House of the Dragon vs. Fire and Blood

Documenting perversion of the source

INTRODUCTION

George Martin may be the best technical writer alive. His Song of Fire and Ice essentially obsoletes Lord of the Rings, along with all other preceding fantasy, and he has paved the way for a new generation of fantasy authors who build on his legacy.

Conservatives wrongly accuse Game of Thrones of being gratuitously violent and sexual, morally ambiguous, depraved, a symptom of cultural decay.

They miss the point: Martin is essentially a writer of historical fiction in the vein of Mary Renault and every bit as educational. His basis is the wars of the roses; he mines history and refines it into dangerously compelling entertainment. He comes off as a leftist NPC in real life, BUT he has that rare ability as an author to cast modernity from his mind entirely and get in the heads of the ancients.

Once upon a time (before Kant), there was no such moral code as “altruism” and people would think you nuts if you preached self-sacrifice. Might as well tell a flower to hand its neighbor the sunlight. You had virtues like pride, ambition, strength, honor, chivalry, generosity - ways to better yourself, even if ill-defined, rarely practiced, never fully integrated into a coherent framework.

Then we decided that virtue is only to be found in the beneficiary of an action, rather than the action itself. If it benefits someone other than you, it’s good. If it benefits you, it’s evil. This is the essence of modern ethics which have so saturated our culture. Why do billionaires like Bill Gates dump their money into deep state “charities” which advocate the destruction of the very source of their wealth? Because their wives have learned to harangue them from the altruist perspective. Your company is no good, it’s profit-seeking, you must allow me to spend your money on other people to be redeemed.

Anyway, my point is that while George Martin is on board with modern ethics, he leaves it all behind in his fantasy, opening a clear window into how our ancestors thought. More importantly, when we are exposed to how cheap life once was, how miserable the oppression, how sadistic and cruel the nobility - we better understand how good we have it. We are raised to believe that life sucks in America. We internalize this view without thinking, victims of a deluge of self-loathing cultural reinforcement, and yet, if we step off our pinnacle to fathom what came before, we might realize just how lucky we are to be alive now. Better to be poor today than a King of yesteryear.

The HBO writer is not able to think like Genghis Khan, Henry V, or anyone else. Left to her own devices she will write a show about herself and her gaggle of gay friends triumphing over oppression. Given strong enough source material, she may perhaps do a bit better. Let’s see how she does with House of the Dragon.

FIRE AND BLOOD

Fire and Blood is George Martin’s The Silmarillion - his notes of history leading to the events of A Song of Fire and Ice, part of the world-building, an adjunct. Not the most readable of fiction, I wouldn’t recommend it, and I only read it because it was going around the pod in county. Books are more interesting in a cell, I find.

But I was glad I read it, because Martin applies his genius so well to this bit of history, elevating Fire and Blood well above Tolkien’s unreadable Silmarillion (which veers into OCD territory, forcing the reader to learn 5 new languages to comprehend precisely how boring it is). Fire and Blood races through 200 years of history and teases us with an array of plot skeletons which, I imagined, could be mined into endless prequels to Game of Thrones. And so it is happening; the prophecy is fulfilled.

Rhaenyra Targaryen was the most fascinating character in the book - an ambitious, independent-minded dragon-riding princess, heir to the kingdom thanks to an indulgent father who hardly realizes the lethal consequences of forcing a queen on the patriarchy. Rhaenyra is alleged to be up to all sorts of kinky stuff with the help but ultimately marries her depraved uncle Daemon. She becomes dumpy and ugly by her early 20’s from 6 childbirths, yet her ambition only intensifies as her old friend Alicent marries her father and usurps her kingdom on his death.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON

If you’ve seen the show, you may have noted some divergences already. Ambition is such an ugly thing to young HBO writers (even if they possess it themselves), being selfish, when the only virtue they are programmed to parrot is altruism, self-denial, self-loathing, self-destruction. Therefore, if a modern NPC is to sympathize with Rhaenyra, ambition must be eliminated. She doesn’t really want to be Queen, but it turns out she has a “higher duty” to fulfill a prophecy so that Game of Thrones can happen. “What a neat trick!” thought the HBO writers. “In one fell swoop we tie her motivation into the Lore, AND, any questionable non-altruistic actions lifted from the Martin text can be forgiven for the sake of the “higher duty”. Phew, we can keep some of this kinky uncle-fucking stuff.”

The early episodes of House of the Dragon also attempt to turn childbirth into its own heroism, dwelling so hard it risks becoming the theme. And yet, the TV Rhaenyra never gets dumpy and only seems to get prettier as she ages. Like Tom Cruise, HBO’s Rhaenyra has fully divested herself of Thetans and seemingly halted the aging process in her late teens (I’m not sure why they bothered to change actresses for middle age). Another bland hot chick heroine, despite the amazing frumpy-but-empowered hausfrau Martin wrote. At least she’s not in the Matrix - this season.

Sadly, the writers couldn’t resist putting Daemon into the Matrix for at least one painful scene. Mostly, Daemon (great performance by Matt Smith) is the same character Martin bestowed upon us Yet this scene, one sentence in the book:

In 108 AC, when at last [Daemon] came face-to-face with Craghas Crabfeeder, he slew him single-handed and cut off his head with Dark Sister.

is turned into a most sloppy, ill-informed battle scene, in which Daemon is sent to fight the Crabfeeder’s entire army, one at a time of course, killing a few dozen in the Matrix, until a few hundred Agent Smiths encircle him completely, at which point his dragon burns them all out. This is presented as a wily tactic from Lord Corlys. I can only imagine the horrors to come in season 2, which promises nothing but battles. Written by 20-something girls who find history too boring to mine for material (Martin, on the other hand, is mining the Wars of the Roses like a champ)

The Daemon character is also compromised by having to take the blame for morally dubious actions which were assigned to Rhaenyra in the book. The HBO writers couldn’t bring themselves to allow this bit of realpolitik:

She dispatched Prince Daemon to seize Ser Vaemond, had his head removed, and fed his carcass to her dragon, Syrax.

Though it’s only vital character development. Instead, TV Daemon is made a willful threat to the very sane and noble matriarchal utopia brewing in ancient wokeland. Watch TV Rhaenyra’s shock as that damn Daemon ruins everything again:

These are not the worst sins of House of the Dragon. In the book, when the King dies, time compresses in a sense as Martin begins to write entire scenes with full dialogue for the first time. It’s as if he knew this show was coming and felt the need to offer better guidance to HBO. But the HBO writers were determined to overcome this guidance and they did. In the book Rhaenyra rages and suffers a stillbirth upon learning of Alicent’s usurpation; she all but forces the stillbirth, screaming at the monster to get out, having its corpse tossed off a cliff, blaming Alicent for the loss, steeling her resolve for all-out war.

In the TV version: Rhaenyra refuses to go to war because she has a moral code in which one doesn’t attack first (even though the Queen just killed a half-dozen of her supporters). All the patriarchy pushes for war, her uncle in the lead, but there’s something about that estrogen that gives Rhaenyra an advantage. It’s not clear why inaction is the best policy until Lord Corlys comes to save the day with his fleet and a proclamation that Rhaenyra’s womanly war-evasion really sealed the deal for him, he’s uhh, ready for war now?

But the TV writers need their heroine to have altruistic motives - not ambition! - so they move the killing of Rhaenyra’s son up a few notches. The death of her son (not the usurpation of the crown) causes the rage which leads to the stillbirth, and to a declaration of war.

Also very unlike the novel, TV Rhaenyra loves her stillborn baby and we get a nice long scene where she cries a lot and lovingly mummifies it or something. Because she’s a mom! And she cares about people other than herself! George Martin doesn’t know how to write women at all, eh, HBO writing team?

In the end the character of Rhaenyra is rendered meaningless, another cut-out NPC heroine who occasionally utters a cool line which seems a bit out of character, having been ripped from its context (the book) and forced into a shotgun wedding with clownworld.

My second-favorite character in the book was Mushroom the dwarf, Fool to the King and one of the two “primary sources” oft referred to by the Maester character who narrates this synthesis. Mushroom always has the sordid details which are contrasted with the sanitized version of a bland contemporary history. As a device it’s almost compelling enough to carry the whole book. But Mushroom is more than a gimmick, he’s deeply involved in these events and yet, he is not even mentioned in the show. Is this anti-dwarf bias?

From there the prince went on to show his niece how best to touch a man to bring him pleasure, an exercise that sometimes involved Mushroom himself and his alleged enormous member. Daemon taught the girl to disrobe enticingly, suckled at her teats to make them larger and more sensitive, and flew with her on dragonback to lonely rocks in Blackwater Bay, where they could disport naked all day unobserved, and the princess could practice the art of pleasuring a man with her mouth.

IF MUSHROOM IS TO BE BELIEVED!

Mushroom is a lot like Tyrion and should have been as important a character - cutting humor which conceals a cunning ability to tilt the game for Rhaenyra. But his dialogue isn’t pre-written like Tyrion’s was, and these HBO kids can’t do it I guess, so screw Mushroom.