We Might Be Getting a Game of Thrones Sequel Whether We Want It Or Not

The news that House of the Dragon was officially getting a fourth season probably didn’t surprise anyone. It’s one of HBO’s most successful post-Game of Thrones projects, after all. But the announcement that the fourth season — initially presumed to be the series’ last – might not be the Targaryens’ final outing after all was a bit shocking. Or maybe not.

The cable giant has long struggled to figure out how to harness the larger world of Westeros, with only House of the Dragon and the forthcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms prequel having made it out of a particularly complicated form of development hell that has included rumored spinoffs about everything from the Children of the Forest and the warrior queen Nymeria to Aegon’s Conquest. Now, it seems as though the franchise may start looking forward as well as backward.

Per author George R.R. Martin, he’s involved in discussions about other projects, “several” of which seem to be stories that will pick up after the events of Thrones’ bloody (and fairly controversial) final episode.

“Aside from The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon, there are other Game of Thrones spinoff projects in development,” Martin said at an event attended by Los Siete Reinos. “Most are prequels. There are several in development, five or six series; and I’m not developing them alone, I’m working with other people. Yes, there are some sequels.”

These are rumors we’ve heard before. Who doesn’t remember the supposed Kit Harington-led Jon Snow series that would tell his continued story in the unexplored country north of the Wall? Or the one that was maybe going to follow Arya Stark on a journey to discover “what’s west of Westeros”? Neither of those has ever gone anywhere, and while it’s an open question as to whether Martin is referring to either of those specific projects here, there are no guarantees. He might mean something else entirely. After all, he’s still (allegedly) got two as-yet-unreleased books of source material to write work with.

But as someone wise (Jeff Goldblum) once said — the real question is not whether HBO can make a show like this, but whether they should. So much of Thrones’s ending left a bad taste in the mouths of so many fans, it’s difficult to wonder what anyone might actually want from a story like this. (Or even if they want it at all.) It seems unlikely that such a series would jump but so far into the future; after all, a big part of its appeal is naturally going to be grounded in finding out what happened to our surviving faves from the original.

But is anyone really all that interested in the reign of King Bran the Broken? Is the idea of Tyrion Lannister engaging in the complex act of nation-building in a world without politics and magic really all that appealing to the folks who were previously tuning in for White Walkers and dragon battles? Is there a story to be told about Sam’s ascension to the role of Grand Maester? Does anybody care what happened to second-tier figures like Gendry Baratheon or Davos Seaworth, no matter how popular they were in the original? (For my money, Queen Sansa, Lady of the North, is right there, if we’re looking for out-of-the-box inspiration. Just saying!)

The biggest question, of course, is what on earth the point of such a show might be. One of the biggest lessons inherent in Game of Thrones is that the titular “game” is essentially impossible to win, and the only way to truly do so is to stop playing. Theoretically, that’s what Bran has done — sort of, he’s still a king after all — but the hard work of sifting through the ashes to find what comes next might not exactly be the definition of must-see TV many are going to expect.