House of the Dragon showrunner explains why he (basically) cut Nettles from Fire & Blood

It has been a crazy couple of days within the House of the Dragon fandom. First, author George R.R. Martin wrote a blog post criticizing the show for changing so many things from his book Fire & Blood. Then he took it down, and then HBO dropped a surprise podcast episode where House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal defended some of the changes he'd made. There were twists and turns every minute!

By and large, fans seemed to support Martin taking a stand for textual fidelity, but it's still interesting to hear Condal talk through some of the changes he and his team made. Take the case of Nettles. Nettles is an important character in Fire & Blood, a peasant girl living on Dragonstone who manages to claim the dragon Sheepstealer not by virtue of having Targaryen blood, but by being resourceful and clever: she simply brings the dragon a sheep to eat every day until it trusts her.

I really like the character and was looking forward to seeing her on TV, but it looks like Condal and company are giving Nettles' role to the character of Rhaena Targaryen, Damon's daughter, instead. Unless something extremely unexpected happens, I don't think the Nettles we know from the book is going to show up.

Condal wouldn't quite commit to saying this outright in the podcast episode, but he did talk through his thought process, and got me wondering after what exactly he has planned. "I think a lot of this story is still kind of in progress, so I don't want to say too much to preserve the experience for the audience that's watching," he said. "I would say that we don't do anything on the show without long discussion and consideration. And I would just say we understand these stories that have kind of risen to the top. They get talked about a lot online. Even before I was involved, we understand how important they are to the audience. And I think it's our job to adapt and render them in a way that it might not be exactly what you expect but is satisfying and hopefully, in some cases, exciting and surprising. And I think this story is something that falls into a nice area where you can do something that is faithful to the history as written, but also do something very unexpected and different."

Honestly, I find these comments a little weird. Condal and his team are adapting a book, so why do they feel a responsibility to adapt that book in a way that readers of that book won't be expecting? I imagine what's "exciting and surprising" for readers will be to see the characters and stories they love come to life onscreen, and for everyone else, it will be novel and new.

So I don't know if that explanation passes the smell test, but I understand his follow-up better. "I've said before that this show is based wholly around [King] Viserys and his extended family. And I think the Rhaena character, even though she takes more time for her to come into the narrative in the book, is actually a big character in this family, the greater dynasty of the Targaryen family. And she's one of Daemon's two kind of semi-estranged daughters, at least, you know, at least in our version of the story. So we felt it very important to tell a robust story for her that brings her into the narrative, one that not only gives Rhaena a full three-dimensional real story to tell, but also has an impact on Daemon. And I think that is kind of to be unveiled and to be revealed. But please stay tuned. I think most people will see what we're doing and be able to see how it actually dovetails in very nicely with the history as it exists."

"I think the way we approach this is we're constantly balancing the need to tell a broadly appealing fantasy story and also servicing this book that we revere very greatly, Fire & Blood, and rendering an adaptation that remains very faithful to it and respectful to it and sometimes will not do exactly the thing that the audience expects or has read in the text. But I think in the final analysis of it, hopefully most people can go in and see, 'oh, I can see how the historians had one perspective on this story.' But when you tell this objective story of what it was actually like living there on the ground with these characters, how that story was then absorbed into the history either because that was the accepted propaganda of the time because somebody had an agenda or simply because that person wasn't there and only knew the what the who and the when and didn't know how and the why."

If House of the Dragon is going to cut Nettles, make it a clean cut

It's true that Fire & Blood is not written as a straightforward novel but as a kind of fake history book where events are filtered through the perspective of second-hand chroniclers and historians working years after the fact. There is room for ambiguity.

But I think a lot of fans would agree that Condal and his team have taken that ambiguity and made far too much of it, changing things that are as set in stone as it's possible for them to be. In that block quoted paragraph above, it sounds like Condal is planning to merge Nettles' story into Rhaena's and somehow claim that the historians who "wrote" Fire & Blood simply missed this detail. That seems like a crazy stretch. In the book, Nettles and Rhaena are two different people doing different things in different locations at the same time. Their presences are accounted for. Claiming that history remembers this one person as two people, if that is indeed what Condal is claiming, is extremely hard to swallow.

It's also unnecessary. Condal's first explanation sounds more reasonable to me: he and his team wanted to keep the story focused on Viserys' family, Nettles isn't a part of that family, so they cut her and subbed in Rhaena. There's no need to justify it by trying to make it fit into Fire & Blood's structure; that's a sell no one's gonna buy.

Mind you, I don't agree with Condal's logic; I think the show can still be about Viserys' family while including Nettles, who I think brings more than enough to the table for it to be worth making room for her. But at least that explanation doesn't require Condal to absurdly argue that history forgot that two people, both of whom are drawn very distinctly in the book, were one person. How much can you really "revere" a source text if you're willing to play so fast and loose with its plain language? Honestly, as upset as I am to lose Nettles, I can see myself enjoying a story where Rhaena mounts a dragon and spends time with her dad; why not? It's the weird attempts to retrofit the story that bother me.

That said, I wonder how far Condal and company will go with trying to make Rhaena's story fit. Maybe she'll pass herself off as a peasant and call herself Nettles or something? But even as I write that I can think of a hundred reasons it wouldn't work. If the show has to lose Nettles, I hope it's a clean break. We'll find out when House of the Dragon season 3 airs in 2026.

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