The reaction to the first episode of season 2 for House of The Dragon has had a bit of a divided response. If you never read the book Fire & Blood, this issue may not bother you at all. If you have read Fire & Blood, I think the portrayal of the Blood and Cheese has caused some disagreement among readers, but it really just puts a magnifying glass on a bigger topic at hand. And that is the topic of adaptation.
Now, our author George RR Martin already makes this a challenging task in his main series ASOIAF with various pov characters having perspectives and judgements based on myths and legends, hearsay and gossip. This is an area of writing George really likes to play around with, offering perceptions as facts only to have something contradict this perception later in his books from a different character. The fact Game of Thrones was as good as it was in those earlier seasons is actually very impressive regardless of our opinions of Dan Benioff and DB Weiss for the later seasons.
But, Fire & Blood took this idea of unreliable narrators and unreliable witnesses and cranks it up to about 1000. But compared to ASOIAF, where Fire & Blood amplifies the idea of various unreliable accounts of events, it dials back actual narrative, character development, and detail, to the point that if you read a chapter from any of the five books in the main series, and then read Fire & Blood, you’d quickly recognize how little any of these events are developed beyond a general plot and outline. Gone are the intimate inner thoughts of characters and nuance, the themes are more generalized. Each event is described in such surface level descriptions, and events are more checked off like a to-do list than they are dwelled upon and truly explored.
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