Can ‘House of the Dragon’ Still Be Called an Adaptation of ‘Fire & Blood’?
In its third season, the show has deviated further and further from the book. At what point does an adaptation become a reimagining?
Two years ago, George R.R. Martin had a meltdown over House of the Dragon.
On September 4, 2024, the author published—then, about an hour later, deleted—a blog post ripping the show, which had concluded its second season a month prior. Martin, whose frustration with the show had been building throughout Season 2, titled his post “Beware the Butterflies,” referring to the butterfly effect, and wrote that “even small and seemingly insignificant alterations to a timeline—or a story—can have a profound effect on all that follows.”
Martin was most upset that showrunner Ryan Condal had made the decision to cut Maelor, the third child of Aegon and Helaena. (Martin, ever one with nicknames and titles, immediately dubbed him “Maelor the Missing.”) While Maelor is a 2-year-old during the Blood and Cheese sequence in Fire & Blood, his absence made the scene in the show—when a couple of assassins kill Jaehaerys—lose some of its brutality. It also changes things down the line (which I won’t go too far into because it may take us into spoiler territory, depending on what the show has planned).
Martin floated some ideas he had for how to make the story work despite the removal of Maelor but concluded that any solution would have drawbacks that would leave some plotlines on the cutting-room floor. He even pondered the option of making Helaena pregnant and Maelor a newborn in Season 3—something that Martin said Condal had decided against but that now appears to be on the table again since Helaena is indeed pregnant—but Martin wrote, “That would scramble up the timeline, which is a bit of a mess already.” He elaborated: “I have no idea what Ryan has planned—if indeed he has planned anything.”
But Maelor wasn’t his only objection. He concluded his post with this: “There are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4 …”
Earlier this year, Martin elaborated on his frustrations in a long interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought Ryan and I were partners,” Martin said. “And we were all through the first season. I would read early drafts of the scripts. I would give notes. He would change some things. It was working really well—I thought. … Then we got into Season 2, and he basically stopped listening to me.”
THR also reported that, according to their sources, on a Zoom call in which Condal presented Martin with his vision for Season 3, Martin became so upset that he declared, “This is not my story any longer.”
Well, here we are, with seven of eight episodes of Season 3 of House of the Dragon in the books, and we have a much clearer picture of what Martin was so upset about. Season 3 has strayed further and further from the book, and after the seventh episode I’m wondering where the line is between adaptation and reimagining. Can House of the Dragon still be called an adaptation of Fire & Blood? Let’s break it down—and no, I won’t spoil anything from the book that is yet to come.
Any adaptation from page to screen requires changes. The medium is the message, and a different medium requires different storytelling. And even changes that are not required can be an improvement.
Take Season 1 of House of the Dragon, for example, which was more faithful to Fire & Blood but was still far from a one-to-one adaptation. Off the bat, the show gave King Viserys more depth and complexity than he had in Martin’s novel, in which he mostly just comes off as a layabout. “I am vastly impressed by the show’s version of King Viserys, played by Paddy Considine, who gives the character a tragic majesty that my book Viserys never quite achieved,” Martin wrote in 2022. “Kudos to Paddy, Ryan and his writers, and Miguel and the other directors.”
The show aged down Alicent a bit and aged up Rhaenyra a bit to make the two childhood friends, adding a complexity to the narrative that isn’t present in the novel, in which the two have a more instant rivalry and Alicent embodies something of an “evil stepmother” archetype.
Then at the end of Season 1, Lucerys Velaryon’s death is portrayed as an accident—Aemond didn’t mean to kill his nephew. This adds to the idea that House Targaryen’s control of the dragons is an illusion, a theme that is prominent in the show but entirely absent from the book.
We could debate other Season 1 changes—like Aegon’s prophecy, Laenor faking his death, or Rhaenys destroying the Dragonpit—but in general Season 1 was deservedly well received, and most of the changes added to the story. Change can be good. But fast-forward two seasons, and we’re in a different place.
Nearly everything that took place in the latest episode of House of the Dragon represented a deviation from the source material, often a dramatic one. Let’s go story line by story line, starting with the one that I believe has strayed the most from Fire & Blood: Alicent heading to Harrenhal to assassinate her son Aemond.
Alicent Hightower and a Galaxy-Brained Assassination Plot
As mentioned above, in the book Rhaenyra and Alicent have a far more antagonistic relationship. When Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing in Fire & Blood, she has Alicent confined to the dungeons in gold chains and spares her life only “for the sake of our father, who loved you once.” Alicent earns the moniker “The Queen in Chains.”
Alicent isn’t even mentioned in the novel for 14 more pages, when Corlys suggests to Rhaenyra that she send Alicent and Helaena to the Faith to “spend the remainder of their lives in prayer and contemplation” as they try to wind down the war. At this point in the book, much like in the show, Rhaenyra is relentlessly hunting down Alicent’s sons, Aegon, Aemond, and Daeron. Corlys floats the idea of sending them to the Wall, but Rhaenyra rejects this, feeling that they must be killed to quell the idea of any subsequent rebellion.
Hearing this, Alicent pleads with Rhaenyra for peace. She even proposes that the Seven Kingdoms be divided up—Rhaenyra can keep King’s Landing, the Crownlands, the North, the Vale of Arryn, the lands watered by the Trident, and the isles. Aegon could have the Stormlands, the Westerlands, and the Reach, and he’d rule from Oldtown. Rhaenyra, of course, rejects this too, saying, “They sought to rob me of my birthright, and the blood of my sweet sons is on their hands.”
Alicent’s response? “Bastard blood, shed at war. … How many more must die to slake your thirst for vengeance?”
“Speak again of bastardy and I will have your tongue out,” Rhaenyra shoots back.
In the book, Alicent cares enough about her sons that she goes to Rhaenyra and gets on her knees to beg for their lives, even as she can’t help but still sling some insults toward this woman she clearly despises. And Rhaenyra, for her part, can’t forget the deaths of her own sons and Alicent’s role in them. Rhaenyra in both book and show is also at least partly responsible for the deaths of Alicent’s grandson Jaehaerys and father, Otto (even if in the book, unlike the show, she does not personally behead Otto), making this situation fully irreconcilable.
So how did we go from that relationship in the book to the one on the show, where not only are Rhaenyra and Alicent working together, but Rhaenyra sends Alicent to kill her own son? To some extent, this feels like a by-product of casting. Alicent is largely sidelined at this point in the narrative of Fire & Blood, confined to the dungeons without power or much of a voice. But when you have Olivia Cooke in your show, you want to use her, and House of the Dragon has marketed Alicent as a main character over the seasons and made the Rhaenyra-Alicent relationship central to the entire civil war. So you have to come up with things for her to do, and I guess that includes multiple failed escape attempts and, now, a trip to Harrenhal to murder her child.
Even if it weren’t absurd, it’d still be pretty far from Martin’s version of the story. Alicent displayed some of her book counterpart’s viciousness in Season 1—remember when she tried to stab Rhaenyra?—but now, in Season 3, she’s almost the polar opposite of how her character is portrayed in the novel. For book readers, it’s jarring.
Aemond’s Harrenhal Sabbatical
Speaking of Aemond, even besides the Alicent plot, he’s gone off book. In Fire & Blood, as in the show, Aemond is at Harrenhal when Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing. But unlike in the show, Aemond doesn’t go alone. He goes with Criston Cole and his army to confront Daemon there, unaware that Daemon has already left and returned to Driftmark.
Aemond does kill Simon Strong and his sons in the book, and he does spare Alys Rivers, whom he takes “into his bed as a prize of war soon after taking Harrenhal, seemingly preferring her to all the other women of the castle, including many pretty maids of his own years,” per the novel. But Aemond doesn’t get injured, and he doesn’t remain at Harrenhal too long. He and Criston decide to split up, and Aemond takes Vhagar and terrorizes the Riverlands, burning villages that are aligned with Rhaenyra to become “the terror of the Trident.”
The show has decided to split up Aemond and Vhagar, with the dragon burning villages on her own (and all off-screen). It makes sense for Aemond to burn villages, but a dragon doing so with no human guidance? Why would Vhagar care to burn human settlements? Plus, this plotline means that Aemond and Alys are holding Harrenhal—the largest castle in the entire realm—by themselves, which has strained credulity a bit.
Also straining credulity: Rhaenyra knows that Aemond is at Harrenhal and Vhagar isn’t. With rider and dragon separated, killing Aemond should be easier than ever. She could just send her dragons and burn him out. Rhaenyra reasoned last week that if she sends swords after him, “he will flee again, go to ground, and be lost,” but for real, how long can a one-eyed, silver-haired prince really stay undercover in the Seven Kingdoms? Even just Daemon on Caraxes would make quick work of a Vhagar-less Aemond. With six dragons at her disposal, Rhaenyra’s plan to send Alicent of all people is far-fetched.
Alys Rivers’s Surprise Dragon Eggs
Sticking at Harrenhal, we’ve learned a bit more about Alys Rivers and her motivations this season. She wants Harrenhal to herself, and she wants to start her own line of dragonlords. First Daemon was her muse, but now it’s Aemond.
Alys represented another one of these opportunities for the show to flesh out a character whose deal wasn't clear in the text. But where did she get those dragon eggs from the last episode? She explains it pretty clearly to Aemond in the episode:
Your ancestor Rhaena Targaryen came to Harrenhal after the death of her daughter. And she grieved and grew old here. Her dragon laid a clutch of eggs before Rhaena herself died. And they have sat here cold and abandoned these hundred years. I do not know the ways of dragons, but I have long envisaged the return of the Targaryens to this ancient seat.
We don’t get a ton of Alys in the book—the mystery is kind of the point—but this development is completely new and pretty wild. It is true that Rhaena Targaryen, the original rider of Dreamfyre (now Helaena’s dragon), stayed at Harrenhal toward the end of her life. And historically, it’s true that Dreamfyre dropped many clutches of dragon eggs in her life (her eggs are highly likely to be the ones that became Daenerys’s eggs). There’s no recording of a clutch laid at Harrenhal, and dragon eggs are precious, almost priceless commodities in Westeros—it’s somewhat surprising that they could remain hidden for nearly a century. And five eggs is a lot. And they’re warm.
This is actually quite interesting. But at some point the show will have to explain what happens to these five dragon eggs and why no A Song of Ice and Fire text mentions them.
Rhaena’s Stealing of Sheepstealer
After the Alicent plot, the next-biggest change involves Rhaena’s role in the story. As discussed previously in this column, a completely different character, a baseborn girl named Nettles, claims Sheepstealer in the book. Condal decided to omit that character to make the story more focused on the Targaryen family and give Rhaena, who spends the war just putzing around the Vale in the book, something to do.
But this change has gone beyond a simple character swap. In the book, Nettles and Sheepstealer are part of Rhaenyra’s forces. Nettles fights alongside Jacaerys in the Battle of the Gullet. She’s tearful after the battle even while Hugh and Ulf (who are present in the book) celebrate, possibly due to Jacaerys’s death there. But in the show, Rhaena shows up out of nowhere and inadvertently causes Jacaerys’s death.
Nettles and Sheepstealer are present when Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing, helping to secure the queen’s safety alongside Rhaenyra’s own Syrax, Daemon’s Caraxes, Addam’s Seasmoke, Ulf’s Silverwing, and Hugh’s Vermithor. Shortly after taking the city, Nettles accompanies Daemon to the Riverlands as they hunt down Aemond. In the show, these roles have been given to Baela and Addam.
There certainly is no four-way confrontation among dragons in the book. No Caraxes fighting Sheepstealer and ultimately letting the other dragon flee. No taking Rhaena/Nettles back to King’s Landing as her dragon limps away.
There’s also no implication that Sheepstealer is unreliable in the novel, while Rhaena admits in this episode that Sheepstealer does not heed her.
I have no idea where the show is going here. In the book, Daemon and Nettles form a close relationship, which starts to come between Daemon and Rhaenyra. That’s been accomplished with this change in the show, although it takes a somewhat different flavor—Daemon and Rhaena have a complicated relationship, as we’ve seen this season, one far different from what was described between him and Nettles. And at any rate, Nettles never gets separated from her dragon in the book, and Sheepstealer never gets wounded. We’re way off page.
Ormund and the Rest of the Hightowers
Everything happening in Tumbleton has been flipped. In the book, Ormund doesn’t control Tumbleton—Rhaenyra does. His host is marching across the Reach in these days after the fall of King’s Landing, rather than already at this small market town not far from Westeros’s capital city. There’s no fake Daeron plot from earlier this season, either (and the book’s Daeron has silver hair and stayed in King’s Landing until he was 12 before going to ward in Oldtown, rather than going as an infant).
Furthermore, Gwayne isn’t with Ormund or Daeron in the book (although I won’t say where he is at this point in the story, to avoid spoilers). And Ormund is barely a character in the book—because Fire & Blood is written as an in-universe history that relies on three primary sources to give us insight into this civil war, the perspective can sometimes be limited. And none of those three sources were with Ormund, so our knowledge of him is largely limited to his tactical movements and machinations. So all the characterization—his scholarly pursuits, ethno-nationalist worldview, and strong aversion to odors—comes from the show, not the book.
But the Ormund-Daeron-Gwayne trio has been a treat this season. Yes, Rhaenyra’s assassination plot was a bit goofy and Ormund’s ability to foment rebellion in King’s Landing a bit far-fetched, but these scenes in Tumbleton have been some of my favorite this season. I can’t stress enough: Change can be good.
Corlys the Kidnapped
There is one change in Tumbleton, though, that I take some issue with. Last week, Jon Roxton appears and kidnaps Corlys Velaryon. How did he find Corlys? How did he make it through what must have been a decent number of Velaryon troops undetected, and then back out again? As you may have guessed when it comes to questions like these, this does not happen in Fire & Blood.
In the book, Corlys remains with Rhaenyra in King’s Landing at this time, counseling her on how to approach the war. He is a bit more sympathetic to the other houses, though, as he advises Rhaenyra to extend pardons to Ormund Hightower, Borros Baratheon, and House Lannister. He’s Rhaenyra’s voice of restraint, foiling Daemon as the voice of vengeance. But I’m not sure how the show can possibly have him fulfill that role now, after Ormund has cut off his finger.
Corlys’s rift with Rhaenyra is also a deviation from the book. In Fire & Blood, when Corlys asks Rhaenyra to legitimize Addam and Alyn (who, he maintains, are his son Laenor’s children, not his own, although rumors that they are his persist), the queen complies without protest. So the show is going in a very different direction with the Sea Snake.
Aegon, Larys, and Tyland’s Wild Ride
Aegon, Larys, and now Tyland wandering around the Crownlands has been one of the highlights of this season, similar to the goings-on in Tumbleton. But this, too, represents a change from the book.
There was always going to be a fill-in-the-blank opportunity here for the show; when Aegon and Larys flee the city, the book goes mum on the exact details of what they get up to, as there is no primary source with them to chronicle their dealings. But one character who certainly doesn’t join them is Tyland.
I was thrown off a bit when I thought that Tyland had died at the Battle of the Gullet, as in the book he remains in King’s Landing and is “given to the torturers instead, in hopes of recovering some of the Crown’s treasure” when Rhaenyra takes the city.
Then there’s Sunfyre. I was also thrown off by the idea that Sunfyre was dead, which the show had seemed to confirm many times, dating back to last season. Sunfyre does get badly wounded at the Battle of Rook’s Rest in the book, just as he does in the show, but no one mistakes him for being dead. Instead he stays back to recover, remaining “in the fields beyond Rook’s Rest, crawling through the ashes like some great golden wyrm. In the early days he fed himself upon the burned carcasses of the slain. When those were gone, the men Ser Criston had left behind to guard him brought him calves and sheep.”
The show essentially ran the same playbook with both Tyland and Sunfyre: a fake-out death. It’s fairly cheap storytelling, although not unprecedented for A Song of Ice and Fire (see: Snow, Jon).
All things considered, we aren’t too far off book here, although that’s partly because there isn’t much book for this portion of the story as it is. Tyland’s presence is a definitive change, though, and could portend larger deviations.
Baela’s Front-Facing Role
House of the Dragon is deploying Baela differently than Fire & Blood did. Much like Rhaena, she’s sidelined for this portion of the Dance of the Dragons in the book. Baela remains on Dragonstone at this point in the war, as her dragon, Moondancer, is still too young to ride. That means she isn’t present at the Battle of the Gullet, she isn’t around in King’s Landing, and she’s not patrolling for Vhagar in the Riverlands. It’s a bit funny how, in the show, Addam worries about Baela having too much to do, while in the book she has nothing to do.
We do get some snippets of Baela at this point in the book, however. She’s not completely absent. Fire & Blood tells us that Baela, who is just 14 years old at this point, is “a wild and willful young maiden, more boyish than ladylike, and very much her father’s daughter. Though slim and short of stature, she knew naught of fear, and lived to dance and hawk and ride. As a younger girl she had oft been chastised for wrestling with squires in the yard, but of late she had taken to playing kissing games with them instead.”
Baela first begins riding Moondancer around this time. And the novel tells us that she flies every day, although not very far. She begins splitting her time between Dragonstone and Driftmark. Baela wants to leave her chambers and investigate the mysterious death of one of the wild dragons, Grey Ghost, but is forbidden from doing so by Ser Robert Quince, the castellan of Dragonstone, who is in charge of her. She’s caught trying to sneak out at night and as a result is confined to her chambers. That’s the last we hear of Baela for a while.
One thing that is true to the book—the liaison we saw last week between Baela and Alyn happens, only much later on the page than on-screen. But overall, the show is obviously taking Baela in a very different direction from her book counterpart.
Helaena’s Dreams
Virtually all the stuff about the Targaryens' prophetic dreams is exclusive to the show, even if the idea of “dragon dreams” in general does exist in the books. None of the primary sources for Fire & Blood would’ve had any insight into these dreams, so making Helaena a dreamer isn’t completely at odds with the text.
In the book, Helaena is deeply depressed after the death of her son Jaehaerys, which was more brutal on the page, as she was forced to make a “Sophie’s choice”–style decision between Jaehaerys and Maelor. She begins to refuse to eat, bathe, or leave her room and essentially sinks into a kind of madness. We’re seeing some of that on the show, but reimagining Helaena as a dreamer has been a huge win for her character. Her dreams this episode, including one of her birthing the child (Maelor?) that she’s carrying and another of her riding her vibrantly colored dragon, Dreamfyre, are becoming more and more chaotic. They’re not strictly from the book, but this change works.
Rhaenyra’s Other Children
Sometimes it is easy to forget that Rhaenyra has more children than just Joffrey, her last child with Laenor Velaryon, whom she had brought to King’s Landing earlier this season to raise as her heir but has hesitated to spend time with. She has two others, Aegon and Viserys, the rarely mentioned and even more rarely seen babies she had with Daemon. Earlier this season, Daemon admonished Rhaena for abandoning her duty and failing to accompany his sons to Essos, referring to those two. Rhaena says the two are in good hands, and that’s all the explanation we’ve gotten about them so far this season.
We met the two when Rhaenyra introduced them to her father, Viserys, in Season 1, and we got a glimpse of them again in Season 2. But we have yet to see either appear on-screen this season. In the book they aren’t as absent. The two are toddlers on the show, but at this point in the timeline, Fire & Blood’s Aegon and Viserys are 9 and 7, respectively, and are present at the Battle of the Gullet, as their ship to Pentos was accidentally caught by the Triarchy’s fleet and thus put into the action. There’s a dramatic scene in which Aegon escapes on his dragon, Stormcloud, in his first time flying.
Obviously, none of this made it into the show. In July, Condal talked about this decision to Backstage, saying he felt that “in television, toddlers are not characters—they’re props,” and so it was impractical to have them be a part of a big action set piece:
A great example is, during the Battle of the Gullet in the book, Rhaenyra [Emma D'Arcy] sends her two youngest sons with Daemon [Matt Smith], who in the show [are aged down], and the eldest one is not yet ready to fly his dragon; he flees and warns the Sea Snake. It's a really visceral and memorable scene in the book. But, going into Season 1, we took 30 years of history and decided, "We're going to make it 20,” because, at some point, it becomes too broad and vast. And while that got us out of having to recast everyone, it also meant the youngest kids in the story either didn't exist yet in the timeline or were that much younger. So Rhaenyra and Daemon's kids are basically toddlers, and, in television, toddlers are not characters—they’re props. You're dealing with the practical concerns of, these kids can't act because they're 4-year-olds, it’s not safe to have them do stunts, and you can't create a CG kid and make it realistic.
Condal may be right about toddlers being more props than actors, but it was also his decision to shorten the timeline that led to this call to scale back the roles of Aegon and Viserys (who become important characters down the line—this isn’t just window dressing). It’s a deviation on top of a deviation. In a way, this proves Martin right about the butterfly effect—one small change can lead to more and larger ones down the line.
So what’s left that is accurate to the book? The broad strokes are there—Rhaenyra struggling to keep control in King’s Landing, Daeron and Ormund causing trouble in the Reach, Daemon drifting away from his wife, and Aegon fleeing in the Crownlands. Even Rhaenyra’s relationship with Mysaria has textual support, lest you think the show is just throwing that in for fun.
But the way these things are playing out is so far off book at this point that House of the Dragon is beginning to feel like a different story from Fire & Blood. Especially because the changes are not just to the plot, but to the characters. Rhaenyra and Alicent, in particular, are completely different from their book counterparts. They're each missing ambition and edge, which are replaced mostly by a series of tragic misunderstandings that have turned the civil war into one big accident.
Not all these changes have been bad. Some have improved the story, at times dramatically. But after a certain point, you start to wonder whether it even is the same story, or something new.
