#dragons

#dragons

Aegon arrives from Dragonstone with three dragons and demands that the kings of Westeros submit. When several refuse, he burns their castles and armies until they surrender. And that, at least according to the existing lore, is pretty much that.

The Pendragon Cycle is a TV series executive-produced by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro exclusively for DailyWire+. If you're unfamiliar, it's the conservative streaming outlet attached to Shapiro's The Daily Wire news service. As "alternative" broadcasting like the "All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show" becomes the new normal for the MAGA faithful, The Pendragon Cycle is a discount Game of Thrones that retells the story of King Arthur's most-trusted magician during the arrival of Christianity.

For decades, we smallfolk have been told that goodness is naïve, that moral grayness is sophistication, and cynicism is cleverness. Turns out, we do not want it. Most of us can only take an endless string of villains, liars, and normalized nastiness for so long. Our battered nervous systems want a hero to root for who would not lie to us or betray us.

The World of Westeros is a rich world full of its own religions, history, and superstitions, and therefore, it's no surprise that certain numbers are significant. In particular, the number seven pops up again and again in Westeros: there's the faith of The Seven, the popular curse "Seven hells," and there are, of course, Seven Kingdoms in Westeros. Or are there?

In the world of , you can't move for Aegons. In Game of Thrones, a much-anticipated plot twist revealed Jon Snow wasn't the bastard son of Eddard Stark. In fact, he was secretly Aegon Targaryen, son of the Mad King Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark. Then, House of the Dragon introduced King Aegon II, the son of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alicent. Finally, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms revealed its bald squire, Egg, was actually Aegon Targaryen, the future King Aegon V.

I wish this was a one-off blip in my regimented friendship schedule, but all through 2025 I played the world's slowest game of message tennis. I'd invite a pal for dinner, only for the world to turn, the seasons pass, grey hairs gather at my temples, before a date was finally locked in. This sentiment seems to be common among my circle.

Two Chinese Artists Created This Terrifying Hyper-realistic Sculpture Of The Falling Angel An Artist Captured the Innocence of Childhood by Photographing His Three Sons Florey's Unforgettable Alternative Movie Posters Sensitive Ballerina Watercolour Portraits By Liu Yi Artist Turns Animals Into Original Characters That Look Like They Belong In An Anime Russian Artist Adds Digital Pixel Glitches To Animal Tattoos. And It's Awesome!

Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).

Renais­sance artist Albrecht Dür­er (1471-1528) nev­er saw a rhi­no him­self, but by rely­ing on eye­wit­ness descrip­tions of the one King Manuel I of Por­tu­gal intend­ed as a gift to the Pope, he man­aged to ren­der a fair­ly real­is­tic one, all things con­sid­ered.

In the medieval world, strange signs in the sky were rarely ignored. In AD 536, when the sun seemed to lose its light and the climate turned harsh, that catastrophe may have been remembered in the terrifying Norse legend of Fimbulvetr. In our medieval past, the sky was thought to be tightly connected with the landscape. Historical sources show a deep sense of fear caused by celestial phenomena such as comets, meteors, bolides, and even the aurora borealis.

Draco Malfoy, one of Harry Potter's most recognisable villains, has become an unlikely lunar new year icon across China, as fans embrace the character for the year of the horse. In Mandarin, Malfoy's name is transliterated as ma er fu. The first character means horse while the final character, fu, means fortune or blessing a powerful symbol found across lunar new year celebrations. Put together, Malfoy's name can be loosely read as horse fortune, making him an unexpectedly auspicious figure for the year ahead.

This open-access book brings together more than thirty essays on languages and the ways they develop, interact, and influence one another. Its main focus is the Middle East, where Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic long existed side by side and often overlapped in everyday use, scholarship, and culture. In line with Geoffrey (Khan)'s commitment to the maximally accessible dissemination of research, this Festschrift has been published in both open-access digital editions and affordable printed formats.

At long last, the secret behind Egg has been revealed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now half over, but now viewers have learned the squire's true identity, something readers of the original Tales of Dunk and Egg books have known from the start. But what does this new secret mean for the future of the show - and the future of Westeros itself? The answer is a lot more complicated than you may think.

We don't know much about Dunk's beginnings, but to be fair, he didn't know much either. He grew up an orphan in Flea Bottom, the slum near King's Landing. He had no idea who his parents were, but figured he was an orphan and probably a bastard. (Some fans suggest he could be related to Brienne of Tarth, since he was tall just like her, but that's still unconfirmed.) He made a life by scavenging all kinds of meat for establishments that made "bowls of brown," the go-to food of Flea Bottom.

"What was so beautifully done about House of the Dragon is this epic scale at which the story is told. So to have this big booming orchestral score was very important," Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker says during a roundtable interview. However, for his series, "we realized early on that we're telling a small story here - a small story about a simple person who has smaller ambitions. And so, certainly our sound had to suit that."

When a franchise goes big, you have two choices for what to do next. You can zoom out and reveal the wider context of the original story, or you can zoom in and spotlight a story that has lower stakes. This latter approach is high-risk, high-reward, but it could serve to completely redefine the entire property. Take, for example, the DC Universe.