The battles have begun on House of the Dragon. The Brackens and Blackwoods died off-screen in the melee that gave “The Burning Mill” its title, but it doesn’t seem like on-screen, dragon-filled conflict is far behind. For now, our weekly mailbag tackles questions about Alicent’s Aegon misunderstanding, travel times in Westeros, and more.
To appear in future editions, message me @zachkram on Twitter/X or at zach.kram@theringer.com each week after a new episode airs.
Sergy asks, “Has there been a more costly misunderstanding than this Aegon snafu?”
As much as I loved the scene between Alicent and Rhaenyra that ended “The Burning Mill,” and as fascinated as I am by House of the Dragon’s emphasis on how its war grew out of avoidable mistakes, I think the focus on the “too many Aegons” problem obfuscates an important reality: Even if Alicent hadn’t misinterpreted Viserys’s dying words, the coup to install Aegon II on the Iron Throne instead of Rhaenyra probably still would have happened. We know this because the Aegon snafu was invented for the show rather than initially appearing in the Fire & Blood source text—and yet the green council plotted to crown Aegon in the book anyway!
Remember the show’s conversation that unfolded in the Small Council chamber after Viserys’s death (emphasis mine):
Otto: We grieve for Viserys the Peaceful, our sovereign, our friend. But he has left us a gift. With his last breath, he impressed upon the queen his final wish, that his son Aegon should succeed him as Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.
Tyland: Then we may proceed now with the full assurance of his blessing on our long-laid plans.
Otto: Yes, there is much to be done, as we previously discussed. [Details specific plans to seize control of the City Watch and royal treasury.]
Alicent: Am I to understand that members of the Small Council have been planning secretly to install my son without me?
Ironrod: My queen, there was no need to sully you with darkling schemes.
Alicent’s misinterpretation provided a seemingly legitimate justification for the plotters to proceed with their plan, but they didn’t need to believe it. (Based on Otto’s throwdown with Aegon in the Season 2 premiere, he doesn’t believe it.) A dying wish or misinterpreted prophecy wasn’t necessary for them to favor Aegon over Rhaenyra; simple, ingrained misogyny was sufficient, with a side bonus of self-interest for Otto to get his grandson on the throne.
That said, the way that misunderstandings fuel conflict is one of George R.R. Martin’s favorite themes. It’s a huge component of his approach to prophecy. Melisandre supports Stannis in the War of the Five Kings, for instance—and, in the show, convinces him to burn his daughter alive!—because she misreads her prophetic visions in the flames.
A misunderstood prophecy also dictates the course of Cersei’s life. In her youth, a fortune teller predicts that she’ll be queen “until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.” Decades later, Cersei schemes against Sansa and then Margaery because she fears one of them might be the “younger and more beautiful” replacement, which ultimately lands her in a whole heap of trouble. And Cersei might be wrong, because Daenerys and book-only character Arianne Martell look like the truer threats to her title. (Brienne of Tarth is another captivating possibility here, given her derisive “Brienne the Beauty” nickname and relationship with Jaime.)
But in terms of the most costly misunderstanding in the A Song of Ice and Fire canon, I’d have to give the honor to the misconceptions surrounding the romance between Rhaegar Targaryen (son of the Mad King, and Daenerys’s older brother) and Lyanna Stark (Ned’s sister), which instigated Robert’s Rebellion, ended the 300-year-old Targaryen dynasty, and nearly wiped out the once-great house.
In the books, Bran explains the realm’s general understanding of Rhaegar’s relationship with Lyanna: “Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar carried her off and raped her. Robert fought a war to win her back.”
But the reality is more complicated, starting with the famous tourney at Harrenhal about 20 years before the events of Game of Thrones. After Rhaegar won the tournament—defeating Barristan Selmy in the final joust—he crowned Lyanna the queen of love and beauty, instead of his wife, Elia Martell. Ned Stark later remembers this as “the moment when all the smiles died.”
Soon after, Rhaegar allegedly kidnapped Lyanna, triggering the war—but hints throughout the text suggest that Rhaegar and Lyanna had actually eloped after falling in love, perhaps stemming from Lyanna’s theorized secret identity as the Knight of the Laughing Tree at that tourney. (It’s been a while, but it sure is fun to deep dive into A Song of Ice and Fire theories again.) In Thrones, Bran sees their secret wedding and the outcome of their relationship when Ned finds his sister at the Tower of Joy and promises to save her baby, whom he’ll call Jon Snow. R + L = J, confirmed.
As with Aegon’s crowning and the Dance of the Dragons, it’s possible that some sort of rebellion against the Targaryens would have arisen anyway. The Mad King wasn’t exactly a popular ruler, and if a book character named Barbrey Dustin is to be believed, the other great houses were already plotting against the Targaryens before Lyanna’s apparent abduction.
But we don’t know that the so-called “southron ambitions” theory is true. We do know that Rhaegar and Lyanna had a child together, that his is the song of ice and fire, and that—as Bran says in the show—“Robert’s Rebellion was built on a lie.”
Chris asks, “Does Westeros have wormholes or Star Trek transporters? Because I honestly don’t understand how people get from one land to another so quickly.”
This sudden travel speed was such a huge problem in late-stage Thrones that even the show’s creators acknowledged it. Thrones writer Dave Hill said before Season 8 that they’d try to “keep more of the time logic rather than jetpacks,” after going the disorienting jetpack route in Season 7.
But the travel times in Dragon don’t bother me because of two key differences. First, other than Daenerys and (briefly) Jon Snow, all of Thrones’ characters travel by ship, foot, or horse, and Google informs me that an average horse with a rider tires quickly and can travel only about 30 miles in a given day.
But in Dragon, almost all of the long-distance travel comes on dragonback. We don’t know the exact speed of dragon flight, but it’s definitely superior to a horse’s trot. Fire & Blood says that when King Jaehaerys toured the country along with a royal retinue, “The king had grown tired of flying ahead and waiting for his escort to catch up.”
In contrast with 30 miles of travel per day on horseback, the horizontal airspeed velocity for birds is about 30 miles per hour, and it’s possible that dragons are much faster than that. Some scientists believe that the Quetzalcoatlus—a pterosaur that lived in the Cretaceous period and is the largest flying animal ever discovered—could fly up to 80 miles per hour for a week at a time.
Limited evidence from Fire & Blood supports this real-world basis. The text describes one dragonrider as appearing in one location on one day, then “fifty leagues away” the next day; 50 leagues converts to 150 miles. And after Daemon returned from the Stepstones, he and Rhaenyra “began to fly together almost daily, racing Syrax against Caraxes to Dragonstone and back.”
Estimates based on the map of Westeros and the length of the Wall place Dragonstone and King’s Landing about 500 miles apart, giving dragons a tremendous range. Coincidentally, Harrenhal is also about 500 miles away from Dragonstone, so Daemon could have made that journey in this episode with ease. Note that Criston Cole is also headed toward Harrenhal, but this episode keeps him in the Crownlands because he’s going much slower by horse.
The second reason for quicker travel in Dragon is a more compressed map than Thrones had. Only two Dragon scenes set in Westeros have occurred outside this red box: Daemon’s murder of Rhea Royce in Season 1, in Runestone, and Jace’s trip to the Wall to negotiate with Cregan Stark, in the opening of Season 2.
The Wall is far away from this red box, but the show accounts for this greater distance. Westeros’s map places Dragonstone about 2,000 miles away from Castle Black, meaning it would have taken several days, at minimum, for a raven to reach Jace about Luke’s death and then for Rhaenyra’s heir to return to her side. And that’s what appears to happen: Daemon remarks that Rhaenyra “has been gone for days,” after which she’s able to find Luke’s corpse, return to Dragonstone, and tell her war council, “I want Aemond Targaryen,” all before Jace arrives.
All of these calculations about a fictional map might seem silly and moot. Back in 2002, Martin wrote, in response to a detailed fan question about competing timelines, “The reason I am never specific about dates and distances is precisely so that people won’t sit down and do this sort of thing. My suggestion would be to put away the ruler and the stopwatch, and just enjoy the story.”
Yet aberrant pacing can still grate even without granular ruler-and-stopwatch analysis. Travel in late-stage Thrones stood out because its previous treatment had fit the map so much more smoothly, and in some climactic moments, it made no sense, like when Daenerys rescued the crew beyond the Wall after Gendry’s miraculous sprint through the snow.
But none of those issues have arisen on Dragon. The prequel has put the jetpacks away—it doesn’t need them, because it has lots of dragons instead.
Randy asks, “Were those Daenerys’s eventual eggs that went to Pentos with Rhaena?”
Yes, they were, according to Geeta Vasant Patel, the episode’s director, who told Mashable, “Those are Daenerys’ eggs. All of us who work on this show are big Game of Thrones fans, so it was very exciting to shoot that scene.” That means Rhaenyra’s dragon, Syrax, is the mother of Dany’s dragons, making the connection between Rhaenyra and Daenerys even closer than it already was.
However, Daenerys’s eggs likely have a different origin in the book. Read Riley McAtee’s breakdown for the full details of this entertaining story, but the gist is that Dreamfyre (Helaena’s eventual dragon) laid the fateful eggs, rather than Syrax, and they’ve already been in Essos for decades by the time of the Dance. This is a prominent example of a book/show change, with deep implications for Thrones lore. Which leads us right into the last question for this week’s mailbag:
Matt asks, “What’s your interpretation of ‘canon’ at this point for the mythology of GRRM’s world? Fire & Blood is known to be an in-world account from a few individuals, who often conflict in their presentation of the facts. Since George was involved in some of the work on HotD, does that change how you think about the in-universe history or clarify anything from Fire & Blood, or do the show and book exist completely separately for you?”
Matt asked this question a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to save it for the right moment. Episode 3, which brought several major changes to the existing canon—including the origin of Daenerys’s dragon eggs and the meeting between Alicent and Rhaenyra, which doesn’t appear at all in the book—provides a perfect opportunity to zoom out and think about this meta aspect of the story.
The nature of Fire & Blood’s narrative subjectivity affords Dragon the opportunity for copious adaptation changes that don’t wreck fidelity to the source material. The Alicent-Rhaenyra meeting is an excellent example: Because it occurred in secret, we can imagine that it’s not in Fire & Blood because the historians didn’t know about it; ditto Laenor’s secret survival when everyone thinks he’s been murdered, or the uncertainty surrounding the start of the fire at Harrenhal, because Larys covered his tracks.
Rhea Royce’s death is another example. The only description that Fire & Blood offers about the death of Daemon’s first wife is: “Lady Rhea Royce, fell from her horse whilst hawking and cracked her skull upon a stone. She lingered for nine days before finally feeling well enough to leave her bed … only to collapse and die within an hour of rising.”
Dragon showed viewers that Daemon was actually the impetus behind the stone that cracked Rhea’s skull—but because there were no other witnesses, it makes sense that the in-universe historians wouldn’t have known of Daemon’s culpability.
The way that showrunner Ryan Condal talks about this interplay is interesting—especially because, while Martin is an executive producer and cocreator of the show, he hasn’t actually written any individual episodes. (He wrote four for Thrones, including standouts “Blackwater” and “The Lion and the Rose.”) On the one hand, Condal says that the Dragon writers tried to “define what we thought the objective truth of this actual history was, as we saw it.” But he also acknowledges, “I don’t know that we’re making the definitive version. … What I think we’re really trying to do is keep the show in active conversation with the book.”
That conversation is a key aspect of how I view the book and show together. At its best, the show is additive, filling in the knowledge gaps Martin sprinkled throughout his story: When I reread Fire & Blood now, I believe that Larys is the culprit at Harrenhal, that Daemon killed Rhea, and so on. But I’m not completely beholden to the on-screen depiction of every event, particularly because the show had to cut and condense certain characters and story lines for logistical reasons. My headcanon of the Blood and Cheese assassination is based on the darker version from the book, which includes an extra son and a Sophie’s Choice situation.
That’s not wholly different from how any story adaptation works, Thrones included. When that show, say, placed Jon Snow at Hardhome—rather than letting him learn about the horrors there via raven, as he does in the books—it produced a much more thrilling battle scene than Martin initially wrote. Thrones fan theories have long incorporated show elements to support or counter text-only evidence.
But that effect is compounded with Dragon and Fire & Blood because of the peculiar nature of the source text, and because there’s no singular A Song of Ice and Fire authority overseeing every production in every medium (unlike Lucasfilm with Star Wars). HBO won’t even let Martin give its spinoff shows the titles he wants if the company doesn’t agree.
The end result for the story we’re now seeing each week is that viewers and readers can pick and choose which parts they like from each version, page and screen, forming a patchwork quilt of the “true” Dance of the Dragons saga. Best of all, we can read and watch the two complementary renditions and enjoy them both.
