We are in the middle of the second season of House of the Dragon and so far Westeros creator George RR Martin has had almost nothing but praise for the fantasy format. In some cases he even wishes he had thought of it himself.
However, since the later seasons of Game of Thrones, there has been a Dragon detail that isn’t quite right. In fact, it makes GRRM so angry that he wrote a 10,000-character post about it on his personal blog.
The dragons from House of the Dragon only have two legs – except on the coats of arms (sometimes)
As Martin writes in his detailed blog entry, his dragons only have two legs instead of four because he wanted to be based on realistic biology:
I designed my dragons with great care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, these features seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four)and two wings. Big wings. Many fantasy dragons have these tiny little wings that would never let such a creature get off the ground. And only two feet; the wings are its front legs. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, as do bats, as well as pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.
The problem is not the dragons in House of the Dragon, but rather the heraldic animals. While Rhaenyras red dragon on black background While in the time of Daenerys in the mother series it was partly correctly shown with two legs, it now has four of them – like on real historical coats of arms. The real people back then had no great understanding of biology and no real model to compare them to. But why would someone from Westeros make this mistake?
George R.R. Martin/HBO
GRRM shows us how it is true: left: right, right: wrong.
Martin admits that the dragon’s three heads are purely symbolic and represent Aegon the Conquerer and his sisters. However, he cannot forgive the small wings and especially the two extra legs:
Game of Thrones gave us the correct two-legged crests for the first four seasons and for much of Season 5, but when Dany’s fleet sailed into visibility, all of the sails featured four-legged dragons. Someone must have messed it up. Or someone opened a book on heraldry and read closely enough to get it wrong. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A few years ago, House of the Dragon decided that their heraldry should be consistent with Game of Thrones… but they chose the bad symbol over the good one.
GRRM finds this mistake particularly regrettable because he has now also to his literary version of Westeros: “The sound you heard was me screaming ‘No, no, no.’ Those damn extra legs even made it onto some of my book covers, despite my objections.”