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George R.R. Martin’s problems with House of the Dragon are well-documented, but only true Westeros sickos know the author even has beef with the show’s choice of symbols. On the prequel series, House Taragaryen’s sigil features a three-headed dragon with four legs. That’s the same number of legs Daenerys will have on her banners when she arrives on Dragonstone 200 years later on Game of Thrones. But both Khaleesi and House of the Dragon got it wrong. Martin’s dragons only have two legs. And that’s what the Targaryen sigil will show on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms co-creator and showrunner Ira Parker spoke to Entertainment Weekly about how his show will feature a dragon sigil with just two legs. It might not seem to make sense with the timeline of HBO’s Seven Kingdoms, but he has an explanation. He said, “…I do think that there are artistic progresses, or at least cycles, that there is a new designer of House Targaryen doing just a little bit of a different freehand version of something. That’s really all it is. It wasn’t meant to be anything different other than this is the sigil of this specific time. Everything should feel very bespoke to our show.” Unsaid is that this fixes a problem with the Targaryen sigil that arose midway through season five on Game of Thrones. For the first half of the original series’s run it used the correct number of legs on the family’s sigil. But then it inexplicably changed to a three-headed dragon with four legs. (It’s the worst thing Daenerys ever did. Don’t fact check that.) Martin wrote about why he thought that incorrect change happened in 2024. On his “Not a Blog,” he talked about the history of heralds, dragons, wyverns, and why his fantasy world’s dragons very intentionally only have two legs. Here’s why he cares so much about this otherwise small detail (emphasis his): I designed my dragons with a lot of care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings. LARGE wings. A lot of fantasy dragons have these itty bitty wings that would never get such a creature off the ground. And only two legs; the wings are the forelegs. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc. Parker said he did discuss this change with his fellow Westerosi showrunner, Ryan Condal. Condal has also previously explained why his show opted for the four-legged symbol. One person we know Parker didn’t have to talk this change over with is Martin himself. We all know he won’t have any complaints about A Knight of the Seven Kingdom‘s two-legged dragon banners.
