The Epic Fantasy Face-Off of This Year Had No Winners

They weren’t loved by critics House of the Dragon was perhaps slightly more than Rings of Power, but it wasn’t that they weren’t watched. (Amazon has been a bit cautious about numbers but Rings didn’t seem like it had bailed out; Dragon had the largest finale night of any HBO show since Game of Thrones. It’s not that they had any real impact. Although fantasy movies and series have been a huge success for many decades, it was not until the late 1990s that they reached mainstream status. Everyone has a favorite fantasy. The culture has become so ingrained with it that no series can capture the public’s interest. It’s just a bunch of longhairs, swords and sorcery.

This may not be the best approach

It’s a bit foolish to pit these shows against each other, as Ben Lindbergh stated in a piece for Ringer earlier this season. Martin clarified that they are not in ” the death match”. Rings have a lot more imagination, with elves, dwarves and orcs. Dragon does not have any of these, but it does have more incest and bloody gruesome births. Rings could be almost a family-oriented show, but Dragon does not. Unless you love your children. Despite the rhetoric encouraging viewers to choose one, viewers don’t have to do that. You could accept that 2022 was the end of the golden age for fantasy and that’s it.

However, that is not the issue. It’s not that one winner emerged victorious; this is Highlander. It was that the two largest fantasy franchises met head-to-head, and conversations about them lasted as long as a Twitter policy change. People talked about Peter Jackson’s final Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King until 2005. Although the Game of Thrones final was terrible, people still talked about it for months. It has been less than two years since the House of the Dragon finale, and it still feels like yesterday.

This could be a sign of time. Every major fantasy release has been in a completely different world. Some were published before Facebook was Meta, while others were created before Twitter was even invented. An excellent TV show may stay in the conversation for several weeks, but not for very long. (Guys Stranger Things Season 4 was this. It would be amazing if one series could make people talk for weeks, months, or even years. Maybe its just a fantasy.