Fantasy face-off: The Rings Of Energy versus Home Of The Dragon

Comparisons between HBO’s Home Of The Dragon and Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Energy – each new epic fantasies, each prequel collection, each with enormous budgets and ready-made fan bases – have been in all probability inevitable. And certainly the Web has already been very happy to oblige. However ought to individuals evaluate them? Presumably not.

Thrones writer George R.R. Martin – whose work was closely influenced by the unique Rings writer, J.R.R. Tolkien – desires solely peace within the realm. “It’s not a loss of life match or something,” he instructed The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t should be bracketed collectively.”

Nonetheless, few appear ready to withstand the urge. As an alternative of evaluating business stats, although – rankings, budgets and so forth – check out the place the 2 reveals overlap. Which one has the best swords? One of the best dragons? Essentially the most formidable heroine? Granted, preliminary observations are based mostly on solely the primary few episodes. However individuals have seen sufficient to get the dialogue began. Warning: Some spoilers lie forward.

Popular culture cred

It isn’t solely truthful to match Englishman Tolkien with Martin, who’s sometimes called “the American Tolkien”. The 2 authors are usually not in competitors. Martin takes inspiration from a lot of what Tolkien did, particularly within the areas of magic and world-building, however he has additionally expanded on Tolkien’s achievements. Tolkien has offered extra books than Martin (they’ve each offered tens of tens of millions), however Tolkien’s have been round for much longer.

A greater comparability could be the earlier variations of their work: HBO’s Recreation Of Thrones (2011 to 2019), to which Dragon is a prequel, versus Peter Jackson’s movie variations of The Lord Of The Rings (2001 to 2003) and The Hobbit (2012 to 2014).

It could possibly be stated that the early seasons of Recreation Of Thrones have been in some methods comparable with the primary three (and much-loved) Jackson movies, whereas the derided later seasons of Thrones resembled extra the polarising Hobbit films. Every collection acquired off to an ideal begin, however every examined viewers’ endurance. Tolkien followers are already discovering issues to gripe about with the brand new collection, however they’ve had rather more time to recover from the Hobbit films. If the monster rankings seen up to now for Dragon are any indication, Thrones followers appear ready to forgive (if not overlook) for now. However it’s nonetheless early, fan response to the tip of Thrones was really bitter and the franchise nonetheless has quite a lot of floor to make up.

Heroes

As prequels go, The Rings Of Energy has one other benefit as a result of a few of its characters are immortal. The trick, in fact, is that new actors should measure as much as these enjoying earlier incarnations, a few of whom have been extensively beloved. Morfydd Clark, as an adventurous younger Galadriel in Rings (performed by Cate Blanchett within the films) manages this fairly properly.

Dragon might need taken an identical route if the showrunners had been prepared to revisit such long-living Thrones characters as Melisandre (Carice van Houten) or the Youngsters of the Forest. However that will have required wedging these characters into the story in locations the place they didn’t actually match.

As an alternative, Dragon implicitly asks viewers to determine Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) with Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) and due to this fact assist her declare for the throne. As causes go, that’s not as noble as Galadriel’s quest to extinguish the last word evil and even Dany’s early struggle towards oppression. Rhaenyra desires solely her birthright and maybe there’s something heroic in combating the patriarchy to get it. However thus far, she isn’t any Galadriel, even when the blonde wigs make the Targaryens resemble elves.