About

House Of The Dragon is a spin-off TV show created by HBO and George R.R. Martin as a spin-off prequel to the show Game of Thrones, set 200 years before based on the events of "The Dance of Dragons" during the Targaryen civil war in Westeros. Due to the pop culture relevance of the original show and the expectations going into it of both the story and the actors, the show has received significant attention online, as well as memes. Season one premiered in August 2022.

History

Shortly after the completion of season eight of Game of Thrones in 2019, rumors of a prequel spinoff being made quickly began to circulate. Upon official confirmation that a prequel was in development, a mix of hype and nervousness began to spread in fear of the show being as rushed and poorly executed as Game of Thrones season eight, which notoriously left many fans angry. On October 5th, 2021, the official HBO Max YouTube channel released the first teaser trailer^[1] for House of the Dragon, which was viewed over 17 million times in 10 months, as well as give the basic premise of what to expect (shown below).

On August 21st, 2022, the show had its first episode, titled "The Heirs of the Dragon," released on HBO Max, drawing nearly 10 million viewers as it became HBO's most-watched premiere in history.^[4]

Reception

Following the release of the first episode of the series on August 21st, 2022, the show was largely well received by the community and critics alike. On IMDb,^[5] HotD received a 9 out of 10 rating, while on Rotten Tomatoes,^[6] it received an 82 percent critic score and an 87 percent audience score.

Online Reactions

House of the Dragon began seeing reactions, memes and other social media posts from people online almost immediately upon release of episode one. For example, late on the night of August 21st, 2022, TikToker BrettyBuckets^[2] uploaded a video of an apartment building in which it could be seen that several of the apartments were watching the show at the same time, with their lights changing based on when in the intro they were, earning over 890,000 likes and featuring several comments talking about the show favorably (shown below). The viral video was also reposted by numerous users elsewhere online.

Due to one of the main characters (Daemon Targaryen) being acted by Matt Smith, who also starred in Morbius months before HotD, many early memes from the show revolved around references to his character Milo in Morbius, as can be seen in the post by Redditor Avaenem^[3] on August 22nd, 2022, in which the Morbin Time catchphrase is used for Daemon alongside the Milo Dance meme, earning over 1,700 upvotes in one day on /r/freefolk (shown below)

Search Interest

External References