Dwelling of the Dragon’s sixth episode, “The Princess and the Queen,” was a significantly difficult a person for pretty much everybody on the display. The sequence picked up 10 years soon after episode 5, and caught us up with its most vital figures, several of whom had experienced a handful of little ones in the interim.

Amongst these people was Laena Velaryon, daughter of Corlys Velaryon and Rhaenys Targaryen, and now Daemon Targaryen’s next wife. Viewers understood Laena best as the 12-yr-outdated woman from episode 2 who spoke to Viserys about dragons prior to pitching him on relationship (which he politely declined). Laena and Daemon wound up possessing two small children through the 10-calendar year time jump, and Laena spends most of the sixth episode expecting with what would be their third. Amid the drama of an incoming new child is exactly where the filmmakers made a decision to alter a several specifics about her fate from the show’s source material, Fire & Blood.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood novel and for House of the Dragon.]

In Fireplace & Blood, Laena undergoes a notably hard labor in advance of offering delivery to a stillborn little one, a lot like what occurs in the exhibit. On the other hand, in the e-book, she spends many times sick and dying. In accordance to Hearth & Blood’s maester creator, legend has it that in her closing moments, she tried to obtain her dragon, Vhagar, to fly just one much more time, but died on her way.

The display will make all this a little a lot quicker and a minimal more literal. Get over with grief more than the reduction of her son, Laena rushes from the birthing chamber and finds Vhagar. She kneels down in front of the dragon and instructions it to melt away her alive.

Picture: Ollie Upton/HBO

There could be a pair of explanations for this transform, or additional accurately, this new variation of the story. Although Fire & Blood plays the component of a heritage, telling only the most critical particulars of its tale — and even then, undertaking so with the fallibility of its creator and their sources — Property of the Dragon is supposed to be a additional factual and thorough account of the Dance of Dragons, in accordance to showrunner Ryan Condal. It’s doable that that’s what is going on in this article — that Laena’s suicide by dragon was basically not recorded by Maester Yandel in the in-universe edition of Fire & Blood to support defend the status of the Targaryens. But this isn’t the only possible reason for the new scene.

Like many aspects of Property of the Dragon so significantly, this isn’t so considerably a direct departure from the story of the guides as it is a literalization of selected themes. Although the challenges of childbirth and women’s roles in Westeros are unquestionably concepts that are explored in Fireplace & Blood, the ebook doesn’t seriously devote time detailing them (or any other themes), choosing simply just to recount gatherings in Westeros instead than imagine about them.

The show’s adjustments appear most normally in the realm of character fatalities. Although the e-book most often has them slipping away immediately after several times in the treatment of maesters and their leeches, Household of the Dragon prefers to kill figures with a flourish. People like Joffrey Lonmouth, and even Daemon’s very first wife, Girl Rhea Royce, ended up explicitly killed by House of the Dragon’s leads to support shift the plot and figures together.

An added profit of this option in Laena’s situation is that it much more strongly defines her character. While we did not devote much time with Laena in the exhibit, seeing that she’d alternatively close her possess life than bear the loss of a baby provides an fascinating wrinkle to who she was, and can help us greater recognize Home of the Dragon’s very hard romantic relationship with motherhood, and especially with childbirth.