Everyone’s fretting over the succession, there’s a threat from the Crabfeeder, King’s Landing is either crime-ridden or a police state, and Viserys and Rhaenyra have a strained relationship that only gets worse once he names her heir. But the seven kingdoms already seem to be in trouble. Ambiguity will never have a chance if too much is presented too plainly, too early.Įven those coming to House of the Dragon with no knowledge of Fire & Blood could guess from the first episode that Rhaenyra would face a conflict in ascending to the throne. Just look at HBO’s first flagship series, The Sopranos. To an extent, the ambiguity of a novel or feigned history can’t be replicated in a visual medium like TV – but it is possible. Too often, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have felt like looking through that glass while someone shouts in your ear how to think and feel about what you’re seeing while whacking you in the back of the head. The effect is akin to seeing things through a looking glass all is there for you to see, but you make up your mind what it means. But many of the personalities and major events of the books do exist in a gray area, where right and wrong can’t be easily discerned and readers have to decide for themselves what to feel. It would take a lot of mental gymnastics to conclude living under the Greyjoys of the Iron Islands would be better than living under the Starks of the North. Not everything in the books is as ambivalent as that preference would suggest Ramsey Snow and King Joffrey are just as nasty on the page as they were on the screen, and characters like Cersei are considerably more so. He’s often spoken about preferring shades of gray to straightforward black and white. It's the fact that Viserys is so obviously not good at ruling that’s the issue with House of the Dragon, and it ties into a larger problem Game of Thrones and its successor have had in adapting Martin’s work. But a more tragic Viserys could have shown more qualities as a ruler and made it harder to call him a bad king. For this viewer, in a series as loaded with tragic and majestic characters, a merry king feasting lords, sharing wealth, and smoothly delaying the day of reckoning between his wife and daughter might have made a good contrast and enhanced the tragedy of characters like Rhaenyra. Per Martin, Considine “gives the character a tragic majesty that my book Viserys never quite achieved.”Īs creator of the world and its characters, Martin has every right to make that assessment. He took to his Not a Blog to say that he found him an improvement over his Viserys, much like he preferred Game of Thrones’s Shae to his own. It’s worth noting that Martin himself greatly enjoys the reinterpretation of Viserys for House of the Dragon. And now, near the end of his reign, he’s willfully blind to the illegitimacy of his grandsons, and to the extent of fear and loathing his wife now has for his daughter.Ĭonsidine’s Viserys is a gaunt and broken figure by comparison, without his book counterpart’s virtues as a ruler and with his faults greatly heightened. His soft spot for his dangerous brother Daemon ( Matt Smith) keeps any punishment placed upon him from sticking. Against advice, he married his daughter’s best friend, Alicent ( Emily Carey/ Olivia Cooke, alienating her and one of his most powerful counselors at once. He discarded the precedent set by a majority vote of the lords of the realm when he named Princess Rhaenyra ( Milly Alcock/ Emma D'Arcy) his heir. So, what has Good King Viserys accomplished in his time upon the Iron Throne? Well, his desperation for a son to match his prophetic dreams led to two miscarriages and a gruesome rudimentary Caesarian section that neither mother nor child survived. So it might be time to try answering him. But he’s looking considerably worse for wear after the latest time skip, and the consequences of some of his major decisions are already evident. With Viserys still alive going into Episode 7, the book hasn’t quite closed on his reign yet. While suffering through treatment for his various ailments in the fifth episode of House of the Dragon, King Viserys ( Paddy Considine) asks his faithful Hand, Lyonel Strong ( Gavin Spokes) whether he’ll be remembered as a good king. Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers from Episodes 1-6 of House of the Dragon.
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