‘GoT’ prequel won’t have Targaryens or dragons

George RR Martin says ‘The Long Night’ is set 5,000 years into the past

Now, every true Game of Thrones fan has heard the rumour that the show’s upcoming prequel is set 10,000 years before the events we’ve been watching over the past few years. But guess what? Author George RR Martin has correcting that figure in a recent new interview with Entertainment Weekly, about his book on the Targaryen dynasty Fire and Blood.

As it turns out, the HBO prequel is tentatively titled The Long Night and actually set “only” 5,000 years before the events in GoT. That’s still long enough ago to predate Valyria — the doomed city in Essos where dragons and House Targaryen hail from.

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“It’s closer to 5,000 years,” said Martin, who is an executive producer and co-creator of the new show. “But Westeros is a very different place. There’s no King’s Landing. There’s no Iron Throne. There are no Targaryens — Valyria has hardly begun to rise yet with its dragons and the great empire that it built. We’re dealing with a different and older world and hopefully, that will be part of the fun of the series.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean the show The Long Night will never have a dragon. Just that the show’s initial setting is a pre-Targaryen which is a dragon-free world.

PHOTO: FILE

In any case, Martin’s original idea for Game of Thrones was a fantasy world without any dragons whatsoever. “I did consider in the very early stages not having the dragons in there,” Martin has previously admitted. “I wanted the Targaryen’s symbol to be the dragons, but I did play with the notion that maybe it was like a psionic power, that it was pyrokinesis — that they could conjure up flames with their minds. My friend and fellow fantasy writer Phyllis Eisenstein actually was the one who convinced me to put the dragons in, and I dedicated the third book to her. And I think it was the right call.”

Judging from our previous experiences with Martin’s writing, only one thing is for sure: The Long Night will not be the story we think we know.

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