Why the argument that House of the Dragon can change things because it's adapting a "history book" doesn't work

A war of words has broken out in Westeros between A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R.R. Martin and HBO over the direction of the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon. Earlier this week, Martin published a lengthy blog post discussing the infamous Blood and Cheese incident, where a pair of assassins sneak into the Red Keep and kill Queen Helaena and King Aegon's son Jaehaerys Targaryen. The show cut some important elements of this scene from the book, including Helaena's other son Maelor; Martin thinks that cut has the potential to cause a butterfly effect of even more drastic deviations from the source material in future seasons.

And Maelor was seemingly only the beginning of the author's concerns. Martin hinted that "there are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4." A short while later, he pulled the blog post down, though you can still find it archived on the internet if you look.

Meanwhile, HBO released a surprise "bonus" episode of their official House of the Dragon podcast where showrunner Ryan Condal talked about the "challenge" of book-to-screen adaptations, even going so far as to specifically address why Maelor was cut and Martin's involvement in the series. A short while later, HBO issued an official statement in support of the team behind House of the Dragon, saying, "There are few greater fans of George R.R. Martin and his book ‘Fire & Blood’ than the creative team on ‘House of the Dragon,’ both in production and at HBO. Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”

All of this happened over the course of around four hours. So yeah...things got messy. We even had to track updates on the fly during our weekly live podcast, Take the Black:

What is happening with George R.R. Martin and House of the Dragon?

While there's almost certainly a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know, taking all this at face value, I find myself supporting Martin. He had been hinting for a while that he had some issues with House of the Dragon season 2, and the tone and timing of the HBO podcast episode came off like very transparent damage control. I imagine the studio picked up on Martin's intent to go public with his problems, which made headlines last week, and rushed to get ahead of it. But Martin had a fire under him and released his blog post fast enough that HBO couldn't beat him to the punch, resulting in the chaos we all just witnessed.

As for why Martin released this post, a prevailing theory is that the team behind House of the Dragon has repeatedly ignored his input to a degree where the show seems in danger of going fully off the rails as an adaptation of his book Fire & Blood. This theory has been posited by Iron Widow author Xiran Jay Zhao, who spent time with Martin last month at Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland. It's also been backed up by Elio García Jr., one of the founders of the fansite Westeros.org and co-author of the books The World of Ice and Fire and The Rise of the Dragon. García also spent time with Martin in Glasgow, and came to pretty much the same conclusion Zhao did about his blog post being a way to try and force HBO and House of the Dragon to course correct before they make egregious changes from the source material in future seasons. Martin didn't air the worst of his grievances, but he showed that he could if he wanted to, which would be a PR nightmare for HBO.

I also spent some time around Martin and his team in Glasgow, and while we didn't discuss any of his issues with House of the Dragon, my opinion is that García and Zhao's read on the situation has merit. This was not an impulsive move on Martin's part; he mentioned wanting to write a post about "all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing" back in early July. I think he said exactly what he meant to, in the specific way that he did, for a reason. He's been working in television on and off since the late 1980s and knows the business well; in my opinion there's a 0% chance he was just blowing off steam. And tellingly, HBO's response supports that theory, because it's surprisingly reactionary for a multimillion dollar corporation responding to a lone author's blog post, however famous he may be.

Fire & Blood as a "history book" and the slippery slope of adapting it

There's a section of the House of the Dragon podcast that I think shines a light on a major problem that has been plaguing the show, and is likely serving as a driver of this schism with Martin: the idea that since Fire & Blood is a fake "history book," it means that the events described in it are all up for interpretation, which gives House of the Dragon leeway to make up its own versions. Let's let Ryan Condal explain it: "Unlike A Song of Ice and Fire or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Fire & Blood is a history book. It's not a narrative. It's not written in point of view. It is a history described by three unreliable narrators. There are intentional holes in this historical fabric. That's part of the fun in the way that it was written."

"And I think the other thing to highlight too is that there aren't characters in this text, per se, but rather historical figures. Now of course, Daemon and Alicent and Rhaenyra are all characters because they are people who occupy a fictional world, but the way that they are covered in the historical text is the way that any historical figure would be covered in a history book... So, as dramatists, I think we have to approach this history, though it is fictional, as anyone would do as trying to adapt a chapter from real history."

- Ryan Condal

This is an argument that gets trotted out a lot when discussing the changes on House of the Dragon, and on some levels it's fair. Fire & Blood is a fake history book; it's written from the point of view of a maester who is sifting through various historical records in order to write an account of the Targaryen dynasty, and it is absolutely laced with purposeful ambiguity to simulate the often opaque nature of real-world historical records.

However, this doesn't mean that the events described in the book are truly ambiguous. Often, Martin gives a little more weight to one or the other of the historical sources recounting events, signaling that one version or other is likely the "truth." At other times, the veneer of ambiguity falls away entirely. Most often, that happens when something is such a matter of public record that it's common knowledge; a good example is the murder of Laenor Velaryon, which happens in the middle of a crowded marketplace on Driftmark. There's ambiguity concerning why Laenor was killed and who ordered it done, but the fact that he was murdered isn't disputed. The show took a different route, having Laenor fake his own death in order to go live across the Narrow Sea — and opening up unnecessary plot holes with his dragonriding bond in the process.

Another great instance of that transparency is Blood and Cheese, one of the most infamous events of the Dance of the Dragons. That scene isn't described from the perspective of any of the three narrators Condal mentioned; it's a devastatingly straightforward description with no room for misinterpretation. This is reflected in Martin's blog post about Maelor, where he describes the events of that scene as fact, right down to lines of dialogue. Fire & Blood wasn't giving us some possible imagined history of the scene, it was actually giving us the scene as Martin envisioned it. So the "idea that the events of Blood and Cheese, as chronicled in history, were somewhat of a...propaganda against Rhaenyra," as Condal said in an interview with Westeros.org after the episode aired, really doesn't hold water if you think about it for more than two seconds.

There's an even better example of this which really proves the point: the ultimate fate of Helaena Targaryen. To discuss it we have to get into SPOILERS from Fire & Blood and House of the Dragon season 3. These will be the same spoilers which cropped up in Martin's blog post, so if you've already read that you can proceed without fear.

George R.R. Martin just confirmed the cause of Helaena Targaryen's death in Fire & Blood

As part of Martin's post on Maelor, he got into all the other ripple effects removing the young prince would cause. That includes the death of Helaena Targaryen, who commits suicide in the book shortly after her son Maelor is torn apart by a mob in the town of Bitterbridge. However, the book obscures the exact cause of Helaena's decision to leap from a tower of the Red Keep. There are three different theories put forth, by each of the three sources our intrepid maester is examining:

• Helaena was driven to end her suffering because after Rhaenyra captured her she was "sold for a common whore" as the "Brothel Queen," and got pregnant from one of her traumatic encounters. Fire & Blood dismisses this theory outright in the text.
• Helaena took her life after enduring the "horror" of watching Rhaenyra order the execution of two of Team Black's own knights after they rebelled against the queen's orders. While more credible than the Brothel Queen story, Fire & Blood states that this still seems unlikely, since Helaena hardly knew those knights in the first place.
• Mysaria told Helaena about the death of Maelor, including the "grisly manner of his passing," and that finally broke Helaena's will to live. The book questions why Mysaria would tell Helaena this painful information at this juncture, saying "what motive she would have had for doing so, beyond simple malice, is hard to fathom."
• And then, there's the rumor that all the people of King's Landing believe: that Queen Helaena Targaryen was murdered by Rhaenyra and the Blacks. Regardless of the actual truth, this is the story that drives the plot forward and sparks the beginnings of the unrest that eventually leads to the Storming of the Dragonpit, which Martin mentioned in his blog.

The historical ambiguity that Condal mentioned is on full display here; Helaena's death is a perfect example of an instance where the book doesn't explicitly tell you what happened. However, in Martin's blog post, he speaks firmly on the cause of Helaena's death: "In the book, when word of Prince Maelor’s death and the grisly manner of his passing (pp. 505) reaches the Red Keep, that proves to be the thing that drives Queen Helaena to suicide. She could barely stand to look at Maelor, knowing that she chose him to die in the 'Sophie’s Choice' scene [of Blood and Cheese]… and now he is dead in truth, her words having come true. The grief and guilt are too much for her to bear."

Martin provides far more detail about what thoughts drove Helaena to commit suicide than we ever get in the text, and it drives home the idea I mentioned above: that even though Fire & Blood is written as a history book filled with ambiguity, Martin did have an actual "true" vision of these events in mind when he wrote it. Perhaps not for every single thing in the book — there are plenty of places where it's simply noted that "no one knows what was said" or some such, like at the parting of Daemon Targaryen and Nettles — but on the whole, this description of Helaena's death supports the idea that the ambiguity is a veil meant to entertain readers, not a crutch Martin is using to get out of clearly defining what happened in his own world.

And that matters, because the team behind House of the Dragon has access to Martin and could presumably get clarity on events fairly easily; official HOTD podcast co-host Jason Concepcion even said as much in the episode with Condal. So the idea that the series has to interpret this ambiguous "history" and carve its own path through it without knowing the truth of things doesn't completely pass muster. Or more accurately, it's an excuse that's being used to weave an entirely different tale than the one Martin told in Fire & Blood, often to the show's detriment.

Changes from source material are natural in adaptations, but should still make sense

To be clear, I'm not saying that House of the Dragon should be utterly slavish to the source material. There are plenty of examples of moments where the show does thread that needle of historical ambiguity well, such as when Aemond Targaryen torches his brother Aegon over Rook's Rest. Fire & Blood describes a chaotic battle between dragons, but that sort of detail about what actually happened in the air obviously isn't something that was witnessed by any of the book's narrators. That's a perfect place to expand and insert some extra drama, and House of the Dragon did a fantastic job with it.

But then you have a growing mountain of other changes where it feels like the show uses the book's ambiguity to take liberties which don't entirely make sense. The relationship between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower is a good example of this. In Fire & Blood, Rhaenyra and Alicent have an extremely adversarial relationship, and that causes a lot of heartache. The show has gone the route of making them estranged friends who really, truly could get along if only all the men around them stopped fighting, instead of the power-hungry and entitled nobles they're portrayed as in Martin's book. "History will paint you a villain, grasping for power," Rhaenyra tells Alicent in their clandestine meeting on Dragonstone in the season 2 finale, while the two of them parley to try and avoid a war they were directly responsible for causing in the novel. And yes, the novel did paint Alicent as a villain grasping for power...which is a key piece of her character that is missing from the television series.

When an adaptation handles characters and events in the opposite way to how they're portrayed in the source material, it becomes a slippery slope fast. And using the "it's a history book" argument to justify it just makes less and less sense the longer you look at it. Above, Condal refers to Rhaenyra and Alicent as "historical figures" more than true characters with clearly defined inner motives. And while that's true to an extent, it's important to remember that the characters presented in Fire & Blood are the versions of these characters Martin wanted to present. If Alicent and Rhaenyra were secretly besties who wanted to avert the war, you can bet that he would have alluded to it in the novel.

At the end of the day, most of this is just my opinion. But I think it's become clear the longer House of the Dragon has run that this idea of treating the source text as a history book, instead of an actual novel that is simply simulating a history book, is starting to get it into trouble. And given the very public nature of the dispute we witnessed this past week, it seems likely those troubles have become even more untenable behind the scenes than we imagined back when the season was airing.

Hopefully, a solution to this can be found, so that House of the Dragon can finish out its last two seasons in triumph and George R.R. Martin can feel good about the way the series is handling his story. We'll be watching to see how things progress.

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