Why would you want to trade a perfectly good scene for something like this?
After watching Game Of Thrones move further and further away from the books starting with season 5, everyone was ready to see House Of The Dragon follow its footsteps.
After all, it’s not always easy to bring everything that’s written on paper to the screen, especially when the story involves many characters, few major time jumps, and dragons that can’t be easily cast like humans.
The House of the Dragon creative team did their best to show as many dragons as possible in season 1, and have already promised a bunch more for the upcoming season 2.
However, hardcore book fans are still bitter about one particular scene that seemed crucial to the plot.
The scene in question takes place after Aegon’s coronation in The II. As we know from the show, that’s when Rhaenys pulls her dragon Meleys out of the dragon pit under the decks of the hall and rises above it to bring the news of the coronation to Dragonstone.
The scene has been heavily criticized by fans for portraying Rhaenys as a hypocrite. She doesn’t burn the Greens, and says it wasn’t her war to start, but she has no problem killing hundreds of civilians who couldn’t escape the Hall.
“I don’t understand how Miguel could say that they needed a cool dragon scene at the end of ep 9, yet they didn’t go for the obvious, book-accurate one?
Like, Sunfyre and Dreamfyre would have been way more epic than Rhaenys committing mass murder,” Redditor Overall_Wolf6557 said, mentioning one of the co-writers of the first season, Miguel Sapochnik.
The original scene fans were referring to, showed the new king, Aegon, and his sister-wife, Helena, flying their respective dragons, Sunfyre and Dreamfyre, together.
The problem with this could be both, the writers’ need to emphasize the poor relationship between Aegon and Helaena, or the logistics of adding two more dragons during season 1.
Considering the amount of work and budget that goes into each dragon, it might just be too much for one season.
Whether or not that is the reason for these changes, fans have more than enough chances to meet both Sunfyre and Dreamfyre next season among the 5 new dragons previously promised.
Keep an eye out for news on the release date for season 2.