other followers of the red god practice multiple types of magic children of the forest also use multiple types of magic there’s elemental control raising the dead glamouring those are all types of magic that melisandre uses in the world raising the dead is also thought of as a different skill from just
flat out necromancy really good example that is what the night king does is closer to necromancy than just raising the dead raising the dead is like bringing someone completely back to life the nike mostly just raises whites by just turning the dead into finger puppets melisandre also uses her enchanted gemstone to glamour herself making herself appear as if she were still a middle-aged woman when in fact she’s closer to like 200 years old really cool side detail because the show picks up about 187 years before the events of game of thrones season 1 that means
that melisandre is a young girl during the events of house of the dragons season one but she’s from the shadowlands in asshai so she’s not in westeros while house of the dragon is happening i don’t know if they’re going to have a cameo scene with a young version of melisandre or anything like that there’s divination which are things like greensight and dragon dreams which are two different things but essentially the same basic idea seeing versions of possible futures green sight is something that the children of the forest all possess naturally in some works possess like
bran is born a greenseer in the case of dragon dreams it’s kind of the same situation but with people of valyrian descent it’s incredibly rare for someone to be born with the ability blood magic is meant to be one of the darkest and rarest types of magic in the world blood magic is like a broader type of magic that has a bunch of subsets like you use it for a bunch of different types of things really good example is that during game of thrones season one miri mazdur claims to be a blood mage have the
ability to save khal drogo’s life but she secretly has to sacrifice daenerys unborn baby rhaego to do it so using blood magic usually involves literally some sort of blood sacrifice and because this series is meant to delve into the history of the valyrians and the targaryens ancient valyrians also practice forms of blood magic when they tame dragons initially and started the art of dragon bonding turning it into more of a genetic thing that eventually future generations could just pass on to the next one supposedly blood magic was also used in the creation of valyrian steel
which i think is one of the reasons why creating new valyrian steel has become a lost art when we pick up a house of the dragon because it requires a lot of magical spells that people just don’t know it’s way more complicated than just finding the right ingredients on the show there are a lot more references in easter eggs for the ancient valyrians freehold before the doom so we do hope we get more lore about the ancient valyrians in future seasons alchemy is also considered a completely different type of magic that’s one that’s practiced by
the alchemist guild which gets into the creation of wildfire that we saw during the original series there’s also skin changing which you think of as warging skin changing is like another ability that descends from the children of the forest it started with them and then they slowly passed it into some of the first men that lived near them and eventually those first men fought the kings of winter they started intermarrying and that’s how eventually you’re born with stark children who all have wolf dreams and are capable of warging when we talk about wolf dreams it’s
a little bit different from dragon dreams in the books the stark children who still have dire wolves that are still alive have wolf dreams and what’s happening is that when they’re asleep they’re basically warging into their direwolves without realizing it there was a trailer during one of the early seasons where they kind of teased that so like jon snow and arya for example still have dire roles that are still alive they still have wolf dreams it’s just that both jon snow and arya never practice the ability so they don’t know how to actually work like
you actually have to practice the skill that’s why bran is the only one that can actually do it dragon dreams like i said are just like literally seeing possible futures the magic of dragons is george r martin talks about it being like a completely different thing it’s sort of like a subset of blood magic i think because of the way they bond with certain types of valyrian blood really good example of this is that like everybody at the ancient valyrian freehold all the houses were not dragon lords meaning that not everybody who lived in ancient
valyria were bonded to dragons that’s where we get to the velaryons this family here is spelled differently so velaryons come from ancient valyria spelled differently but they were not ancient dragonlords which is why they can’t ride dragons but the targaryens can’t because the targaryens in ancient history were dragon lords so i think we’ll find out through the lore that ancient valyrians who were dragon lords practice this special type of blood magic co-mingling their blood using a lot of really dark arts and spells to basically domesticate dragons and then pass that ability on genetically to future
generations in their houses the step to this problem like the reason why you see a lot of valyrians have white hair but not be bonded to dragons is because during the last couple hundred years you have a lot of targaryens intermarrying with velaryons in their children then get the gene that way so there are some valyrians who do have the ability to bond with dragons best example of that on the house of the dragon tv show are rhaenys targaryen’s children with corly’s velyaron so rhaenys targaryen this woman here has a dragon called meles she was
born a targaryen she has a dragon just like all the other targaryens she married corlys velaryon who is not a dragon rider didn’t have the gene but their children did have the gene but as george r martin says he wanted the way magic worked in a song of ice and fire to be very particular that’s why for instance the night king who was a member of the first men a thousand years ago wasn’t born with the dragon bonding gene originally thus he could only ride viserion after he had died and then raised him up as
a white using necromancy like a magical flex tape workaround without breaking the rules of the universe when martin says the fire dragons create is a special kind of fire like the fire itself has magical properties i think partly that’s just the innate magical power that all dragons are born with in the way that children of the forest are born with a really strong affinity for magic but the big theory is that a lot of these types of blood magic necromancy the powers of the night king the white walkers all the children of the force all
come from the same source like in a larger sense they’re all drawing on the same magical power just using it in very very different ways or like the dragons and the children of the forest they’re connected to it in different ways because literally the night king and the white walkers are creation of the children of the forest so their magic power is based on the same powers as the children of the forest under normal circumstances i would say dragonfire is just probably better for killing white walkers because it burns so much hotter than normal fire
but there’s also probably some biochemical reasons for why fire itself is more potent along with why dragonglass and valyrian steel are so much more potent in killing white walkers but here’s we get to the magical side of that too like the magical properties behind the dragons in the targaryens so on a biological level the dragon’s bodies will just create certain types of chemicals that mix to create the fire when they’re exposed to air the reason why the fire burns so much hotter is probably because of the types of chemicals their bodies produce but it’s also
probably what makes their body so much more resistant to regular types of fire and it’s also why i think that targaryens those of valyrian descent are burnt by fire nearly as easily because ancient valyrians use this blood magic spells to literally bond parts of dragon’s genetic code with their blood so that metaphorically and literally they became kind of like dragons but remember there’s a lot of magical spells involved with how they actually got started in ancient valeria bonding dragons so it wasn’t like some ancient valyrian went up to dragons one day and gave himself a
dragon iv of a bunch of their blood and suddenly they thought of him as one of their own the ancient freehold taming dragons is based a lot on the real world domestication of horses so just like that it took a long time a lot of selective breeding because this is a song of ice and fire blood magic spells along the way so it wasn’t like an overnight thing in order to get to the point on the show here where targaryens could hatch a new dragon egg and that new dragon wouldn’t just eat them right on
the spot like i’ve talked about in the past the show is going to get into a lot of the personalities between the different dragons like all the dragons will have their own different types of personalities but if we’re talking about animals they’re mostly like cats very standoffish but when they bond with someone they become incredibly loyal but that’s why just like anybody off the street can’t just walk up and ride them like if you tried to go up and pick up a random cat it would just run off george rr martin talks a lot about
the biology of dragons just dragons growing over time and even though it’s not magic just on a biological level dragons never stop growing the longer they live the more they consume over time the bigger they’ll get this is like a really easy size chart to just help show you so like the biggest dragons are typically the oldest ones when the show begins balerion the black dread has died recently he was about 200 years old when he died making vegar the biggest one on the show but also the oldest and they say that as dragons get
older they become more like b-52 bombers much harder to take off in much harder to land in but even more deadly in the air flying around on vhagar is kind of like flying around on a giant fortress there’ll be 17 total dragons that are alive during this period will meet over the course of the series but i believe during season 1 we’re only going to meet 9 of them we’ve seen a bunch during the trailers but not every single one i’ll talk about them a little bit more as they pop up in episodes if you
have any other questions about the dragons how they work or the magic behind them how their abilities work just write them below in the comments and i’ll be sure to add them to my bonus videos my full house of the dragon episode 1 video will post later tonight be sure to enable alerts for my channel so you don’t miss it everyone click here for my house of the dragon review video and click here for my new house of the dragon trailer breakdown thank you so much for watching everyone stay safe and i’ll see you guys
in the next one!
