Given author George RR Martin’s direct involvement, it was always assumed House Of The Dragon would follow its source material pretty closely. Eight episodes in, that assumption has largely proven correct, though there have been a few notable changes and omissions. One of those omissions involves King Viserys and Queen Alicent’s shared children. We’ve met three so far on the show, but in Fire & Blood, there is a fourth child. Well, George RR Martin finally addressed what’s going on, and it turns out just because we haven’t met him yet, doesn’t mean we won’t.
The beloved author, who also co-created House Of The Dragon, dropped a post on his website yesterday, which addressed a wide variety of topics including unexpectedly hot starts by the New York Giants and New York Jets and other fantasy books he loves. He also touched on a lot of thoughts related to the new Game Of Thrones adaptation. One of those thoughts was about how frustrating it is to only have 10 episodes a season to tell the story you want to tell and how there were more things he wanted to explore including Alicent’s fourth child. Here’s an excerpt…
Do I wish we’d had more time to explore the relationship between Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin, the marriage of Daemon and Laena and their time in Pentos, the birth of various and sundry children (and YES, Alicent gave Viserys four children, three sons and a daughter, their youngest son Daeron is down in Oldtown, we just did not have the time to work him in this season), and everything else we had to skip? Sure.
First of all, yes, I also wish we had more time to explore the relationships between Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin and Daemon and Laena. Both Harwin and Laena were awesome characters who we only got a small taste of. That’s why I wish we would have gotten an entire season that was just the younger versions of the characters. The fact that Laena's death in particular, which was changed from the books, was so moving with so little screentime feels like such a what could have been situation.
But whatever. It is what it is. And what I take from this comment about Daeron is that we’re very likely to see him in the future. Most book readers had kind of assumed that would be the case, given the role he plays in the forthcoming Dance Of The Dragons. We even included him in our Targaryen Family Tree, but given there are plenty of characters and plot points that got cut from Game Of Thrones, no one was quite sure. That's probably why there's no shortage of wild rumors going around about other characters too.
In the books, Daeron is sent to Oldtown as a child to serve as a cupbearer and squire for Lord Ormund Hightower, who is Queen Alicent’s cousin. This sorta thing is common in Westeros, as we’re also seeing with one of Daemon’s daughters who went to live with her grandmother Princess Rhaenys. I won’t get into what happens in the books, but it’ll be interesting to see whether his personality is similar to what we see in Fire & Blood or whether some changes are made to that and/ or his story arc.
House Of The Dragon has two episodes left in Season 1. HBO has already announced it will return for Season 2. The plan is currently for the show to run either 3 or 4 seasons.
