The House of the Dragon showrunner is still equivocating about Rhaena Targaryen

The House of the Dragon season 2 finale ended with a lot of things unresolved. Among them was the fate of Rhaena Targaryen, who abandoned her half-siblings to run away into the wilds of the Vale alone to look for a wild dragon living in the area. She found it near the end of the episode, but we don't see what happens next. “I think that’s a ‘please stay tuned and keep watching the story,'” showrunner Ryan Condal told members of the press, per The Hollywood Reporter.

If you've read the source material for House of the Dragon, George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, you've probably guessed that the wild dragon is Sheepstealer, who lives on Dragonstone in the book and is claimed by a character named Nettles. It's looking very much like Rhaena will replace Nettles on the show, which upsets me because Nettles is one of my favorite characters from the book. It's nothing I can't get over, but still, it's too bad.

When asked whether Rhaena was replacing Nettles, Condal remained vague. “I will say we love Rhaena as a character and we’ve we’ve really done a lot of legwork to set her up from the beginning as somebody in this Targaryen household who does not have a dragon and we see how powerful an idea it is," he said. "[W]e’ve seen how with Aemond’s character, somebody that grows up in a family, even at the time of peace, when you don’t have a dragon, how it changes how you’re identified even within the family and how how desperate Rhaena is for that sort of self identification as a dragon rider and is willing to go to fairly dangerous lengths to try to see that realized."

"We’re providing the television version of one objective truth of this history and anybody who reads the book is free to interpret it however they want to, but there is a there are a lot of paths to interpretation through this and I think the the Rhaena story, as we’re seeing it unfold, is potentially one of those interesting interpretations that we have to offer and I would just say that we don’t do any of this stuff lightly."

Fire & Blood is written as a kind of fake history book about the Targaryen dynasty compiled by a scholar from unreliable, sometimes conflicting sources years after the fact. There are ambiguous gaps the writers of the TV show can fill with their own ideas. That said, I think Condal and other producers too often cite these gaps as a justifications for adding in new subplots that aren't based on the book no matter how ambiguously it's written.

For example, in the first season, King Aegon's coronation is interrupted by Rhaenys Targaryen bursting through the floor of the Dragonpit on her dragon Meleys, which is mentioned nowhere in the book; surely something that spectacular would have made it into the historical record. Likewise, George R.R. Martin himself has written that dragons do not hunt in the Vale on account of them preferring warmer climates, and yet here's a dragon hunting for food in the Vale on House of the Dragon.

So these are straight-up changes from the book, not interpreations of an ambiguous text. And I think that's fine! I don't have a problem with changing the book, but equivocating about it, acting like these big alterations are plausible interpretations of a book that is, at most times, fairly plain in its meaning...well, it nettles me.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.