From Book to Screen (with showrunner Ryan Condal)
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I need you to be the mother to them that I cannot. Teach them, train them, guard them as a dragon guards her eggs. And my sister?

I need Bayla here. Because she has a dragon. I cannot promise to make you happy, but I ask you, make this sacrifice willingly for all of us. Welcome to the official Game of Thrones podcast, House of the Dragon. I'm Jason Concepcion. And I am Greta Johnson. And today we have a very special treat. Our dear friend of the pod, House of the Dragon showrunner, Ryan Condal, is back.

Since our mailbag episode dropped, we've gotten a bunch of fan questions about how Ryan and the team adapted the book Fire and Blood into House of the Dragons Season 2. And we just thought, who better to answer these questions than the FOP himself, Ryan Condal. Yes, as promised, we will still have an episode coming soon about what's going on in the wider Game of Thrones universe. But for today, we are going all in on dragons and we are talking about adaptation from book to screen. And of course, be warned,

It's a big bag of spoilers here. There's gonna be a lot of spoilers. So make sure you're up to date. Without further ado, here is our conversation with the one and only Ryan Condal.

Ryan, thank you so much for coming back to the podcast. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. Thank you, guys. As you know, we wanted to talk because we've been getting some listener questions about some of the changes that the show made from the books this season. And that, of course, is something that we have talked with you before about, especially just in terms of how you're approaching your work as adaptation. But now that the season is over, we thought it would be fun to dive into some of the specifics. So thank you for being here. Of course.

I've read the books. Greta has not read the books. From a book reader's perspective, I was delighted from season one and season two at just how many surprises there were for me. Just generally speaking, how did you approach adapting this book that is this kind of fictional history written by numerous people?

Yeah, I mean, it's a challenge. I mean, obviously, we're dealing with a well-known world with a massive fan base that's following the biggest and most successful television series of all time. So you have to sort of absorb that as step one. Uh-huh, no big deal. Yeah.

We have to respect that and approach the material with, I think, as much reverence as possible and respect. I've done that since day one. But it's important to draw the line between reverence and worship. And I think just as in the real world, there's a thin but dangerous line between religion and cult.

And it's something that we walk all the time. And I always see myself as the sort of arbiter of that as a fan of these books. I mean, these books have been with me and in my life in a big way for over 20 years. I've read every word of all the series. I've read Fire and Blood probably more times than any of those others, at least our section of the book at this point. So I'm deeply steeped in it. And I live it and even breathe it. The making of the series

it wraps around the calendar year, so when it might seem like we're off or not working, like we're working on something regarding the series, which means that I'm constantly immersed in this book. But unlike "A Song of Ice and Fire," "A Night of Seven Kingdoms," "Fire and Blood" is a history book. It's not a narrative. It's not written in point of view.

It is a history described by three unreliable narrators. There are intentional holes in this historical fabric. That's part of the fun and the way that it was written. The what and the who and the when is usually there for you, but rarely the how and the why. And if there is a how and a why, it's usually disagreed upon by these three different sources. Again, an intentional aspect of how this book was written and meant to entertain the fans.

And I think the other thing to highlight, too, is that there aren't characters in this text per se, but rather historical figures. Now, of course, Damon and Alison Renier are all characters because they are people who occupy a fictional world. But the way that they are covered in the historical text is the way that any historical figure would be covered in a history book, which is

When you read a book about Henry VIII, Henry VIII is a historical figure. He's not a character. The historians are not trying to figure out the ins and outs of every little move that he make and all the little nuances to justify and slowly arc over time why he's making all the choices that he's making and why he's doing the things that he's doing. Simply, they're there to render the history in as accurate a way as possible. And that's the way that Fire and Blood approaches it.

So as dramatists, I think we have to approach this history, though it is fictional, as anyone would do as trying to adapt a chapter from real history. So we have to construct this three-dimensional reality and this full story for the world to inhabit and provide the characters with internal lives and flaws and desires that might not necessarily have made it into the historical account. Now, there are plenty of opportunities in reading Fire and Blood to say, well, there is actually a flaw or a desire or something that does make it into the record.

but it's often an incomplete picture. So really a lot of what we do as dramatists and adapters of this is coloring in the lines that we're giving. There's a connect the dots puzzle and some of the lines are drawn and we're kind of filling it in and adding color. And a lot of that color is admittedly our own. And that's part of, I think, the challenge, but also the fun of

creating a show like House of the Dragon versus doing something that is just a literal adaptation of a narrative, a book that has thousands and thousands of pages of it, which I think is what, you know, David and Dan dealt with with the original series, which is its own challenge because then, you know, you have this massive construct and you have to whittle away and make a television series out of it that doesn't go for 25 seasons and bankrupt everybody involved.

So they're all challenging, but I thought part of what was so, I think, alluring about this job for me beyond the world that it took place in was just from a screenwriting perspective, the narrative challenge. Yeah, getting to connect the dots and fill in the blanks. Exactly, exactly. And I think the sort of last point in that, in the approach is that

I mentioned at the top of my treatise on adaptation that –

Because it's a history, it specifically doesn't have a point of view. And it's not a pejorative. It just means that that's the way history is written. It's written objectively. So we have to write a subjective story and we had to choose a point of view. So we chose the point of view of Viserys' very large and complex and complicated family. We're over here with these characters. And that's Rhaenyra and Alicent and everybody that kind of follows on from that. And Otto Hightower, of course. And there are some exceptions of...

Yeah.

Well, I think, and I feel like Jason and I have talked about this too, like partly, I think there are a lot of really exciting things about the way you have adapted this. But one that I find the most interesting is the idea of

being objective and the fact that we have all sort of accepted that as truth, but actually acknowledging the fact that it just literally cannot be. And I think a lot of what your adaptation is doing is saying, no, it can't possibly be objective. There's always so much more to the story and here it is. Yeah. And the way we've, we've actually talked about this quite a bit in the room because we've

We realize how important this material is to so many people, us included, all as fans of the book and the people that have invested a good bit of our careers and lives into rendering it for television. And what we talk about a lot is that the difference between Fire and Blood and House of the Dragon is largely if you look at the story of World War II versus a movie about World War II.

If you were looking at a book that covered the history of World War II, it begins at the beginning, wherever the beginning is, the Nazis taking Poland, and then it ends with VJ Day, victory in Japan. No movie –

No narrative story is going to cover all of that time. It's going to pick a specific span of time and a specific point of view and a specific subjective story within that. And that's why we have so many wonderful World War II movies from really that –

From the beginning of the war, before the war, all the way through now through today because there's so many stories to tell within that. Right. That's how you get Oppenheimer and why it's still like four hours long. Precisely. And fresh and new and exciting. Yeah. And that's the way we've really approached that is that we are telling a subjective story that happens within this massive objective context.

So we can't possibly cover all of the events, but that doesn't mean the events don't happen. It just means that they're not happening on screen to our characters. And that is what we think helps to make this different and interesting and different from the book and also make it feel, I think, deep and textured and engrossing because you know that even though you're seeing this small window into it, it's happening on this massive canvas where all these other events are all happening at once at different times and different places in Westeros.

We got a lot of questions from listeners about various adaptation choices, but to kick off this part of the conversation, we wanted to start with one that we got a lot of voicemails about. Hey guys, love the show. And I'm fascinated by the character of Raina. I was wondering what you guys thought about Raina in Sheepstealer and how they've kind of merged her character, it seems, with Nettles from the book. In the book, the character Nettles plays a really important role in her

And it's really kind of a fan favorite. I've heard a lot about Nettles. It looks like perhaps Rayna is going to be the writer for Sheepstealer, which would be something very different from the book. It seems to me a lot of people are really upset because they think, you know, the character Nettles has been cut out. Will they weave in Nettles? So I would just love to hear you guys chat about that. Thanks.

So from the Nettles' stance, and Nettles, of course, is a kind of orphan character who pops up unexpectedly, has this ability to ride dragons, and plays a pretty important role in the flow of the war. Talk about the decision to kind of amalgamate some of her plot lines with Reyna. Sure.

Well, look, I mean, I think a lot of this story is still kind of in progress. So I don't want to say too much without, you know, to preserve the experience for the audience that's watching. I appreciate that. And Greta, who's not read the book. Thank you, Ryan.

But I would say just, look, we don't do anything on the show without long discussion and consideration. And I would just say we understand these stories that have kind of risen to the top that get talked about a lot online, even before I was involved. We understand how important they are to the audience. And I think it's our job to adapt and render them in a way that might not be exactly what you expect, but is satisfying and hopefully, in some cases, exciting and surprising. And I

i think this story is something that falls into a nice area where you can do something that is faithful to the history as as written but also do something very unexpected and different and i think this goes back to my um my ted talk on um adaptation and and subjectivity and storytelling i've said before that this this show is based

wholly around Viserys and his extended family. And I think the reign of character, even though it takes more time for her to come into the narrative in the book, is actually a big character in this family, the greater dynasty of the Targaryen family. And she's one of Daemon's two kind of semi-estranged daughters, at least in our version of the story. So we felt it very important to tell a robust story for her that brings her into the narrative and not only gives

Reina a full three-dimensional realized story to tell, but also has an impact on Damon. And I think that is kind of to be unveiled and to be revealed. But please stay tuned. I think most people will see what we're doing and be able to see how it actually dovetails in very nicely with the history as it exists. Well, I think that's a really nice way of hearing you frame it too, because you are making changes that

you know, yes, you were hoping are interesting and exciting. Also always in service to the greater story, like always. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think the way we approach this is we're trying, we're constantly balancing the need to tell a broadly appealing fantasy story and also servicing this book that we revere very greatly in, in, in fire and blood and rendering an adaptation that remains very faithful to it and respectful to it. And again,

sometimes will not do exactly the thing that the audience expects or has read in the text. But I think in the final analysis of it, hopefully most people can go in and see, oh, I can see how the historians had one perspective on this story. But then when you tell the subjective story of what it was actually like living there on the ground with these characters, how that story was then absorbed into the history, either because

that was the accepted propaganda of the time because somebody had an agenda or simply because that person wasn't there and only knew the what, the who, and the when and didn't know the how and the why. Yeah, the propaganda perspective I think is an important one. For me anyway, I've talked about this on the pod a lot with Greta, is the way the show kind of reframed the books for me

as so specifically written by the men of the time and ignoring or framing the activities of a lot of the important women of that era in different ways through their lens. With that in mind, talk to us about making Alice and Rhaenyra's relationship

Yeah, I mean, look, it should be no surprise. I've said from the beginning, Alice and Rhaenyra are the two central characters of the show. I mean, look at the poster for season two. Yeah.

And that is stated, I think, pretty clearly in not only in the pilot, but certainly through the course of the first season of the show. It's a story about these two women who are essentially children when we meet them. They're raised in this heavily patriarchal society by two powerful men. I mean, one literally the most power, the man who has absolute power.

in Westeros, in Viserys, Rhaenyra's father, and then his number two, the Hand of the King, Otto Hightower, and how they are both Rhaenyra and Alicent, intentionally or unintentionally, depending on your point of view and which character we're talking about, being wielded as political pawns by their scheming fathers.

So as dramatists, we were very interested in seeing beyond what exists in the text of the book and following these two characters through this very compelling narrative that we felt was very different than the core themes and concepts behind the original Game of Thrones. I mean, if we're going to tell the story, we need to have a reason to be. Why are you telling the story beyond just

Everybody wants to see the Targaryen history telling the story centered around two powerful women sitting at the forefront of this and then coming up as friends and then breaking apart and becoming foes and being on the two sides of this terrible civil war, the worst civil war that's ever been fought in Westeros. That was all very interesting to us. And I think –

Going deeper, as we try to have this kind of living conversation with the text of Fire and Blood and also history itself and how history is written, how women tend to be erased from histories like this. And does that mean that they didn't participate or simply that –

What they did do wasn't captured in the historical record or was it intentionally brushed over or minimized in the writing of the history? And what I think is interesting when you start with that as an idea and as a concept is

when you see the result of this, when you read Fire and Blood and you see how these two women were kind of blamed for the awful consequences of this war, that felt like a real kind of interesting and intentional cognitive dissonance that we really wanted to play with. And again, it just felt like that was always something to kind of come back to and hold to and hang our hat on. And instead of

carrying it as a burden, we kind of leaned into it and said, well, what unexpected things can this give us as we go along the way? It was really interesting to learn that, well, interesting and also not surprising to learn that in a history book, Alicent is not looked upon super favorably.

That is certainly something that is different from the books in terms of what you're working with in the show. But that also makes so much narrative sense to me. Like, yes, you want an interesting, complicated main character. For sure. And I think Alicent...

in the book, is an interesting character. I think in the show, hopefully we are honoring where her historical character came from. But you're also showing deeper layers and more complexity and frankly more conflict, internal conflict within her about what role she wants to play in this history and how she wants to be seen at the end. And she's one of the characters, I think, in this story that's aware that she's

playing a major role in a history that's going to be written about and is wondering how she is going to be portrayed in that in the end. Yeah. Let's talk about Miss Saria, who becomes one of Rhaenyra's most trusted advisors throughout season two, and really the one who Rhaenyra is able to open up to about

her frustrations about being a woman in this world, not being shown how to prosecute a war by her father, which is something that would happen had she been born a man. And of course, in the books, there's no hint of a romantic relationship, although it's not surprising that that might have escaped those historians. But talk to us about adding that layer to the story. Yeah, I mean, I would just say Miss Ari is one of these characters who I was always fascinated by in reading

the text of Fire and Blood. But it's one, again, this is not a, it's being said in a pejorative way, but Misaria is one of these people who's a historical figure in the book and not really a character. She's very shadowy. She kind of weaves her way in and out of the story. She comes in and disappears and you actually, you have the historians themselves telling you, we actually don't know really what her ultimate plots and motivations were and what was moving her.

which is rich dramatic ground to write on and to craft a character, again, where you take the dotted line outline and you start connecting the dots and coloring them within the lines. So we've tried to craft a character that honors all those

events in the history and what she said to participate in. We know that she was Damon's girlfriend. We know that she finds herself at the court of Rhaenyra. But how do we get there and what leads to those events happening? So we've tried to brush a lot of detail and texture into her character and at the same time follow that historical narrative and hopefully tell this multi-season arc of a character that goes through a really big change from beginning to end in terms of her standing in the world

her philosophy, her political alignment, and what role she plays in the endgame of all of this. Let's talk about blood and cheese. Of course, this is the incident from the end of episode one in season two. We have learned that in the book, it turns out, speaking of Massaria, that it was Damon who has Massaria hire blood and cheese. And then in the book, also, Alison was actually present and held against her will instead of, as we like to say, having brunch with Kristen Cole.

And then also in the book, Helena was forced to choose between her two sons. And there is just the one son currently in the series.

Why did you decide to make those changes? Can I just say as a book reader, thank you for changing that. You seemed pretty happy about it. It was like, it's way worse. It's way worse. Yeah, coming into season two, I was like, oh God, oh God, I don't know what we're going to see here. Well, I think that plot as it unfolds, I mean, we really tried to lean into the material, the information that were given by the historians, what they knew, and lean into that and kind of

Mix it up and make it messy and complex. Yes, Misaria sort of hired them because they were names given to her by Daemon who had gone to her when she was a captive of the castle and basically helpless.

but to give Damon what he wanted in that moment. Rhaenyra ordered the death, not of Jaehaerys, of course, but of Aemon Targaryen, which would make sense, I think, in either version of the story that you have an intended target and you hire two

people that are on the fringes of society and you offer them more money than they've ever seen in their lives and tell them bring back a head no matter what and then something goes wrong so I think I stand behind the adaptation of how the plot unfolded and I

I have talked about this quite a bit, but I'll just, I mean, I will just say it in plain text. The children that we had in the story were simply too young to be able to construct that narrative exactly as laid out in the book, period. I have lots of experience working with very young performers. They're babies. To ask two four-year-olds to play through that level of drama, it's just not a realistic expectation. And then there's also a practical element

around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set. And yes, you can do clever cutaways and dummies and all those things. We wanted this to be a very visceral, subjective experience, not something that was very cutty and in with close-ups. And when you start actually breaking apart what happens in that room and the things that are said and the things that are done, it became such a

such a challenge to think about and mount that we started looking for what are the base elements of this story that daemon and rhaenyra send assassins into the red keep and as a result the king's child and heir are murdered and and how do we dramatize that in a way that's exciting and visceral and horrifying and do it in the best way possible and maelor you

If he were born yet in this version of the television timeline. – Maelor, the other son. – Yes, Maelor, who is the third son, who's a little older in the book.

Would have been an infant because of the age of Jairus and Jaira. And, you know, frankly, this goes back to our first season and trying to adapt a story that takes place over 20 years of history instead of a story that takes place over 30 years of history. And we had to make some compromises in rendering that story so that we didn't have to recast the whole cast multiple times and really just, frankly, lose people.

I mean, we were walking right up against the line with it in season one. And I think we did a really great job. And I think the response to season one sort of extols that.

But the casualty in that was that our young children in this show are very young, very, very young, because we compressed that timeline so those people could only have children of a certain age and have it be believable where it didn't feel like we weren't hewing to the realities of the passage of time and the growth of children in any real way. And people look at that stuff, and particularly with a show like this, they look at it very closely.

So it was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength instead of playing it as a weakness. Let's talk about the adaptation of Rook's Rest, which was such a tentpole action set piece for this season. I was particularly intrigued by the choice to show that Aemond, you know, perhaps had

tried to push his brother off the throne a little bit. I thought that was, in terms of drama, added a lot of juice to the storyline. Talk to us about Rook's Rest. Yeah, I mean, I think that's it, Jason. I mean, isn't it more interesting if you have something kind of complicated happen in the midst of this crazy battle? That's very well documented in the book, and this is a great example of something that that is one of our most faithful to the page adaptations of the story. But

But the show has other layers to it that would have escaped the historians. Nobody was up there with them. Nobody knew what happened. But the Aemond character that we know, certainly from our story, who's unimpressed with Aegon and his performance as king to date and was bullied by him as a child, the Aemond from the book, frankly –

thinks he's better and more suited. And sort of, you can tell even in the historical account of him, the court record of him, he kind of looks down at his brother. We know that three dragons went into that sky and two fell out. And one fell while fighting Maelys when Vhagar came and entered the chat, so to speak. So we just thought that instead of doing something that was cut and dry, you know, one way or the other, it was interesting to throw in an element that

was set up completely over the course of the 13 prior episodes of the show and that that would have a ripple effect from there forward and doesn't change anything about how the history unfolds it just makes Amon and then sort of by action and consequence Aegon more complicated characters hmm

I would also love to talk about the crazy dragon lottery, which is what we have been calling what's known in the book as the red sewing. This is, of course, what happens at the end of episode seven in season two. From what I understand and from what it seems like the Targaryens actually sort of understand too at this point, there doesn't seem to be like a clear rhyme or reason for who or why or even how a dragon accepts the riders they accept. Right.

And I'd love to hear more about how you decided to dramatize the mythology of the dragons and how people learn to claim them. Yeah, I mean, we certainly lean into as much as we're given from the book. I mean, all that stuff is very important, and that's clearly a well-thought-out mythology. But as with all mythologies, there are spaces in between the lines because that's what makes it interesting. I mean, if somebody came on the screen and described literally how the way the Force works, which actually they did in the pre-

in the prequels. It's not as interesting as when Obi-Wan is telling Luke that it's an energy field that surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. And

And we see in the drama of Luke's training as a Jedi how all those things work. But nobody's ever literally telling you, this is the Sony stereo guide, the instruction manual for the working of dragons. That stuff just isn't as interesting. So I think we leaned into as much of that that was available. We had to make some of it our own because, again, we are dramatizing scenes that are described differently.

more simply in the book. We had to show actually Hugh, and what's one of my favorite sequences in the season, Hugh going to claim Vermithor and how that worked. And what we really wanted to do across that entire multi-episode arc was

of Rhaenyra's new riders claiming dragons is show that it's different every time. Nobody, just like nobody has the same experience in breaking in as a screenwriter, everybody has a different story. Every dragon rider that manages to claim a dragon has a different story of how that happened. Adam was claimed by Seasmoke.

Uh, Hugh claimed Vermithor in an act of insane bravery. One might say, um, an act of self-harm. And then, and then Ulf, was it his supplication? Was it the fact that he had broken the egg sack but not harmed any of the eggs? Or was it simply the fact that Silverwing had been in search of a new rider for some time and, and...

any old guy will do. Haven't seen any humans in a while. And Tom Bennett was just very, very compelling to her. I think in holding to

clear mythology as we go along, but not taking the time to explain how every little thing works, it makes it feel more kind of rich and, dare I say, magical in a good way, where it is one of these great mysteries of the world that's never really fully explained. And I think we're very proud of how that all came together. You know, I love Damon. I think he's one of the most complicated people.

in this story, book version and show version. That's a nice way of putting it. His...

you know, adventure in the haunted mansion of Harrenhal was for me, a wonderful highlight. And an invention, it seems, or a choice to kind of expound on his experiences at Harrenhal. It doesn't really exist in the books. Talk to us about that. That was actually one of our great challenges, I think, in the season two narrative as we sort of, we, we,

we always begin a season by kind of laying out the linear timeline of what happens next in the text and sort of figure out, okay, what are our big waypoints? What are our big set pieces? What are the things that we have to cover and throw a bunch of resources at? Where are our main characters going? Who's going to be together there? Who can we have in our known and existing cast that can cross over with each other?

And I think we got really lucky in the Alicent and the Rhaenyra and the Aemond and Aegon and Helaena and Jace story because you had a lot of interaction between those sides. Whereas Daemon, after Blood and Cheese and after his big blowout argument with Rhaenyra, which I think is one of the best scenes in the season – thank you, Claire Kilner. Thank you, Sarah Hess. He kind of ends up on an island at Harrenhal. And the story that we're given in the book is essentially –

damon goes to harrenhal and raises a large host of rivermen and the issue there is that because so many other things had to happen around him and that clearly is not a thing that just goes in and happens overnight he has to take the castle there's work to be done we needed damon to be in certain places at certain times and then come back into the main narrative when the other characters were ready to receive him meaning they had also gone through changes in their arcs

So we sort of said, okay, well, Matt Smith is a A++ actor. What do we do with him that is really interesting for Damon and unexpected, and that also shows growth in his character, and then gets us to the end point that we're given in Fire and Blood, which is Damon goes to Haranul and raises a large host of rivermen. So we decided that

Making raising this army a struggle for him, for somebody that is probably a much better warrior in general than he is a diplomat, was an interesting thing to do. We know the Riverlands are always kind of a mess. We know the Blackwoods and the Brackens, despite the sort of wobbly leadership of the Tullys, kick off into this fight at the Battle of the Burning Mill. It's the first big fight of the war. Okay, so we have that. We know the Riverlands are kind of a mess. Damon is going there. He is not the...

at least at this point in the story, the rallier and leader of men who's going to convince everybody to get together and stand behind them. I mean, he might threaten them with their dragon and use the old Targaryen exceptionalism to try to get them in line, but he's not the person that's going to go house to house and try to get everybody to get along.

So Damon's going to go into this place and try to jam his square peg into round holes. Damon will just take a hammer and just try to bash that nail onto the board wherever he goes. That's his style. So that's kind of his external story, this problem of needing to unknot the very strange –

ancient ways of the Riverlands, which he sort of scoffs at as a Targaryen and a dragon rider. It's like, oh, he kind of looks down at them and says, these are ancient ways and kind of looks down at them as being backwards and backwater hill people, essentially. Then what is his internal arc? And that's where we got to the idea that Harrenhal is this haunted castle. Wouldn't it be interesting if Daemon were literally haunted by the ghosts of his past that

kind of torture and bend his will over the course of these pages as he's trying to do this very complicated, undamon-like thing on his external story of wrangling the Riverlands if he is being robbed of sleep and peace by whatever...

mystical things are going on in Harrenhal, and we know there's a witch that lives there in Alice. I mean, all of those threads kind of came together, and then we said, okay, just because you run away from every problem as it comes and faces you, it doesn't mean that those problems have gone away. You've left a

damaged battleground behind you and the detritus of that is not gone simply because you left the Red Keep and you left Dragonstone. Forcing him to stare that in the eye and face that, forcing him to get over this wounded feeling that he has over being supplanted as the heir to the throne by Viserys for Rhaenyra, for his niece—

making him get over that and how that finds great synthesis at the end when he's humbled at the end and has to finally give in to what Alice has been telling him the whole time, which is your way doesn't work here. You have to give in to the ways of the Rivermen. His way didn't work the way he was trying to deal with his problems with Viserys and Rhaenyra. And those things kind of

come to roost at the same time in episode seven and force him to grow, evolve, and then move beyond. Daemon probably goes to the biggest, most radical change in the story this year. But at the end, he still went to Harrenhal and he still raised this river army. It was just a more complex and complicated story that has altered Daemon and the people around him in a big way and given us these great characters in Alice Rivers and Sir Simon Strong. Oh my gosh, great characters, yeah. I mean, I do think...

It's a framing that you've used before and that I think is really helpful, especially when it comes to this Harrenhal example. You have the headline. The headline is the same. The actual story is where you get to fill in the blanks. Correct. We've talked about it a bunch before, and I think it's one of the most, for me as a book reader, fascinating choices and reveals in the show. And it's the prophecy, and we get to see Rhaenyra finally let Jace in on

on the prophecy and its existence. Talk to us about weaving that through this story. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say too much on that just yet, because I think it's worth...

The seeds have all been planted and we're seeing them get sown and grow into interesting things as we go along. But I think we became really interested in this, in the prophecy, this dream that Egon the Conqueror had of essentially seeing the Long Night playing out and how he carried that through his life and then probably passed it on to generations beneath him. And the way that prophecy is often talked about and dramatized in high fantasy stories like this,

We know the chosen one trope, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker. We were really, really intrigued by the idea of knowing that and knowing, having seen the original series, that that prophecy not only didn't happen to Egg on the Conqueror, it also doesn't happen to anybody in this timeline and anyone for many decades and centuries to come. The knowledge of that prophecy...

and the fact that it's real, how does that impact the characters in our present timeline? And of course, whenever anybody hears a prophecy, particularly somebody who believes themselves to be exceptional by birth or bloodline, they will exploit that and use that as a reason, a manifest destiny for the choices that they're making and the things that they're doing. So if Rhaenyra believes or comes to believe that she is

meant to be the one, the chosen one, the one that Viserys dreamed of, and the reason that Aegon passed this dream down was just so it could get to Rhaenyra, the first female sovereign to sit the Iron Throne. We know that it's not her, but it's really interesting to see how the belief of that can be doubted or committed to or believed in and then wielded throughout the course of her attempt to claim the Iron Throne. Yeah.

I feel like in your self-described TED Talk earlier in this conversation, you did a really great job of explaining how you are thinking of your role as adapter in this grand scheme. But I wonder, have you thought through or maybe you've even lived through someone coming up to you on the street or whatever and just being like, this did not happen in the book and I'm upset about it? How do you envision that conversation with

you know, a book reader who is a fan who, who maybe doesn't like some of the choices that you've made. I mean, thankfully I've been, I've been very lucky. I'm a fairly generic white guy. Even when I go to Comic-Con, I'm, I'm fairly incognito. I did, I did have a couple of interactions there. I've had an interaction at a pizza shop. All have been very, really, really touching and very actually, I think, I don't

I don't want to say thrilling. I just want to say sort of heartwarming to me because the fans have been really respectful. And when a stranger walks up to you, obviously, they're also, you're taking a chance by engaging in the conversation, but they're also taking a big chance because we've all had that experience of seeing a celebrity or somebody of note that we love. And I mean, I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in a sushi shop one time, and I desperately wanted to go over and say hi, but I'm like, he's having...

sushi with his son, he probably doesn't want to hear how much you love Conan, Ryan. Just let the man have his spicy tuna roll.

So, you know, respect, which I think is the thing that I love very much about fandom. However, I mean, I think it's almost impossible to render a version of this show that makes everybody or gives everybody what they want all the time. Yeah.

I will say television is a collaborative medium. It's not a single media art form. You're dealing with multidisciplinary. It's a multimedia job. There are writers, directors, there are actors, there's art department, costume designers. There's the realities of reality.

practicality, budgets, what you can and cannot do with small children. All those things kind of come into play. And because of that, I don't even get what I want all the time. So I have to be able to live with and go to lay my head on the pillow at night with the decisions that I've made in the making of this show. Has everything come out exactly the way I wanted it to? No, of course not. Any showrunner that tells you that after the making of a second season of the show is probably not telling you the truth.

Am I overall very proud of the thing that I've made? Yes. I think this is the proudest I've ever been of anything that I have done creatively. I always think it can be better. I think we can learn from the things that we've done in the past. I think we can pivot and adapt as we go into the future. I do postmortems with...

the writers, with the directors, with the cast, with the crew. And a lot of this is boring television process stuff. It doesn't even have to do with the creative on the screen, but we're always trying to get better and always trying to improve ourselves. And I think, I think in the end, I always come back to where I started out at the beginning, which is I'm a massive fan of these books.

I love this text very much and I want to render as faithful an adaptation as possible for television while making it broadly appealing and deeply interesting and make something that satisfies me and satisfies other fans like me that weren't lucky enough to live this incredible dream of getting to bring to life this thing that I have loved for two decades, two decades plus. For a final question,

You're in a unique spot, of course, as an adapter where the author of the source material, George R. R. Martin, is an executive producer on the show and you have a lot of access to him.

Can you talk a little bit about how you work with George when you're making those decisions? The writing that we do on the show is always available to him. The things that we create and do, we show casting tapes and cuts. And when there are art department presentations that we call show and tells, often we put together before the start of a season, we'll show all that.

I mean, I would say everything is made available to him and I've always taken aboard his feedback wherever possible. There are, of course, places where we have not agreed and departed. And some of those things are just things that are a specific condition of

All the things I talked about in the making of the show, telling a subjective story, not telling the subjective history. We can't do 17 set pieces across the making of the show. We have to pick our spots. And the trick with this show is when you go big, you have to go really big, but you can't go big everywhere. I think most of the differences have come in there.

but I've always tried to take aboard the notes. I've always tried to pivot and try to make the thing work. And does this help or does this help? And sometimes, you know, at points, I think it works and connects and other points, it doesn't. And I've accepted that. I've had to accept that as a condition of being a showrunner in a giant franchise. Television just moves. It's a giant moving train and it's very heavy. And even though it takes two years to make the show, it happens very fast and you have to make decisions quickly.

every day. I mean, I always say the job of show running is making a million decisions and then a season of television appears at the end of it. And I have to make a million decisions. A lot of them I have to make very fast and you have to make a decision and then run with that decision and accept that decision and how it affects all the other decisions that you're going to make.

And we just have – that is the condition of making TV. The act of doing a solo art form like painting a painting or writing a book or even writing a comic book, these things are different and the demands of television are great and heavy. And sometimes it's beyond even the showrunner to be able to change the nature of a thing in order to jam it into –

into place on TV and a lot of what my job is is figuring out how to pivot and move and think laterally and we can't do that thing but we can do this thing or this thing because it's not a book it's a television show that makes a lot of sense we really enjoyed season 2 and we can't wait for season 3 we're hard at work thank you so much for joining us Ryan this was wonderful thank you guys thank you

And that's all for today's episode. We will be back soon for our final episode of the season. I can't believe we have nearly reached the end. I cannot believe it. And when you're not listening to us, you can rewatch every episode of House of the Dragon on Max. If you like what you're hearing, don't forget to leave a rating and review on your podcast player of choice. And you can find us on the Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon social media handles. You can find me at NETW3RK on X and Instagram.

And you can find me at Greta M. Johnson on X and Instagram. The official Game of Thrones podcast, House of the Dragon, is produced by HBO in collaboration with Pineapple Street Studios. This podcast is hosted by Jason Concepcion and Greta Johnson. Our executive producers for Pineapple Street are Gabrielle Lewis, J. Ann Barry, and Barry Finkel. Our lead engineer is Hannes Brown, and Hannes also mixed this episode. Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija.

Pineapple's senior audio engineers are Marina Pais and Pedro Alvira. Our editor is Darby Maloney with fact-checking by Melissa Akiko Slaughter. And our producers are Ben Goldberg, Elliot Adler, Melissa Akiko Slaughter, and my lovely co-host, Jason Concepcion. Special thanks to Michael Gluckstadt, Alison Cohen, Kenya Reyes, Savon Slater, and Erin Kelly from the Max Podcast team. Thanks for listening.