Lessons from Dragons: Teaching Political Science with HBO's House of the Dragon

Since first airing on HBO in 2011, "Game of Thrones" (GOT) has proven to be a fruitful text for teaching and studying politics. In 2022 the prequal to GOT-House of The Dragon (HOTD) debuted on HBO. This paper conducts discourse analysis on the entire first season with two goals in mind. First, we demonstrate how pop culture is impacted by real world politics by examining the change in gender and racial representation in HOTD compared to GOT and argue that this change was a product of cultural backlash that GOT received and a result of changing political attitudes over the time of both shows airing. Second, we use the show's content as text to teach American and Comparative politics concepts. In the appendix we provide three examples of low, mid, and high-stake assignments that use show content in teaching political science courses.