#ryan condal if you're reading this it's not too late

[whitegownsandflowercrowns]

Here’s How Nettles Can Still Win

Dragons can understand English: As we saw in Episode 2x04, “The Red Dragon And The Gold”, Aegon’s grasp of High Valyrian is beginner level at best. He can have to make a war and not much else. Therefore, he commands his dragon, Sunfyre, in English or whatever it’s called in Westeros. While Aegon slacking off in his High Valyrian lessons is in character, it could also very much serve as foreshadowing for someone who speaks zero High Valyrian to tame a dragon. Addam, Hugh, and Ulf will all likely learn the basic commands, like Dracarys. But there could be someone who’s not going to learn any of those things, someone who has tamed a dragon in spite of that.

Rhaena did not claim that dragon yet: Her last moment in the episode was seeing the dragon and having it roar at her. For all we know it could eat her. Nettles hasn’t been ruled out yet.

The dragon might not be Sheepstealer: There are many wild dragons in Fire & Blood, not just Sheepstealer. We as a society are overlooking the potential comedic value of Rhaena claiming Cannibal.

Rhaenyra is getting more morally dubious: I have seen Rhaenyra brought up a lot as a potential reason that the writer's room may have decided to cut Nettles, because if you know anything about Nettles' story, you know that Rhaenyra doesn't come out of it looking great. Given how Rhaenyra has been depicted for most of the show, this is a fair criticism. HOWEVER. Rhaenyra in the second half of Season 2 is a Rhaenyra who is a lot more morally questionable. She lets dozens of her own relatives suffer horrific deaths on the off chance that one of them might be able to claim a dragon (and it worked, so she now thinks that it was all worth it), she plans for a battle that would kill thousands of innocents, and she tells Alicent to offer up "a son for a son" knowing damn well what happened to Helaena and Jaehaerys. The writers aren't necessarily afraid of depicting her in a negative light. Do I think that certain things she says and does about Nettles would be softened? Yes. Do I think that eliminates the possibility of Nettles? No.

Rhaenyra cheated: Sorry that so much of this is about Rhaenyra. But this is important to mention, she did cheat on Daemon with Mysaria, and I really don't think that the writer's room is trying to depict Daemyra as the ultimate true love story. In other words, they're willing to break them up.

There has been a lot of focus on the smallfolk: Addam, Hugh & Ulf, all future (at the time) dragon riders, got a lot of focus in Season 2, despite all being smallfolk. There's also been original smallfolk characters like Dyana and Sylvi who got more attention than you'd expect in Season 2. So if smallfolk characters are important, why not have one of the most important ones?

[horizon-verizon]

I think George dont realised what happen to season 2 was a butterfly effects from season 1 yet George still praising season 1, he actually did similar with his complain about Targ sigil, isnt he too late for that? That four legs was already there since season one (Harry Llyod costume), if George still enjoying season 1 and can separate them with his book why can't he do that with the following season they never intent to follow his story btw.

What GRRM was trying to say in the dragons post was what he continues and expounds on in his Maelor/Sophie's Choice post: if you mess with the most critical, moving parts of the plot, you're going to strip the story of its meaning AND empty yourself of logical lines towards future events. that's what anon's referring to.

Well, anon, in that dragons post, GRRM didn't give examples [that had the, in my opinion, very necessary and well warned spoiler] and didn't explain what he meant by "Fantasy needs to be grounded.   It is not simply a license to do anything you like. Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused.  Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper."

What's different now, anon, is exactly what he said in his post, anon: they are messing with VERY CRITICAL MOMENTS that have to do with the end of the war itself; they crossed a particular line in the telling of the story itself, something that should, at all costs, be retained in the show for the ending (Maelor). This isn't about costumes or anything that could be easily reshaped into a "close-enough" storyline, esp bc Jaehaera NEEDS to make it to the end of the Dance and no she cannot replace Maelor. No, she cannot become Aegon's heir; bc the greens were steadfast abt it having to be a boy, having the succession go through males, thus stick to their own guns/reason for going into the war in the first place and going towards their fall. And this part abt Jaehaera, again, is not even the thing GRRM was talking abt out the post.

It's like asking someone to be happy with someone making Nymeria have mostly men instead of women in her group of Rhoynar-rescued; like having the Mountain not kill Elia Martell and her kids, which leads to Oberyn going after the Mountain, which goes into the acceleration of the Dornish plot against the Lannisters going on right now. At least, this is the thing he notes. And he's entitled to expressing what he sees and observes are not-great changes to his story when he see/observes them. As we all are when we're looking at something created for us to watch/read; with him, the actual writer, he has even more "right" to.

In season 1, he also wasn't promised (seemingly) something would happen and then that thing then not happening, as what was the deal with Maelor and Ryan promising Maelor would exist.

the following season they never intent to follow his story btw.

This is conversation of the definition and parameters of "adaptation", but first, GRRM was basically giving us an extended....not metaphor but an extended parallel of what he [the guy who wrote this story for anyone to adapt or not] thinks are the most important elements of the story; and he chose dragon legs likely bc it was one of the most incentivizing amongst many fandoms, he takes great pride in his reasoning for those legs; he wishes to express to his/the show's fans an arm of care and relation towards changes eh doesn't think production or execs should or had to cut or distort BEFORE he he heard of HBO's plans to produce it and when he met with the producers/Condal about it.

Because--before that ill-fated post--from how GRRM writes abt HotD, even when he's positive, it gives off the impression that he's never in the actual writer's room despite how many fans argued that he was and had to have been as an exec producer (that must have been awkward for those fans upon seeing GRRM demonstrate how wrong that notion was). If he's not in the writer's room or has proper authority, all he can really do is sit back and watch the product...maybe a little earlier tha most, but still, he's not involved and he's reacting and thinking about the show.

Anyway, what, anon, do you think entails an adaptation "following" a story? How closely or far from the original plot would you say is "too far", when it finally becomes something that is not the actual story anymore but an invention by those who want to make a completely different story? And does this actually sound like an adaptation? Or a fanfic?

Definitions:

adaptation: a composition rewritten into a new form, or to fit a different medium; a screen adaptation of a novel fanfic: stories written about TV, film, or book characters by their fans (= people who admire them); stories formed from existing, usually published material with a plethora/array of possible interpretations of the source materials present themes, characterizations, etc./the purpose of creating fan material for the sake of personal enjoyment

HotD was always going to be more fanficy sorta thing bc it is a hotly debated section of a history book IN YERMS OF THR MIST INTIMATE OF RVENTS AND DETAILS BETWEEN CHARACTERS; however, like what historians and history books have always tried to do and continue to do so, F&B is container if actual firsthand records as eell as secind hand. There ARE more probable and likely options of situations the history book creates for us to....not "solve" but piece out when it comes to possible biases, and some claims by some narrators are very easy to mark as false.

And what you piece out will be very much a reflection of how you view certain behaviors, characters, ideas, AS WELL AS you actual knowledge of what inspires GRRM, why it does, why we care abt those things (I'm talking real history) what the lore of the world Rhaenyra and the rest are in. I'm talking laws, how some people view some of them and how they will twist them to their own emds. And most of all, as I already said, somethings without a doubt...precisely bc it i IS a history book, happened. And some of those need NEED to be on screen for the end to make any sort of sense the way it was intended to.

But I also think he's hopeful abt Ryan making some script changes from his very rare assertiveness.

I also think that this is all part of a reckoning with the different degrees people are willing to tolerate the "inventive" adaption that really changes the source material that many have not actually read or understood; some want the adaptation to match as close as possible to the orig (a lot of book readers), other don't care how far away the story gets from the org, others are in an undefined but just as variant "middle".

[westeroswisdom]

HotD showrunner Ryan Condal had a lot to say about Season 3 and about that public disagreement with GRRM.

"There's been no television show in history that ever said, 'We have too much money and too much time to make this,'" Condal tells Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview. "You're always making decisions as you go along as to, how are we going to use the resources we have right now to tell the best story we can possibly tell? But I appreciate everybody's patience." Now, as House of the Dragon season 3 officially fires up filming a new batch of eight episodes in the U.K., Condal sits down with EW over Zoom to preview what’s to come — and he's giving the people what they want. [ ... ] "This is certainly our biggest season to date, both in terms of ambition and just the practical size, the amount of sets," he says. "We're cresting that narrative parabola here and starting to come down into, if not the endgame, the midpoint and getting into the late Act 2 and moving onto the start of Act 3. Anybody that's read that book knows that the narrative gets bigger and grimmer as it goes along, and the show has to match that ambition as best it possibly can."

Now to the GRRM stuff...

"It was disappointing," he admits. "I will simply say I've been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy. George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer." Condal acknowledges he's said most of this in previous interviews, including how Fire & Blood isn't a traditional narrative. "It's this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way," he continues. "I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time. At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that's my job. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that's what I have to say about it." Martin's biggest gripe in his deleted blog entry revolved around the omission of Maelor Targaryen, the third child of Queen Helaena (Phia Saban). That character's absence impacted the context of the tragic Blood and Cheese sequence early in season 2 — Condal previously addressed why the writers approached that scene differently — and Martin feared for other potential ripple effects as it pertains to Helaena's future. Condal promises he has a plan in place. "There's nothing we do on the show without talking it through and thinking about it very deeply for usually many months, if not years," he says. "I will just say that the creative decisions that we make in the show all flow through me, every single one of them, and this is the show that I want to make and believe, as a fan of Fire & Blood and a deep reader of this material, it is the adaptation that we should be making to not only serve Fire & Blood, but also a massive television audience."

A reminder that a large number of characters from ASoIaF were left out of HBO's Game of Thrones. That includes Lady Stoneheart who some readers regard as pivotal. And ASoIaF was much more of a traditional narrative than Fire & Blood. F&B is a latter day history of the Targaryens written by Archmaester Gyldayn who was active around the time of Mad King Aerys II Targaryen. Gyldayn's history is based on incomplete, occasionally biased, and sometimes conflicting accounts of the civil war.

Ryan Condal has had to piece things together, fill in gaps, and render the Dance of the Dragons into a self-explanatory TV narrative. I sympathize with George R.R. Martin who created this world. Though I would gently bring up GRRM's increasing number of diversions which have caused him to not complete various projects. If George is concerned about specifics in House of the Dragon then he would be taking a more direct role in its production.

As to who is right about the inclusion or exclusion of Maelor Targaryen, we'll simply have to wait until the end of House of the Dragon to make that call.