#note i quite like these changes to helaena - alas she was somewhat bland in F&B with nothing particularly unique just a pleasant mother

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

@vclyrias asked:

Hi Butterfly! I just wondered if you know if they changed Helaena’s character for HOTD? I haven’t read Fire and Blood but in TWOIAF she is described as a pleasant and happy girl, and in the show so far she is very serious and gloomy. Do you have any thoughts? 🦋

F&B's description of Helaena isn't that much different from TWOIAF — it only says she was plumper and not as strikingly beautiful as most Targaryens. She was pleasant and happy as a 13-year-old at her marriage (sigh grrm) to her brother Aegon, and gave birth to twins (Jaehaerys and Jaehaera) a year later, and to another boy (Maelor) 4 years after that.

However, by the time of Viserys's death she seemed somewhat displeased with Aegon to the point of sarcasm — when they came to her rooms to tell him his father died and he was king, Aegon wasn't there, and she was like, "Aegon's not in my bed, you can check under the blankets to make sure." As Aegon was actually (depending on the source) either in his mistress's bed, or in a skeevy den in Flea Bottom (featuring bloodsport of feral children) with an extremely underage prostitute, you can see why the years of marriage to him might try her patience.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot else about Helaena during the pre-war period. At the reconciliation banquet (that failed miserably), there's no mention that she minded that Jace asked her to dance, but Aegon was offended and things nearly came to blows. She was apparently close to her mother and close to her father and took her kids to visit them every day. Dreamfyre, her dragon, is described as "beloved". After the Green and Black coronations but before the war actually started, Helaena was in favor of a parley (along with her mother) instead of immediate outright war. Pretty basic until the war began, until "a son for a son", after which she became suicidally depressed. 😭

However, Helaena's daughter Jaehaera is described with terms that seem to be implying (by the author, not the in-world writer who doesn't have the knowledge or vocabulary) she was on the autism spectrum, some sort of neurodiversity — that is, lack of emotion and affect from infancy. It seems likely that HOTD is borrowing from Jaehaera for their version of Helaena, giving her some behaviors that a lot of neurodiverse fans are identifying with. Note that they've also made her a dreamer, like they also did with Viserys; there's no textual basis for either of them to be so, but the skeptic maester of record wouldn't know such details or likely believe in prophecies anyway. (Mind you there's also a popular epic fanfic where Helaena is a dreamer, but she's somewhat of a minor character and it's so au that it's almost certainly just a coincidence.)

Oh, also, here's an illustration from F&B (by Doug Wheatley) of Helaena and the kids visiting Viserys shortly before he died:

It's interesting, while the text says the twins listened attentively to the king's fantasy adventure tale while the 2-year-old Maelor played with a ring Viserys gave him, instead Wheatley chose to draw the boys enthralled by the story while Jaehaera ignores it, instead apparently fascinated by the ring. Makes me wonder if the text was changed last minute? Or if Wheatley read Jaehaera's earlier description and thought she'd be the one more into the ring than the story, and so picked it up when the baby dropped it? (But then the twins don't really look 6 and Maelor definitely doesn't look 2, plus it looks like Viserys has all his fingers, so I shouldn't be too picky.)

Either way, you can imagine the HOTD creators seeing this image and deciding that Jaehaera is how they'd like to characterize young Helaena. (Though with bugs instead of rings. 🐛🕷) We'll just have to wait for the next episodes to see how she's characterized as a young adult...