House of the Dragon has been in the news a lot these past few weeks, and my has it been interesting. It all started a couple of weeks back when author George R.R. Martin, whose book Fire & Blood forms the basis of the show, posted about some of his grievances with the TV adaptation to his blog. Martin took particular issue with the absence of Maelor Targaryen, the youngest son of Queen Helaena and King Aegon, who features prominently in the horrific Blood and Cheese sequence and later goes on to have a large effect on the war at large later in the book. In the show, Maelor has been cut entirely.

Martin was surprisingly candid in this post, going so far as to tease “larger and more toxic” deviations from the source material in the future “if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4.”

Around the same time, HBO released an episode of its official House of the Dragon podcast where showrunner Ryan Condal defended said deviations from the source material. A short while after that, HBO released an official statement in support of the show’s writing staff, and Martin’s blog post mysteriously vanished from the internet.

Since then, the air in Westeros has been a bit frosty; when asked for comment about the situation from The Hollywood Reporter, Martin chose to not speak at all about House of the Dragon and instead praise A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a totally different Game of Thrones spinoff based on his Dunk & Egg novellas which just wrapped filming last week. Presumably, things are getting sorted behind the scenes between Martin and HBO right now, but what that relationship will look like afterward is anyone’s guess.

On the whole, I found Martin’s criticisms to be pretty fair, and the tenor of HBO’s responses telling. House of the Dragon has taken so many liberties with Fire & Blood at this point that in many ways it almost feels like a totally different story. But not all of the changes in House of the Dragon were for the worse! Some of them even improved upon the book in interesting and unexpected ways. So today, we’re going to inject a bit of positivity into things by celebrating some of the changes that House of the Dragon made that worked, and worked quite well. Starting with…

1. The Battle at Rook’s Rest

Yes, the irony here is that we’re starting with the event which is arguably changed the least from the source material…but there were changes made to the Battle at Rook’s Rest, and they were pretty much great across the board. In the book, this battle unfolds in much the same way, with two major differences: we never hear anything about Aemond’s plan to ambush Meleys and Rhaenys at the castle, and we never find out exactly how Aegon fell from the sky with his dragon Sunfyre. Instead, Fire & Blood introduces the battle, has Aemond and Aegon show up to fight Meleys, and then it describes the horrific aftermath.

The show took those basic building blocks and layered onto them a lot of drama. We find out that the whole plan to attack Rook’s Rest was a wild, secret gambit plotted by Ser Criston Cole and Aemond Targaryen. King Aegon wasn’t privy to it, nor were any of the soldiers following Cole until it became absolutely necessary to loop them in. It set the whole thing up to be a much more devious play by the Greens, as well as add a lot of juicy internal conflict among the Greens.

But the biggest change was that in House of the Dragon, Aemond purposely douses his older brother Aegon in dragonfire. In the book as in the show, Aemond resents Aegon’s rise to power, believing he would be a better ruler for the Seven Kingdoms. Aemond does claim the regency after Aegon’s fall in the book, but since he wasn’t directly responsible for it, the whole feels less sinister. This is a fantastic example of House of the Dragon changing the details of a situation while leaving the overall spirit of the book intact.

2. Helaena Targaryen’s journey through grief

Another very interesting and, in my opinion, beneficial change House of the Dragon made is how it handled the grief of Helaena Targaryen. This one’s a bit tricky, because the show had to do something different than the book since it cut Maelor. I don’t like that it cut Maelor and I’m nervous for how that will impact things down the road…but in the middle of it all, right after Blood and Cheese killed Helaena’s young son Jaehaerys, House of the Dragon had a glimmer of brilliance.

In Fire & Blood, the assassins Blood and Cheese make Helaena choose which of her two sons they’ll kill: Jaehaerys or Maelor. Helaena chooses Maelor, and then Blood murders Jaehaerys instead; it is brutal. Afterward, Helaena is so shattered by the loss of one son, and the guilt of knowing she’d chosen the other to die, that she slips into a dark spiral, becoming unstable. Helaena is never the same again, and largely spends the rest of the story walled off emotionally from others until her tragic end.

The show took a different route by giving Helaena room to explore her grief. Instead of it being a fairly one-note journey where Helanea becomes a shattered human for the rest of her story, we see her grapple with all the implications of Jaehaerys’ death. Does she forgive her mother, Alicent Hightower, who was having sex with the only Kingsguard on duty when Jaehaerys was murdered? How does she feel about having Jaehaerys’ little body paraded through the streets to stoke anger against the Blacks? And does she even have a right to feel the difficult feelings she does, when the smallfolk deal with terrible loss so much more often than the nobility?

These are all interesting questions, and House of the Dragon did a great job exploring them — so great, I might add, that George R.R. Martin himself praised actor Phia Saban’s turn as Helaena. So while there’s the potential for the changes surrounding Helaena to make big problems down the road, at this point House of the Dragon has done some fairly interesting things with her character.

3. Mysaria

Of all the characters in House of the Dragon season 2, few received as substantial an alteration as Mysaria, the spymaster who falls in with Team Black. In the book, Mysaria helps Daemon Targaryen with his plot to hire the assassins Blood and Cheese, then largely fades into the background until later in the story.

That sort of thing works fine in a book, but isn’t always easy to pull off in a TV show where you need to keep actors engaged enough to stay in the production. Instead of having Mysaria remain largely off-screen for season 2, House of the Dragon gave her a different role, sending her to Dragonstone where she gradually became Queen Rhaenyra’s closest advisor. This is more or less the same trajectory Mysaria has in the books, except the show started exploring it earlier and gave Mysaria a ton of fascinating new material in the process.

Perhaps the most interesting development of all was the kiss between Mysaria and the queen, when Rhaenyra hugged her for being supportive. That hug slowly transformed into something more passionate. There are hints in Fire & Blood that Rhaenyra is bisexual, largely involving her relationship with Daemon’s first wife, Laena Velaryon. House of the Dragon did away with that, but bringing in this surprise moment with Mysaria was a savvy way to revive that piece of Rhaenyra’s character. Plus, it has the potential to add even more drama down the road once Rhaenyra’s husband (and Mysaria’s ex) Daemon comes back into the picture.

4. The claiming of Vermithor and Silverwing

One of the biggest changes House of the Dragon season 2 made from the book concerns the dragonseeds — Targaryen bastards — and the eventual claiming of the dragons Vermithor and Silverwing. In the novel, Vermithor and Silverwing are claimed as part of a larger montage where many dragonrider hopefuls try their hand at claiming dragons; this event is known as the Sowing of the Seeds or the Red Sowing. This is the very first time that Hugh Hammer and Ulf White are mentioned in Fire & Blood, where we only get a single sentence describing how the two dragonseeds claimed their dragons:

“”Vermithor, the Old King’s dragon, bent his neck to a blacksmith’s bastard, a towering man called Hugh the Hammer or Hard Hugh, whilst a pale-haired man-at-arms named Ulf the White (for his hair) or Ulf the Sot (for his drinking) mounted Silverwing, beloved of Good Queen Alysanne.””

– Fire & Blood

The show took a very different route, spending ample time throughout the season introducing us to Hugh and Ulf as characters so that by the time they came face to face with fire-breathing monsters near the end of the season, we’d care about them. On the whole, I think that worked really well, especially with Ulf. As for the dragons, they speak for themselves. The last 15 minutes of the season’s penultimate episode are easily the most impressive dragon effects work of the entire Thrones franchise to date.

So while there are other changes in regards to the dragonseeds that may not have worked as well — I’m looking at you, Rhaena Targaryen or Nettles or whatever they’ll call you next season — the changes to Hugh, Ulf, Vermithor and Silverwing stand as a towering achievement for the series.

5. The psychology of Ser Criston Cole

From one of House of the Dragon’s biggest, splashiest changes from the source material, we turn now to one of its quietest, yet most effective. Throughout the first season of House of the Dragon, the Kingsguard knight Ser Criston Cole was established as one of the most loathsome characters on the show. From beating a man to death at a wedding to turning into a caustic ex who made it his life’s mission to sling mud at Rhaenyra, there were a lot of reasons to dislike Criston.

That theme continued in season 2, where his tryst with Alicent and general failure to be a good Lord Commander of the Kingsguard left Helaena and Prince Jaehaerys vulnerable to the assassins Blood and Cheese. Then, Cole tried to wash out his guilt by sending Ser Arryk Cargyll to Dragonstone in an attempt to murder Rhaenyra, which ended with Arryk and his twin brother Ser Erryk fighting to the death instead.

All of that was compelling, but Criston’s story became even better after the Battle at Rook’s Rest. While it was technically a victory for Criston, it came at such a horrific cost that it haunted him throughout the rest of the season. There’s just something about seeing the dragons dance on the battlefield that changes a person, and Criston is perhaps the most poignant example of that we’ve seen in either Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. Yes, he won at Rook’s Rest, but he is clearly not the same afterward.

This culminated with the strongest scene of the season finale, where Cole delivers an oppressively bleak monologue to Alicent’s younger brother Gwayne Hightower all about how futile the efforts of men are in the face of dragons at war. In Fire & Blood, we don’t get any of this internal journey for Criston. It’s a testament to how effective it was in the show that House of the Dragon managed to take one of its most hated villains and turn them into one of the show’s most interesting characters.

But these were only five of the many changes House of the Dragon season 2 made from the source material. Were there others you enjoyed? Let us know in the comments!