#epic-fantasy

#epic-fantasy

The trailer makes the show look what pretty much everyone expected it to be: Another rendition of Rowling's saga. There's a bit more elaboration of Harry's miserable life pre-Hogwarts, as we see the Boy Who Lived get bullied at school and tormented by his Aunt Petunia.

For decades, we smallfolk have been told that goodness is naïve, that moral grayness is sophistication, and cynicism is cleverness. Turns out, we do not want it. Most of us can only take an endless string of villains, liars, and normalized nastiness for so long. Our battered nervous systems want a hero to root for who would not lie to us or betray us.

House of the Dragon was the first Game of Thrones spinoff series to hit screens. It's adapted from Martin's fictional history of House Targaryen, Fire & Blood, which draws on unreliable narratives and sometimes conflicting first-person accounts. The show was an instant success upon its 2022 premiere, breaking viewership records at HBO and credited with reviving interest in Westeros after the divisive Game of Thrones finale.

The Pendragon Cycle is a TV series executive-produced by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro exclusively for DailyWire+. If you're unfamiliar, it's the conservative streaming outlet attached to Shapiro's The Daily Wire news service. As "alternative" broadcasting like the "All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show" becomes the new normal for the MAGA faithful, The Pendragon Cycle is a discount Game of Thrones that retells the story of King Arthur's most-trusted magician during the arrival of Christianity.

Aegon arrives from Dragonstone with three dragons and demands that the kings of Westeros submit. When several refuse, he burns their castles and armies until they surrender. And that, at least according to the existing lore, is pretty much that.

I wish this was a one-off blip in my regimented friendship schedule, but all through 2025 I played the world's slowest game of message tennis. I'd invite a pal for dinner, only for the world to turn, the seasons pass, grey hairs gather at my temples, before a date was finally locked in. This sentiment seems to be common among my circle.

The last five years have seen a tremendous resurgence of role-playing games, from the turn-based masterpieces of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to the action-packed Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. And staggeringly, it looks like that trend is set to continue well into 2026. While there's undoubtedly a handful of games we don't know about, even what we do have looks like it's going to make this another banner year for RPGs.

I feel I'm finally getting established enough that we can make a Mistborn game happen. ... This is at Step One only, but it's an encouraging One.

In the world of , you can't move for Aegons. In Game of Thrones, a much-anticipated plot twist revealed Jon Snow wasn't the bastard son of Eddard Stark. In fact, he was secretly Aegon Targaryen, son of the Mad King Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark. Then, House of the Dragon introduced King Aegon II, the son of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alicent. Finally, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms revealed its bald squire, Egg, was actually Aegon Targaryen, the future King Aegon V.

What is available is the daydream-a limitless realm of freedom. In this other world, one might be famous or rich, finally catch the attention of their beloved, or simply sit on a beach as a waiter brings them cocktails. They might fly or speak to animals, heroically save a child, tell off their boss with no consequences, win the Super Bowl at the whistle, or travel to another continent, planet, or time period. No one can stop them; no one can even object.

Tolkien begins with a pas­sage that first describes the crea­ture Gol­lum; lis­ten­ing to this descrip­tion again, I am struck by how much dif­fer­ent­ly I imag­ined him when I first read the book. The Gol­lum of The Hob­bit seems some­how hoari­er and more mon­strous than many lat­er visu­al inter­pre­ta­tions. This is a minor point and not a crit­i­cism, but per­haps a com­ment on how nec­es­sary it is to return to the source of a myth­ic world as rich as Tolkien's,

"What was so beautifully done about House of the Dragon is this epic scale at which the story is told. So to have this big booming orchestral score was very important," Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker says during a roundtable interview. However, for his series, "we realized early on that we're telling a small story here - a small story about a simple person who has smaller ambitions. And so, certainly our sound had to suit that."

When a franchise goes big, you have two choices for what to do next. You can zoom out and reveal the wider context of the original story, or you can zoom in and spotlight a story that has lower stakes. This latter approach is high-risk, high-reward, but it could serve to completely redefine the entire property. Take, for example, the DC Universe.

We don't know much about Dunk's beginnings, but to be fair, he didn't know much either. He grew up an orphan in Flea Bottom, the slum near King's Landing. He had no idea who his parents were, but figured he was an orphan and probably a bastard. (Some fans suggest he could be related to Brienne of Tarth, since he was tall just like her, but that's still unconfirmed.) He made a life by scavenging all kinds of meat for establishments that made "bowls of brown," the go-to food of Flea Bottom.

At long last, the secret behind Egg has been revealed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now half over, but now viewers have learned the squire's true identity, something readers of the original Tales of Dunk and Egg books have known from the start. But what does this new secret mean for the future of the show - and the future of Westeros itself? The answer is a lot more complicated than you may think.

When I watched the original Game of Thrones, I loved it because of its comedy,