Epic

"House of the Dragon" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" battled for the hearts of fantasy audiences everywhere.

It’s been less than two months since the House of the Dragon season finale aired, and it already feels forgotten. A good TV show can stay in the discourse for a few weeks, but rarely for much longer. It could just be accepted that the end of 2022 was the golden age of fantasy, and that’s that. Perhaps, though, this is a sign of the times. It had to, because this year, two of the biggest fantasy franchises of all time, the brainchildren of Tolkien and George R. [cagey about numbers](https://variety.com/vip/amazons-silence-on-the-rings-of-power-audience-size-is-deafening-1235422462/), but Rings doesn’t seem to have bombed; Dragon had the [biggest finale night](https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/media/game-of-thrones-house-of-the-dragon-ratings/index.html) of any HBO series since Game of Thrones.) Instead, it’s that they had no real impact. The Game of Thrones finale was god-awful, but at least people talked about how god-awful it was for months. Tolkien adaptation The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power this summer kind of felt like boarding a yacht, or walking into a Four Seasons. Rings is far more fanciful, full of elves, dwarves, orcs, and the like. When Peter Jackson’s final Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King, hit theaters in December 2003, people didn’t stop talking about it until 2005 (roughly). Dragon has none of those, but it does have a lot more bloody gruesome births and incest. It’s that the two biggest fantasy franchises went head-to-head and conversation about both of them lasted about as long as a policy shift at Twitter.