How House of the Dragon Connects to Game of Thrones: The Targaryen Civil War Explained
House of the Dragon is HBO's prequel to Game of Thrones, adapted from George R.R. Martin's 2018 book "Fire & Blood." Rather than a conventional novel, "Fire & Blood" is written as an in-universe history — a chronicle of the Targaryen dynasty compiled by a fictional maester, archmaester Gyldayn. That framing matters: it means the "truth" of events is deliberately ambiguous, filtered through conflicting sources, and the show leans into the same uncertainty by dramatizing rival accounts of the same incidents.
The series sits roughly 170 to 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, near the peak of Targaryen rule over the Seven Kingdoms. At this point the dynasty still commands multiple dragons, the throne is at the height of its power, and the Iron Throne is occupied by a Targaryen king. The world looks stable from the inside, which is precisely what makes the collapse that follows so dramatic.
The Dance of the Dragons
The central conflict is the Dance of the Dragons — a Targaryen civil war of succession fought after the death of King Viserys I. The king had spent years grooming his daughter Rhaenyra Targaryen as his chosen heir, even holding court to affirm her succession. But after his death, the crown was seized by his elder son from a second marriage, Aegon II, who was crowned in a move orchestrated before the king's body was cold.
The realm split into two factions. Rhaenyra's supporters were called the "blacks," and Aegon II's were the "greens" — a name drawn from the color worn by Aegon's mother, Alicent Hightower, at a tournament. The war took its name from the dragons the Targaryens rode into battle. At the start of the conflict there were around a dozen living dragons; by the end nearly all were dead, and the few survivors died shortly after, never to recover as a species during the dynasty's remaining rule.
The houses and players
Several houses and figures shaped the war's course. House Hightower backed the greens, and its scheming — particularly through Alicent and her father, Hand of the King Otto Hightower — drove much of the conflict's outbreak. The Velaryons, a wealthy house with the realm's strongest fleet, were allied to the blacks through Rhaenyra's first marriage to Laenor Velaryon. Daemon Targaryen, Rhaenyra's uncle and later husband, was the realm's most dangerous warrior and a figure of deep ambition. And the dragonseeds — commoners of alleged Targaryen descent who managed to claim riderless dragons — added a volatile, unpredictable element to the war.
The human cost was enormous. The fighting ravaged the Riverlands and the lands around King's Landing, devastated House Targaryen itself, and left the Iron Throne's authority permanently weakened. The spectacle of dragon-versus-dragon combat, shown on a scale Game of Thrones never attempted, is a major reason the show drives such massive search interest each season.
Why it matters for Westeros
The Dance of the Dragons is the reason the world of Game of Thrones looks the way it does. The war killed off most of the dragons, which is exactly why Daenerys Targaryen's three dragons in Game of Thrones were such a world-shaking event — they were the first dragons seen in the world for over a century. The creatures that had once given the Targaryens their conquest of the Seven Kingdoms were gone, and the magic that accompanied them faded too.
The war also hollowed out the dynasty itself. The Targaryens survived the Dance but never fully recovered their strength. The slow decline that followed — fewer dragons, weaker kings, mounting political fragility — set the stage for the dynasty's eventual overthrow by Robert Baratheon in the rebellion that opens the backstory of Game of Thrones. Understanding the Dance is therefore understanding the original wound that everything in Game of Thrones inherits.
Each season of House of the Dragon covers a chapter of the war, and because the conflict is structured around set-piece battles and reversals, it keeps returning to the top of search trends. The source material's ambiguity — with the maester's account hedging on who did what and why — gives the show room to dramatize events from competing perspectives, which is part of why the story rewards rewatching and discussion long after each episode airs.