The Targaryens are surely the most unusual family George R.R. Martin has created, what with their lust for power, eerie white-blonde hair, fondness for inbreeding, and tendency toward madness. But their standout oddity is their ability to bond with dragons. In House of the Dragon, they use the giant creatures to ensure their rule over Westeros. In Game of Thrones, we see how the dragons’ return shifts the balance of power once again. Incredibly, though, Martin wasn’t always sure he wanted dragons as part of his narrative.
In an interview at the Oxford Union (via Winter Is Coming; you can watch the full YouTube video below), Martin said when he was conceiving the world that would become Game of Thrones—and the ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire saga—he originally had a different power set in mind for the Targaryens. It was inspired by his interest in science fiction, his main writing focus ahead of diving into this more fantastical world.
“The basic structure was there. You had the Lannisters and the Starks and you had Dany … and you had dragons,” he recalled. “Actually, that was a decision I wrestled with because remember, I was mostly writing science fiction. And one of the early ideas I had was, ‘Well, what if the dragons are not literally real?’ I had written a number of quite successful stories, science fiction stories, about people with psionic powers. You know, they were telepaths, they were empaths, they could do things.”
“And I said, what if this Targaryen family are… you know, pyro people? They could set powers with their minds, and they have that power and they’re dealing with these other people who don’t have that power.’”
And there are hints of Targaryens having certain abilities; in House of the Dragon, Helaena and Daemon Targaryen both have prophetic dreams or glimpses of the future. No spoilers, but we also get a taste of that in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s current Westeros-set series. But neither the page nor the screen gives us Targaryens with the sort of X-Men magic Martin initially considered.
However, the “pyro people” idea did make it into early drafts that Martin showed his friend, the late sci-fi and fantasy writer Phyllis Eisenstein. She convinced him the Targaryens’ creatures had to be real dragons, not “pyro psychic dragons.”
Martin also spoke about this fateful intervention in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone. He didn’t mention the psychic powers idea there, but he did say he’d originally considered leaving out all fantasy elements entirely and writing the tale as War of the Roses historical fiction instead.
That idea evolved, he told Rolling Stone, because “I wanted to make it more unexpected, bring in some more twists and turns. The main question was the dragons: Do I include dragons? I knew I wanted to have the Targaryens have their symbol be the dragons, the Lannisters have the lions, the Starks have the wolves. Should these things be literal here? Should the Targaryens actually have dragons? I was discussing this with a friend, writer Phyllis Eisenstein—I dedicated the third book to her—and she said, ‘George, it’s a fantasy—you’ve got to put in the dragons.’ She convinced me, and it was the right decision. Now that I’m deep into it, I can’t imagine the book without the dragons.”
You can watch new episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (only puppet dragons in that one) Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max; the third season of House of the Dragon (which has many real dragons, thank you Phyllis Eisenstein) will also arrive later this year.
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