House of the Dragon

Septon Eustace, Grand Maester Munkun and the court fool Mushroom rarely agree on what happened, and that disagreement is the pleasure of Fire & Blood. George R. R. Martin wrote the Dance of the Dragons as an in-world chronicle with no dialogue. It is pieced together from biased witnesses who flatter, slander and contradict one another. You are left weighing rumour against record and deciding for yourself who poisoned whom. The show has to commit to one version of each scene, sometimes by choosing an account, sometimes by blending several, and sometimes by inventing its own. The book keeps all the versions open. Beesbury's death, for instance, has more than one telling. Characters the series softens or cuts, from a vengeful Alicent to little Prince Maelor, are restored to their harsher original shapes. The book is also a quick way to see where the story is heading. The chronicle covers the whole war, and its dry, historian's voice makes the atrocities land harder than any staged spectacle.

Rhaenyra and Alicent are the show's clearest reinvention. In Fire & Blood, Alicent is about nine years older than Rhaenyra, marries Viserys at eighteen, and has no special bond with the princess beforehand. The series makes them childhood best friends of the same age and builds its central conflict on that broken friendship. It also gives Alicent a love affair with Ser Criston Cole, which the book does not record. The ending cannot be judged yet because the series is still airing, and nothing so far indicates that it will depart from the book's outcome. The route there has changed in several places. Blood and Cheese is softened. In the book, the killers make Helaena choose which of her sons dies, she names Maelor, and they kill Jaehaerys. On screen, they make her say which twin is the boy, and Alicent is not held hostage. Instead, Helaena finds her in bed with Cole. Showrunner Ryan Condal said the scene was staged as a heist gone wrong. Prince Maelor is cut entirely, a change George R. R. Martin says he argued against and warned would cause knock-on problems in later seasons. Other deaths are reshaped too. The book gives no sign that Lucerys's death was an accident, while the show presents it as a loss of control. Rhaenys never bursts out of the Dragonpit at Aegon's coronation in the book. Criston Cole kills Joffrey Lonmouth in a tourney rather than beating him to death at a wedding. Lord Beesbury's fate is uncertain in the book, and one account has him dying in a cell. Laena collapses while trying to mount Vhagar one last time instead of begging the dragon to burn her. The show also adds smaller touches of its own. Helaena's prophetic dreams are invented. So are Rhaenyra's grief over Jaehaerys and her rebuke of Daemon. The book's Alicent answers the murder with rage and a hunger for revenge, and Cheese escapes. Reports on season 3 suggest that Rhaena takes over Nettles's role and that the Battle of the Gullet is substantially altered, though these changes are less firmly established.