The second season of House of the Dragon wrapped up last month, and if you're familiar with the source material — the book Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin — you know that the show changed A LOT. It changed so much that Martin himself publicly criticized the show, opening up a rift we're not sure will ever be closed. Things are weird in this fandom right now.
In response to Martin's criticisms, HBO released a special podcast episode where House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal defended some of his adaptation choices, including the choice to focus so much of the story on Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. These two are important characters in the book, but are the main focus of the show. For example, during the stretch of story covered by season 2, Rhaenyra and Alicent don't meet, but in the show they meet twice. At one point Rhaenyra even dresses up as a nun to sneak into King's Landing and see Alicent, which struck some fans (okay, me) as...vaguely ridiculous.
"I've said from the beginning that Alicent and Rhaenyra are the two central characters of the show," Condal said on the podcast. "I mean, look at the poster for season 2. And that is stated, I think pretty clearly not only in the pilot but certainly through the course of the first season of the show. It's a story about these two women who are essentially children when we meet them. They're raised in this heavily patriarchal society by two powerful men. I mean, one literally has absolute power in Westeros: , Rhaenyra's father. And then his number two, the Hand of the King Otto Hightower, . And how they are both, Rhaneyra and Alicent, intentionally or unintentionally depending on your point of view and which character we're talking about, being wielded as political pawns by their scheming fathers."
"So as dramatists, we were very interested in seeing beyond what exists in the text of the book and following these two characters through this very compelling narrative that we felt was very different than the core themes and concepts behind the original Game of Thrones. I mean, if we're going to tell this story, we need to have a reason to be. Why are you telling the story beyond just everybody wants to see the Targaryen history? Telling the story centered around two powerful women sitting at the forefront of this and then just coming up as friends and then breaking apart and becoming foes and being on the two sides of this terrible civil war, the worst civil war that's ever been fought in Westeros. That was all very interesting to us."
I thought the show did a great job with this arc in the first season. Rhaenyra and Alicent were best friends, and then were torn apart by circumstance and ambition. I thought things started to feel off in season 2, when the show had Rhaenyra and Alicent do things that weren't contemplated in the text at all. But let's see what else Condal has to say on it:
"And I think going deeper as we try to have this kind of living conversation with the text of Fire & Blood and also history itself and how history is written, how women tend to be erased from histories like this," the showrunner continued. "And does that mean that they didn't participate or simply that what they did do wasn't captured in the historical record or was it intentionally brushed over or minimized in the writing of the history? And what I think is interesting when you start with that as an idea and as a concept, when you see the results of this, when you read Fire & Blood and you see how these two women were kind of blamed for the awful consequences of this war. That felt like a real kind of interesting and intentional cognitive dissonance that we really play with. And again, it just felt like that was always something to kind of come back to and hold to and hang our hat on and instead of carrying it as a burden, we kind of leaned into it and said, 'well, what unexpected things can this give us as we go along the way?'"
"I think Alicent in the book is an interesting character. I think in the show, hopefully we are honoring where her historical character came from. But you're also showing deeper layers and more complexity and frankly, more conflict, internal conflict within her about what role she wants to play in this history and how she wants to be seen at the end. And she's one of the characters, I think in this story that's aware that she's playing a major role in a history that's going to be written about and is wondering how she is going to be portrayed in that in the end."
The problem with making Alicent and Rhaenyra the "central characters" of House of the Dragon
Clearly, Condal and his team are invested in the idea of Rhaenyra and Alicent as the main characters of the show. Their interest in giving us something "unexpected" climaxed in the House of the Dragon season 2 finale, when Alicent secretly meets with Rhaenyra and agrees to open the gates of King's Landing to her, even offering to sacrifice the life of her crippled son and Rhaenyra's main rival for the Iron Throne, King Aegon II Targaryen, in the hopes that as queen Rhaenyra can put an end to the Dance of the Dragons civil war.
In the first season, Condal and company added in these new elements while sticking to the text of Fire & Blood. I thought that enriched the story and made for good watching. In season 2, they turn Rhaenyra and Alicent from rivals to allies, which goes directly against the text. That's where the show starts to lose me. It's one thing to add color and texture to a relationship, and another to have the characters do the opposite of what they do in the book. I don't think you can rightly call your show an adaptation at that point.
I also disagree with Condal's reading of Fire & Blood. I think the book is too complicated to credibly claim that Rhaenyra and Alicent were "blamed for the awful consequences of this war"; too much happened before and during to reduce the story down that far. I'm also confused by his talk about women being "erased," "brushed over" or "minimized" from history. That might be true of real historical accounts, but it's not true of Fire & Blood, where Rhaenyra and Alicent are prominent figures from the start to the end, even if they're not always the only focal points.
I feel like in an attempt to correct a perceived misconception where Rhaenyra and Alicent are blamed for everything, Condal and his team have overcorrected and produced a story where they aren't responsible for anything. For example, Alicent works against Rhaenyra for a while, but only because she misunderstands his husband Viserys' dying words. And now, rather than sliding further down a slippery slope where violence begets violence and revenge leads to revenge, which is the arc for almost every character in the book, the two are trying to come to an accord. This isn't a nip or a tuck on the sides of the story; it's a change to its basic shape.
And this leads to all kinds of weird problems, like the dissonant attempt to frame Alicent as noble and self-sacrificing even as she betrays her family in the hope that a woman she was friends with decades ago will make a better ruler than her sons, one of whose lives she offers up without acknowledging that she had a big role in nursing his antipathy towards Rhaenyra in the first place, or acknowledging that Rhaenyra's husband took out a hit on Alicent's grandson several episodes back. I didn't buy it.
The third season of House of the Dragon is due out in 2026. Now that the show has gone this far afield of the source material, I honestly don't know what will become of Rhaenyra and Alicent next.
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