TheGame of Thronesuniverselends itself to intense fandom. The world of Westeros is rich and sprawling, meaning there’s an abundance of detail for viewers to obsess over and get lost in. BothGeorge R.R. Martinand the showrunners are aware of the devotion the series inspires. They lean into it, frequently serving up the kinds of fan service thatThronesfanatics lap up. This includes Easter eggs, which crop up frequently in theHouse of the Dragon, especially.
The show is chock-full of nods and references toGame of Thronesand Martin’s books.It can be great fun trying to spot them all. For example, some lines of dialogue from the original show are repeated verbatim, or characters and items only mentioned in GoT appear on-screen in HotD. There are also Easter eggs that foreshadow plot developments to come or convey veiled information to the viewer. (Sometimes they’re even literal eggs.) Here are ten of the show’s most enjoyable ones so far.
10Daemon has the sword Dark Sister
Season 1, Episode 1
Back inGame of ThronesSeason 2, Episode 8, Arya (Maisie Williams) poses as a servant for Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), and they have a conversation about famous Targaryens and their Valyrian steel swords. “Visenya Targaryen was a great warrior. She had a Valyrian steel sword she called Dark Sister,” Arya says, speaking about one of the sisters of Aegon the Conqueror. We never see the sword itself in GoT, as it was the last time sometime over the centuries, but it appears prominently in HoTD.
Indeed, Daemon (Matt Smith)wields the blade in the show. We even see him use it in combat against Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel).It’s cool to get a glimpse of the legendary weapon in action.Valyrian steel is incredibly deadly and, by the time ofGoT, vanishingly rare. More than being a neat bit of world-building, Dark Sister also serves as a metaphor for the vigor of House Targaryen in the time ofHotD, in contrast to the sword-less, dragon-less maniacs the viewer hears about inGame of Thrones.
9"You Are No Son Of Mine"
Season 1, Episode 8
Season 1 focuses onthe rising tensionsbetween two branches of the ruling family, centering on Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra respectively, but there is also significant strifewithinthe Hightower faction. For example, Alicent is deeply disappointed in her son Prince Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), even as she backs his claim to the Iron Throne. This reaches a boiling point in this episode when Alicent confronts her son about forcing himself on one of the servant girls.
“You are no son of mine,” she hisses at Aegon, revealing that, at this point, her support for her child is purely political. This reflects an interesting tension, as Alicent is essentially backing someone who she thinks will make an awful ruler purely to advance her own power.The line is also notable because it is exactly what Tywin Lannister said to Tyrion just before Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) killed him with a crossbow.Depending on how deep this reference goes, it could spell doom for Alicent as well in the episodes to come.
8A Feast for Crows
The opening episode of Season 1 is a punishing one for King Visery (Paddy Considine). It sees him sacrificing his own wife during childbirth to save their son. However, he loses both in the end and is shattered. This being the royal court, however, Viserys’s advisors and allies immediately begin scheming about their next political moves.
Viserys is still grieving and becomes angry that his coterie of hangers-on won’t spare his loved ones more than a moment of mourning. “My wife and son are dead! I will not sit here and suffer crows that come to feast on their corpses!” he snaps at them. The line shows that Visery is not as stone-cold as some Targaryen rulers, but it’s also a wink to the title of the fourthGame of Thronesbook,A Feast for Crows,one of the darker chapters in the saga. It’s an indication thatHotDwill be just as bloody and brutal as its parent show.
7Cregan Stark Has Ice
Season 2, Episode 1
Dark Sister is not the only legendary sword that shows up inHouse of the Dragon. The Season 2 premiere transports viewers back to the Wall, the towering construction of stone and ice that protects Westeros from the deathly threats to the North. The Lord of Winterfell at this time is Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor), who gives Rhaenyra’s son Jacaerys (Harry Collett) a tour of the wintry barricade. Cregan can be seen wielding Ice, his family’s ancestral sword, and one of the most iconic weapons in all of fantasy.
Ice was passed down for generations from one Stark to another, eventually ending up in the hands of Ned Stark (Sean Bean). InGame of Thrones, Ice is memorably used to behead a Night’s Watch deserter fleeing from the White Walkers, before being used to behead Ned himself, in a sick irony. Tywin Lannister then has the blade melted down and reforged into two new swords: Widow’s Wail and Oathkeeper - which winds up in the possession of one Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie).
6House Reyne Appears
A neat background detail in the first episode of the second season is the inclusion of this is Martin Reyne (Barney Fishwick), a member of the noble Reyne family, who can be seen in the Targaryen throne room. He’s identifiable by the red lion sigil on his clothing. The viewer never meets any Reynes inGame of Thrones, but the original show does mention them. Indeed, they were the most famous victims of the Lannisters' wrath.
Prior to the events of the GoT, the Reynes stood up to the Lannisters and were promptly crushed by Tywin. This was the origin of the sad song “The Rains of Castamere”, which became a symbol of artistocratic skullduggery and brutality. The song is infamously played during the Red Wedding, with Robb Stark (Richard Madden) and his allies becoming the next victims of the Lannisters' deviousness. Once again, it’s a neat little detail that most viewers would miss but the diehard fans will appreciate.
5"He’ll Have To Close An Eye"
Season 1, Episode 6
A key plot point in Season 6 is Prince Aemond (Leo Ashton)’s attempt to secure himself a dragon. He claims the colossal Vhagar as his own, leading to an argument with Rhaenyra’s children. In the scrum, the young Luke slashes Aemond’s eye with a dagger, which further widens the rift between Rhaenyra and Alicent. However, Aemond is not too fazed. As he says, an eye for a dragon is a good trade.
The Easter egg in this one is the foreshadowing of Aemond’s ocular calamity.Earlier, Alicent comforts Aemond by assuring him that he will one day have a dragon. Immediately after, Aemond’s sister says, “he will have to close an eye”, a none-too-subtle harbinger of the events to come. TheHouse of the Dragonwriters seem to revel in this kind of sneakily prophetic storytelling. It’ll be interesting to see which other seemingly throwaway lines go on to have greater significance in hindsight.
4"Words Are Wind"
Season 2 continues the development of Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) intoa full-fledged villain. The one-eyed dragon rider has several chilling lines over the course of the show, but one of the most memorable comes in the first episode of Season 2. “Words are wind,” he says, It’s an idiom that essentially means talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. It’s a phrase that Martin uses countless times in theGame of Thronesbooks.
Tyrion also speaks the line in theGame of Thronesshow.Aemond’s use of the phrase is a nice wink to hardcore fans and readers, as well as a subtle way of connecting the worlds of the two shows. Part ofGoT’s appeal is that the fictional universe feels so rich and real, despite being fantastical. The viewer gets the sense that the world extends beyond the edges of the frame. Key to this is the wealth of proverbs and idioms the characters use, which give the impression that this is an actual society, rather than an imagined one.
3Rhaenyra’s Fate
Season 1, Episode 4
As with Aemond’s eye, there’s also some subtle foreshadowing about Rhaenyra’s fate in the first season, which some viewers who have read theFire & Bloodfictional history book may have noticed. After all, that work recounts the Targaryen history in detail, including the events ofHotD. (Those wishing to avoid spoilers should skip the rest of this entry, as it hints at some potential future plot developments in the show).
While walking the streets of King’s Landing with Daemon, Rhaenyra comes across a blind woman who asks if she “wishes to know her death”. It’s a bit of a parallel with the young Cersei meeting a seer who gives her a grim and cryptic prophecy. Rhaenyra doesn’t get a full reading from the blind woman, but the scene is immediately followed by a shot of a metal dragon breathing a jet of flame. While the show may not play out exactly as the books,this image is certainly not a good omen.
2Bloodmages Of Valyria
Season 1, Episode 2
Episode 2 of the first season includes another callback to the original show. In one scene, King Viserys shows Rhaenyra a model of Old Valyria, the Targaryen homeland. He describes this mysterious, vanished world in awed tones. “The Valyrian capital was built into a volcano, much like Dragonstone,” he says. “And the dragonlords, the highest of the nobility, lived here, at the volcanic face, closest to the source of their magic and power. And this was the Anogrion. Where the bloodmages worked their craft.”
The series never reveals much about the secrets of the bloodmages, and some of the characters dismiss them as just a myth. However,Game of ThronesSeason 1 shows them to be real.After all, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) has her entire life changed by her run-in with the bloodmage Mirri Maz Duur (Mia Soteriou). The witch betrays Dany, causing Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) and Dany’s unborn child to die. However, her spell also causes the petrified dragon eggs to hatch, paving the way for the rest of the Targaryen princess’s remarkable story.
1Rhaenyra has Daenerys’s Eggs
Season 2, Episode 3
In the third episode of the current season, Rhaenyra sends Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) to the Vale and, ultimately, to Pentos, entrusting her with four petrified dragon eggs to take care of. Three of the eggs are gold, green, and black, just like Daenerys’s eggs that famously hatched at the end ofGoT’s first season. Dany’s eggs were also petrified but hatched due to the aforementioned blood magic.
At first glance it may just seem like a similarity, but, interestingly,the director of theHotDepisode has confirmed thatthese three eggs are in fact the very same eggsthat will later hatch Dany’s dragons Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion. “Those are Daenerys’ eggs. All of us who work on this show are bigGame of Thronesfans, so it was very exciting to shoot that scene,” directorGeeta Vasant Patelhas said. This is a cool link between Dany and her equally fierce ancestor Rhaenyra.
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