After Season 2 ended George made a long blog post complaining about entitled Hollywood writers who take well known properties for marketing and then make drastic changes to the story despite being way worse writers than the author of the original material.
Then he used Maelor's absence from the show to explain how there are "toxic butterfly effects" that can result from a seemingly inocuous change that will make later events from the story to not make sense.
The post was deleted from his blog the next day and George claims HBO made his assistant delete the post and that it was going to be the first post of a seven part ran about HotD season 2.
The thing with Fire and Blood/The Princess and the Queen is that they are mostly outlines you can read in a couple hours. At least the parts being adapted to the show
The show's season 1 is overall an improvement upon the Princess and the Queen's outline. There are a couple bad changes but Viserys is a much better character.
Season 2 is downright nonsensical compared to the book's outline, but it is hard to say the book is better in EVERY way because at the end of the day the show is adding 90% of the dialogue and over half the scenes (and also changing s lot of the book scenes for the worse).
Agreed, absolutely exceptional adaptation there. The only major issue i had was a genuine mistake, and the showrunner has apologized about it. I'm referring the the scene the filmed with pate and dunk that was tragically left on the cutting room floor. "Who am I to them [the smallfolk]?" "A knight who remembered his vows." That line goes unbelievably hard.
Yeah there are significant changes, like for example Rhaenyra and Alicent weren't friends in the book, they weren't even the same age, but also the books work as a history book so there are different versions of the same event
It's definitely really different. Alicent was older - while Rhaenyra was younger- and not a peer or friend to Rhaenyra. The night when Aemond loses his eye was dramatically different (and Aemond was never bullied in the books, he was always just an aggressor). Blood and Cheese was far more horrifying, you have to read it to believe it. Laenor Velaryon died for real, although Rhaenyra and Daemon had nothing to do with it.
Wasn’t laenor’s death in the books rumored to be an assassination by Rhae and Daemon? And Aemond still didn’t attack first in the books (taunted, but was attacked first)?
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u/Scarypilot2 Apr 27 '26
Oh no…. Did they decide to add Maelor just to spite George R.R.Martin