The Princess and the Queen

 

After finishing the first season of HBO's House of the Dragon, I hastily read the novella on which the series is based, "The Princess and the Queen", published in 2013. The novella is not that interesting, as this fake-history format barely provides any room for character development. The reader has zero opportunity to bond or identify with any character. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that GRRM has some degree of emotional investment in three characters: Prince Daemon, his final lover Nettles, and another bastard dragonrider named Addam. As for the rest of the aristocracy of the Targaryen court, he has shown very little sympathy for either the Greens or the Blacks. He is more interested in the random nature of history and how the average people are crushed regardless of who rules. The story might also be a sly ode to the surprising power of an angry and desperate populace, which is not something the American TV industry or culture is interested in, and I doubt the series will be able to do it justice in future season(s). 

The novella itself is not all that good, but I am glad I finally read it. Why? Because it is obviously the clue to the laughable dumpster fire that is the ending of the Game of Thrones series. In the last two seasons, without any ASOIAF materials to go on, the pathetic incompetence of Benioff and Weiss was on full display with various dead-end plot lines and out-of-character characters and stiff, trite, cringy dialogs and nonsensical twists to hastily wrap up the series. The worst choice was in the disintegration of Daenerys Targaryen's character and her demise. It's not that she could not, theoretically, become a megalomania and threat to civilization, but the way to get there is a prime example of how lazy, unimaginative, and dumb the writers are.

Regardless, it has now become clear to me that they did not even come up with that storyline with their own mind, which is not surprising. Nearly everything they had independently come up with was either stupid or nonsensical, or both. The only interesting ideas and twists in the series, some executed well and some poorly, came from GRRM. One could safely bet that Sansa's betrayal of Uncle Littlefinger came from GRRM, even if not done in the way shown on TV, while the death of the Night King at Arya's dagger did NOT come from GRRM. Now I can also safely bet that Daenerys' turn into a tyrannical idiot after her occupation of King's Landing also came from GRRM, except not from ASOIAF but instead from Rhaenyra. In addition, the writers took the idea of the scorpion, a dragon-slaying weapon akin to shoulder-launch missiles, from this and perhaps other related stories.

It is curious to observe that all the other 5 or 6 prequels in development were killed off by HBO, while the only 2 series that have received enough money to show up on our screens are both based on a single idea of a woman in power who is stupid and tyrannical and is severely punished for her folly. There is one remaining series in development, which centers on the most boring leads in the ASOIAF, Jon Snow. How very predictable.

Anyway, now that I am fairly confident that GRRM did not tell the bozos the full ending of the series, I have my own idea about how Daenerys came to her demise. As I previously pointed out, the final chapter of Book 5 in ASOIAF previewed the battle between her and the army of the Others. That is the end. She and the Others will perish together, bringing about the end of the winter and leading Westeros into a new cycle. Even The Princess and the Queen has demonstrated GRRM's fondness for mutual destruction. I don't think he can resist the elegant symmetry of such an ending.