Warning! Spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3, episode 1, ahead!George R.R. Martin has been openly critical of HBO's approach to his story in House of the Dragon. The author prefers that significant changes to his canon be avoided. Showrunner Ryan Condal, on the other hand, appears to find his various adjustments to the story justified. Among book fans, Martin's opinion is typically the more popular one. However, House of the Dragon's new episode is an argument for Condal's side.
The premiere of House of the Dragon season 3 was truly excellent. This had everything to do with the fact that even book fans had really no idea what was going to happen. We are at the halfway point in this series, and the first two seasons largely aligned with canon on the surface but made significant adjustments to the deeper context. This established the idea that, from episode to episode of House of the Dragon, our expectations could be contradicted at any moment. This show is a wild card.
So, while fans of Fire & Blood started the Battle of the Gullet knowing that Jacaerys would die, House of the Dragon season 3 faked us out on multiple occasions. It seemed for a second that Rhaenyra, not Jace, would fly into battle. Once that shift was adjusted, Rhaena's swooping in to stop Jace from being pulled into the water (his canon death) suggested again that the prince might live. Of course, by the end, everything happened more or less how it was supposed to. Yet, we were all kept on our toes.
House of the Dragon season 3, episode 1, essentially used the show's own reputation to pull one over on book fans, thus improving their viewing experience. Audiences of a book-to-screen adaptation are split into two groups—those who are familiar with the source and those who aren't. If a movie or TV show is adapted faithfully, book fans will typically be pleased, but they miss out on the surprises that non-book fans enjoy. This is tricky with projects within the Game of Thrones franchise, since the viewing experience is all about shock and awe.
Book fans may be disappointed with some of House of the Dragon's previous changes. Plenty of them were real whoppers. Still, it's hard to deny that not knowing whether or not the show would actually dare to change the outcome of the Battle of the Gullet made the whole experience more thrilling. We were ready to be angry if Jace lived, but that also meant we were nearly as shocked as unaware viewers when the moment actually happened.
It's hard to deny that not knowing whether or not the show would actually dare to change the outcome of the Battle of the Gullet made the whole experience more thrilling.
It's interesting to consider, in this context, how book faithfulness may not be the holy grail of TV adaptations we thought it was, especially in a project like Game of Thrones. A perfectly adapted story offers many benefits. However, it's worth considering what we would have lost with House of the Dragon's premiere had Condal not played with our expectations a bit.
Before anyone gets out the torches and pitchforks, it's important to clarify that, for most adaptations, book-faithfulness will be preferred. It's pretty easy to tell, for example, that Game of Thrones began to go wrong when it ran out of Martin's source material. House of the Dragon is a very different bag. Martin's Fire & Blood is written as an in-world history book. So, if anything changes in the show, the discrepancy can be blamed on an unreliable narrator or on information being incorrectly recorded. This creates a lot of wiggle room within the narrative that other stories don't necessarily have.
Of course, House of the Dragon still has to be careful. Those teases in the season 3 premiere were a lot of fun, and they let book fans get in on the thrill of the unknown when that wouldn't normally be possible. However, it worked because the journey was different while the story's outcome remained the same. House of the Dragon will have to maintain a careful balance, preferably avoiding some of the more needless changes of the past. Still, the priority is entertainment, and in this regard, it's difficult to complain.
