Series House of the Dragon reinterprets the fate of a character in episode 6. His fate diverges from the book Fire and Blood.
It’s a change that reminds us that the series House of the Dragon is an adaptation of Fire and Blood, and not a simple recopying of the work on the small screen. In episode 6 (The princess and the queen), broadcast in France on September 27, 2022 on OCS and MyCanal, the fate of a character has been slightly modified. Not excessively, but there is a discrepancy with the book.
If you have seen the episode and read Fire and Blood, maybe you guessed who this article is going to be about. For the others, we must warn you: we will necessarily have to go into the intimacy of the episode and reveal notable events. If you’re not up to date, run. Come back when you’ve seen the episode on your subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service.
A rewritten death for Laena in House of the Dragon
The character whose fate differs between the two versions is Laena Velaryon. This character is the daughter of Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (nicknamed the Queen Who Never Was, as power was given to her cousin, Viserys) and Lord Corlys Velaryon, leader of a powerful clan as ancient as the Targaryens. She is played here by actress Nanna Blondell.
At the time of the episode, which is a ten-year time jump from the previous one, the young woman is expecting her third child, conceived with Daemon Targaryen – Viserys’ brother, you follow? She already had two children with him. Two daughters: Baela and Rhaena. She is also a woman who knows how to ride a dragon. She rides Vhagar, a beast already aged by this time.
However, this third childbirth does not go well. Not good at all. The newborn can’t get out of its mother and we come to wonder: can we save the child and its mother? Could a caesarean section be a solution? Inevitably, we think back to the tragic childbirth staged in the first episode, where everyone dies.
Daemon doesn’t have the heart to make such a decision. In the next scene, we see Laena dragging herself painfully outside the castle, to find her dragon Vhagar. At that point, she repeatedly asks him to kill her, spitting out her flames to die quickly. The dragon, at first, is recalcitrant, then runs, as if he understood the situation.
In Fire and Blood, none of this happens. More exactly, his death does not take place like this. Admittedly, the young woman is pregnant. Her delivery is unspeakably painful. She also had in mind to join Vhagar, but not to perish in his fiery breath. She wanted to ride him one last time before dying. One last dance in the sky.
Alas, Laena will never see her dragon again. The terrible consequences of her birth caused severe bleeding — the child was finally born, deformed, and passed away an hour later. After leaving her bed and her room, she tries to leave the enclosure of the place where she resides, but collapses in the stairs of a tower, and goes out.
This rewrite to give Laena a more glorious death — to perish in her dragon’s fire rather than steps — was vindicated by screenwriter Ryan Condal, who is overseeing the TV adaptation of Fire and Blood. Given the constraints specific to this format, Laena had only a short exposure time. It was therefore a question of doing him a little justice.
” Unfortunately, due to the nature of the season and the storytelling, we weren’t able to spend as much time as we would have liked with Laena. We had to move the story forward “, justified Ryan Condal in an exchange with Variety published on September 25 (date on which the episode was released in the United States). Hence this slightly more spectacular ending.
” So we wanted to give him a memorable outing that was active and in keeping with his character. Even though we are only with the portrait of Nanna Blondell for a very short moment, this moment says a lot about who Laena is and was. “, he added. A dragonrider, who rode one of the most famous dragons, as it belonged to Visenya Targaryen, the sister of Aegon the Conqueror.
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