“Game of Thrones” has a long — a very, very long — built-in history that is sometimes hard to follow. Luckily, HBO is hoping to catch you up before the final season with a new animated history lesson.
On Thursday, the network released a clip from “Game of Thrones Conquest & Rebellion: An Animated History of the Seven Kingdoms,” a look back into the history that shapes current events in the series.
Chapter 1 starts at the very beginning, before the Targaryens even got to Westeros. If you’re up on your Westerosi history, you’ll know that Daenerys’ ancestors came from Valyria, an ancient and advanced city where the people tamed dragons and used magic.
But why isn’t Valyria a force in the show? Well there was something called the Doom that occurred, basically destroying the entire city. While it’s unclear what the Doom actually was, the animation gives us an idea.
“Mountains cracked open like eggs, lakes and rivers boiled, fountains of fire, ash and smoke spewed from the ground so high and so hot that even dragons burned in flight,” the video says.
As we know though, House Targaryen survived. The video goes into how, showing that Aenar Targaryen traveled with his family away from the city 12 years before the Doom and founded Dragonstone, the fortress where Daenerys lands at the beginning of Season 7.
And if the narrator sounds familiar, that’s because Harry Lloyd, who played Daenerys’ brother Viserys in Season 1, is doing the storytelling from his character’s point of view.
Unfortunately, the preview, which you can watch above, is only around four minutes long.
A full 45-minute version will be available with the Season 7 DVD box set.