Now granted, the Mushroom character in Fire & Blood describes some particularly queasy scenes, like Daemon training a teen Rhaenyra in how to please a man, including oral-sex lessons, and Aegon being found in Flea Bottom with a child sex slave. That’s a tidy justification for one’s adaptation choices, and Condal has defended the series’ approach, saying he, Sapochnik, and the writing team selected what they would adapt from Fire & Blood based on what they perceived as the viewers’ “understanding of the story or where it goes.” What has rankled all season, though, is how often House of the Dragon relied on unexpected time jumps and a rapid narrative pace, discarding characters soon after their introductions and alluding to tensions between spouses, siblings, friends, and colleagues rather than showing them.

The thing that George is laughing at on the side is how anybody can read Fire & Blood and think that this is the one true official account of anything. As Condal told Variety, “We’re expected to take the one true history out of this book? No. (I won’t spend too much time complaining about how Dorne was done dirty in that series, but book readers, you know it to be true.) House of the Dragon season-one co-showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, meanwhile, have the opposite problem: They’re only pulling a few chapters from Martin’s Fire & Blood for the presumed four seasons of their series.įire & Blood is an in-universe history book that claims to be compiled from a number of different (fictional) sources: grand maesters who served during this time period, “accounts written decades later by the children and grandchildren of those caught up in the events of these times,” contrasting perspectives from the devout Septon Eustace, who served in the Red Keep and “set down the most detailed history of this period,” and the court fool, Mushroom, whose tawdry, vulgar, and gossipy testimony recounts “ribald tales and gossip, piling stabbings, poisonings, betrayals, seductions, and debaucheries.” The volume is intentionally contradictory and acknowledges that “the question of what to believe and what to doubt remains for each student to decide,” which the House of the Dragon team have described as permission for their own adaptive choices. It’s never a one-to-one process, as fans of Game of Thrones should know lots of characters, subplots, mythology, and lore from the thousands of book pages written by George R.R.

The process of adaptation always means that certain elements of the source material end up on the cutting-room floor.

Fire and blood series