House of the Dragon boss defends drastically changing Daemon's story in season 2

The other week, author George R.R. Martin publicly criticized House of the Dragon, which is based on his book Fire & Blood. Martin dinged the show for wandering too far from the source material and warned of bigger, more "toxic" changes to come. We may never learn what he thinks those are; Martin deleted his blog post shortly after it went up, and HBO released a special podcast episode where House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal defended his adaptation choices.

We're pretty big fans of House of the Dragon here at WinterIsComing.net — go figure — and we've definitely noticed the huge number of changes the show made from Fire & Blood in its second season. Just because an adaptation deviates from the source material doesn't mean the changes are bad; there are several changes that I enjoyed this past season. Others were harder to swallow, including what the show did with Daemon Targaryen, one of the most dynamic characters from the first season.

So let's look at what Condal had to say about Daemon specifically in his podcast, and see if we can parse whether his explanations hold water or not.

Fire & Blood vs House of the Dragon

In both Fire & Blood and House of the Dragon, Daemon Targaryen heads to the crumbling castle of Harrenhal to raise an army. In the book, we're told he's doing it on behalf of his wife and queen Rhaenyra. The shows adds a wrinkle where he contemplates raising the army on his own behalf before thinking better of it. On the show, he's also plagued by nightmares about his sordid past come back to haunt him, none of which appear in the book.

One of the biggest difference between the book and the show is how difficult it is for Daemon to raise his army. In Fire & Blood, we're told that the smallfolk of the Riverlands answer his call pretty much immediately, most of them eager to fight for Rhaenyra Targaryen, whom many remember from when she toured the Riverlands as a girl. The lords of the Riverlands are slower to move, but they come around soon enough, particularly after Daemon attacks Stone Hedge — the stronghold of the Brackens, the only family in the Riverlands to declare for Rhaenyra's rival Aegon — and takes much of Lord Humphrey Bracken's family hostage. On the show, in contrast, Daemon sends Willem Blackwood to attack the Brackens. Willem is brutal in his methods, and the lords of the Riverlands — including some of the same lords who help Daemon attack the Brackens in the book — chastise him for bringing violence to the land. They withhold their support and only give it when the young Lord Oscar Tully convinces them.

Before we get into Condal's explanations, I'll say that I found much of this plot tiresome on the show. From an adaptation standpoint, it was so different from the book as to be unrecognizable, which I think is a sign you've gone too far. I don't think it stood well on its own, either. I found the dream sequences mostly shallow and repetitive, and the notion that Daemon would be this bad at rallying people hard to believe (not to mention dramatically unsatisfying) given his experience. I also didn't believe the actions of the Riverlords. Daemon hints that a guy from one house should attack another house and the lords think this reason enough to rouse Daemon from bed and tsk-tsk him for being a tyrant, even though he has a dragon and they don't? That struck me as very pollyannish given that these people live in Westeros, a land famed for its violence.

Ryan Condal defends changing Daemon's storyline in House of the Dragon season 2

But let's give Condal a hearing. "That was actually one of our great challenges I think in the season 2 narrative," he said on the podcast. "We always begin the season by kind of laying out the linear timeline of what happens next in the text and sort of figure out, 'okay, what are our big way points? What are our big set pieces? What are the things that we have to cover and throw a bunch of resources at? Where are our main characters going, who's going to be together there? Who can we have in our known and existing cast that can cross over with each other?' And I think we got really lucky in the Alicent and the Rhaenyra and the Aemond and Aegon and Helaena and Jace story because you had a lot of interaction between those sides."

"Whereas Daemon, after Blood and Cheese and after his big blowout argument with Rhaenyra, which I think is one of the best scenes in the season — thank you [director] Claire Kilner, thank you [writer] Sara Hess — he kind of ends up on an island at Harrenhal. And the story that we're given in the book is essentially, Daemon goes to Harrenhal and raises a large host of river men.' And the issue there is that because so many other things had to happen around him and that clearly is not a thing that just goes in and happens overnight — he has to take the castle, there's work to be done — we needed Daemon to be in certain places at certain times and then come back into the main narrative when the other characters were ready to receive him, meaning they had also gone through changes in their arcs. So we sort of said, 'okay, well, Matt Smith is an A++ actor. What do we do with him that is really interesting for Daemon and unexpected, and that also shows growth in his character and then gets us to the end point that we're given in Fire & Blood,' which is Daemon goes to Harrenhal and raises a large host of Rivermen."

I understand what Condal is saying about Daemon being isolated on his own island at Harrenhal in season 2 and wanting to give actor Matt Smith something interesting to do. I get a bit nervous when he starts talking about wanting to give the viewers something "unexpected" that "shows growth in his character." Why? It's all in the details:

"So we decided that making raising this army a struggle for him, for somebody that is probably a much better warrior in general than he is a diplomat, was an interesting thing to do," Condal continued. "We know the Riverlands are always kind of a mess. We know the Blackwoods and the Brackens, despite the sort of wobbly leadership of the Tullys, kick off into this fight at the Battle of the Burning Mill. It's the first big fight of the war. Okay, so we have that we know the Riverlands are kind of a mess and Daemon is going there. He is not — at least at this point in the story — the rallyer and leader of men who's gonna convince everybody to get together and stand behind them. I mean, he might threaten them with their dragon and use the old Targaryen exceptionalism to try to get them in line, but he's not the person that's gonna go house to house and try to get everybody to get along. So Daemon's gonna go into this place and try to jam his square peg into round holes. Daemon will just take a hammer and just try to bash that nail onto the board wherever he goes. That's his style. So that's kind of his external story: This problem of needing to unknot the very strange old ancient ways of the Riverlands, which he sort of scoffs at as a Targaryen and a dragon-rider. He kind of looks down at them...He looks down at them as being backwards and backwater; hill people, essentially."

"Then, what is his internal arc? And that's where we got to the idea that Harrenhal is this haunted castle. Wouldn't it be interesting if Daemon were literally haunted by the ghosts of his past, that kind of torture and bend his will over the course of these pages as he's trying to do this very complicated un-Daemon like thing on his external story of wrangling the Riverlands if he is being robbed of sleep and peace by whatever mystical things are going on in Harrenhal. And you know, there's a witch that lives there in Alys."

Okay, now we're getting into the problem areas. One of the issue with making raising an army a "struggle" for Daemon is that it goes against not only what we're told in the book, but what we've learned on the show. Daemon spent years warring in the Stepstones in season 1. As the brother of the king, he would have had a leadership position. But now he can't scare local lords into following him to save his life. It doesn't line up and it's dull to watch, because we keep expecting Daemon to act like the character we've seen him become and are disappointed when it doesn't happen over and over again. It's "unexpected," sure, but it's not entertaining or interesting or consistent. If you have to pick between for the former and the latter, the choice is easy.

I also ding Condal for selective readings of Fire & Blood. He seems to think that as long as Daemon has raised an army by the end of this arc, then the show is consistent with the book. But Fire & Blood isn't just a series of events; the characters have personalities and motivations that should transfer over to TV, at least somewhat. Daemon being a capable commander who's able to quickly rally the Riverlands is an important part of his story, because it lends credulity to why everyone else is so scared of him. In House of the Dragon, Aegon and Aemond are nervous about Daemon taking Harrenhal and raising an army. Rhaenyra worries that he might betray her. But we know that Daemon is a bumbling doofus who can't do anything right, which makes the lot of them look like bumbling doofuses for assuming he's not a bumbling doofus. If you're writing a war drama and you want your viewers to be on the edge of their seats, it's best not to have your characters act like bumbling doofuses.

As for the dreams, I don't know what else I can say except that I found them superficial and far too numerous. Daemon feels guilty about killing Jaehaerys Targaryen so he dreams about Rhaenyra holding Jaehaerys' corpse (that was one of the better dreams, incidentally). He's guilty about trying to supplant Rhaenyra on the throne so he dreams about her sitting on the throne and then he cuts off her head. He's guilty about not spending time with his daughters so the ghost of his late wife Laena asks him if he's looked after his daughters. And it just went on and on like that. It was cool to see actress Milly Alcock return as young Rhaenyra Targaryen in that first dream, but the returns diminished rapidly after that, to the point where I rolled my eyes whenever a dead character turned up. It might have helped if the show had tried to make the dreams scary or cinematically interesting, but by the end King Viserys is just sitting on the edge of Daemon's bed waiting to chat.

A little would have gone a long way. Instead a whole lot went a very short distance.

The tyranny of character arcs

Alright, let's let Condal take this home: "All those threads kind of came together and then we said, 'Okay, just because you run away from every problem as it comes and faces you doesn't mean that the problems have gone away,'" he said. "You've left a damaged battleground behind you, and the detritus of that is not gone simply because you left the Red Keep and you left Dragonstone. Forcing him to stare that in the eye and face that, forcing him to get over this wounded feeling that he has over being supplanted as the heir to the throne by Viserys for his niece, making him get over that, and how that finds great synthesis at the end when he's humbled at the end and has to finally give in to the what Alys has been telling him the whole time, which is your way doesn't work here, you have to give into the ways of the Rivermen. His way didn't work, the way he was trying to deal with his problems with Viserys and Rhaenyra, and those things kind of come to roost at the same time in Episode 7 and force him to to grow, evolve and then move beyond."

"Daemon probably goes to the biggest, most radical change in the story this year. But at the end, he still went to Harrenhal, he still raised this river army. It was just a more complex and complicated story that has altered Daemon and the people around him in a big way and given us these great characters in Alys Rivers and Ser Simon Strong."

I agree with Condal that Daemon went on a big journey this season. I think I've already made clear that I didn't enjoy the way the show walked that path. But I didn't like where it ended up either.

My reading is that Daemon is a more interesting character at the beginning of the season than at the end. At the start, he's torn between his personal ambition and his loyalty to his wife, between his belief in his own exceptionalism and his responsibility to his daughters, between his eagerness to fight a war and his willingness to take orders. By the end, he sees a supernatural vision of Rhaenyra on the Iron Throne, bathed in light, and devotes himself to her, his inner conflicts apparently resolved. I don't see this as a positive development for the show. Daemon might be a better person at the end of the season, but he worked through a lot of the internal conflicts that made him a dramatically interesting character to watch on television. And this is a television show.

Sometimes I think that screenwriters fetishize the idea of character arcs: every major character must go through an arc every season of TV, so spake the authority. But if that arc is boring and the character is a less compelling version of themselves by the end of it, what is it good for? As talented as Matt Smith is, I think Daemon's arc in House of the Dragon season 2 would have been much better served had his arc been milder; perhaps he develops and abandons the idea of raising an army for himself without changing his outlook on life wholesale.

I also think the House of the Dragon team should have embraced the idea that Daemon simply didn't have as much going on this year and allowed him to spend a couple episodes offscreen, as happened with many major characters on Game of Thrones; that show was confident enough in its audience to trust that we wouldn't forget a character if they took a week or two off (Bran Stark even took the whole fifth season off and that didn't phase fans). House of the Dragon could do with some of that confidence. Yes, Matt Smith is a radiant actor, but better he have reduced screentime than bad screentime.

This is a long article because Condal had a lot to say about Daemon's journey and I have a lot of complaints about it. Minute for minute, I think it was the weakest part of House of the Dragon season 2. Heading into season 3, I hope the writers abandon the idea that "good" and "unexpected" are the same thing, are brave enough to let characters stay who they are (at least for the moment) if that's what's best for the story, and realize that if a character on their show is doing the opposite of what they do in the source material, the adaptation has gone off the rails and they need to pull back.

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