#the difficulties in having problematic protagonists in visual media vs in books is probably why the show started where it did

[navree]

Finished my reading of F&B, and to my shock Rhaenyra's character is pretty dark there... Like they've whitewashed her to an extreme degree

And there is no prophecy , no righteous goal etc.. and that's really good tbh because in that way the whole conflict feels more human. Like people irl don't need prophecy to be ambitious or power-hungry . Aegon is not a crybaby , Alicent is more ambitious and shrewd, Daemon is definitely much darker than his show version but also much more interesting...

I wonder why they didn't keep with the main characterization of the characters and tried to flesh them in the show instead of changing them completely.

Yeah they've lightened Rhaenyra up a lot in the show, though to be fair we haven't gotten to some of her darker stuff, but even things that have already happened, like her involvement in Vaemond's death or the Silent Five has been incredibly watered down.

Things like the prophecy providing a goal and some plot contrivances I think are largely there for two reasons: one, George told the showrunners that Aegon the Conqueror had foreseen something involving the war with The Others before he decided to conquer Westeros, and they added that into the show, two, because it's a prequel. Because Fire & Blood is a textbook and mostly just a supplementary piece of reading and not a story in its own right, it doesn't need to be connected to anything involving the main story other than the fact that it's about the Targaryens and there are Targaryen characters in ASOIAF. But because House of the Dragon is a direct prequel, a narrative that is adding some background depth to the original narrative of Game of Thrones, there does need to be some interconnectedness. There needs to be a thread tying one end to the other beyond just "Dany's a popular character and the Targaryens have the most recorded history about them when compared to the other major families", and the prophecy tying into the central conflict of GOT is that. I've been on record saying I don't think it was a good idea or very well done, but that's what they did.

As to why they changed certain things, it is largely to make them more palatable, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. For one, I'm personally a fan of Aegon as played by TGC being this pathetic pretty boy, sopping wet kitten with big needy eyes, desperate for love bundle of issues type of character, I think it's very fun and creatively fulfilling (and Tom and his tear ducts are killing it). For two, when converting any written narrative into a visual format, you're automatically put at a disadvantage by removing things like inner monologue, internal character voice, thoughts and observations, and really anything that cannot be externalized via facial expressions and spoken word. You can try to make up for it in a myriad of ways (Die Hard took a very stoic and quiet character from the book and made him a chatterbox in order to verbalize the thoughts he was having even though it completely changed the characterization, Twilight just plugs in Bella's narration everywhere, the first Dune adaptation did that batshit thing where it added internal monologue for like literally every character, it's so fucking nuts) or you can just ignore it (the Hunger Games movies kept Katniss's stoic characterization but didn't add in any narration to make up for her blank façade and let us see the complexities of her inner character the way we can in the book, which made movie!Katniss a faithful book character but kind of bad as a film protagonist). It's why, in the original show, Tyrion ended up getting a lot of his bad qualities washed away, because without the benefit of his inner monologue and his thoughts and viewing the world through his eyes like we do on the page, instead seeing things objectively on a screen, him doing things like slapping Shae and pawing at thirteen year old Sansa or constantly talking about all the women he wants to sexually assault (to say nothing of the women he actually sexually assaults) would make him completely unsympathetic and turn audiences against him. It's probably why they softened some of Theon too (he's a lot worse in ACOK than he is in season 2) and also why they made sure to show us everything he went through rather than have him vanish and then reappear as Reek the way he did in the books.

The characters in Fire & Blood are not written to be likable, they're ambitious and power hungry and while we all have our favorites and people that we're willing to excuse anything for ("Alys blew up someone's head" "Rhaenys torched people during the Conquest" grow up and have some fun, God forbid women do anything, I support them), we all know that this is one family full of dramatic bitches fighting for who can be the absolute monarch in a brutal feudal system and birthright monarchy is a scam anyway. But in a show, with a narrative, where you do need to have something approaching a protagonist and antagonist (GOT had good and evil on both sides of every conflict, but Joffrey and Ramsay and the White Walkers and the Essossi slavers clearly filled the roles of "big antagonists" for all the characters no matter whose side you're on), having everyone be miserable drama hoes 24/7 from the word "go" just isn't going to get audiences interested. And that's not gonna fly if you're HBO and you are a company attempting to make a profit like every other company on the planet, you need to get general audiences invested when there's clearly not much of an audience for "book only" people who'd shrugged off HBO's version ASOIAF ever since D&D started mucking it up atrociously. So lightening certain characters, making them more palatable in order to have their intricacies conveyed better in a visual format, that makes sense, that's what they ultimately had to land on to make the show work.

I'm not even against it per se, I like the starting off point we had for most of the characters and the change made to things like Rhaenyra and Alicent's dynamic and the new undertones in the subtext. It's mainly how they built on it from there, and some of the choices they've made, that I've had an issue with. But even then, as I've personally said, my critiques tend to be along the lines of liking the foundation and just wanting to build something different, or thinking certain plots and elements were an example of good idea but bad execution. If they'd started the show from the beginning of F&B, then maybe we'd have gotten a more book accurate Dance, since it would come a lot later and we'd have had time to get to know some great Targs but some incredibly awful Targs as well, but that's all in the past at this point.

I tend to just accept that book canon and show canon are different stories, which they are by design, and appreciate them both on their own merits.