Why the Book Change of The House of the Dragon Blood and Cheese is the Anti-Red Wedding

But it is not like that House of the Dragon depicted the death of young Jaehaerys. In fact, the series has made every effort to reverse the sequence, in Fire & Bloodand creates what could be called a reverse Red Wedding. Instead of experiencing a moment of maximum shock and horror, as Martin is used to as a storyteller, House of the DragonThe “Blood and Cheese” affair is a slow car crash that involves the actions of the young Queen Helaena as well as the murder of her child…

How the scene differs from the book

When speaking with Den of Geek Earlier this month, showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal said: “We wanted to dramatize it as a heist sequence where these two dastardly criminals are hired by Daemon and sent on a mission – and then obviously take a sharp left turn at the end. We wanted it to feel more like a heist gone wrong.” There is indeed a sense of hapless confusion in the scene in House of the Dragon. But this intentionally deviates from the book.

On paper, the sequence appears like so many other scenes of sudden cruelty or extreme violence in Martin’s prose: shocking and without warning. While Fire & Blood is seemingly written like a history text—it is said to be a book found in the Citadel that recites the known history of the Targaryen dynasty—but Martin uses this scene as one of many in which he foregoes the scientific framework to paint a set piece of growing threat.

Like the Red Wedding or Ned Stark’s execution, the scene is told largely from the perspective of the victims by Martin’s fictional author, Archmaester Gyldayn of Oldtown. While Glydayn tells us that “Blood and Cheese” – the sinister nicknames for Jaehaerys’ killers because one was a muscleman and the other a Pied Piper – were sent on this mission with clear orders from Prince Daemon, the incident plays out like almost every other famous scene of violence in the original. game of Thrones: growing horror and shock at the merciless power of evil in our fellow human beings.

The characters of Blood and Cheese are presented to the reader with the cold-blooded ruthlessness of Ramsay Bolton or Joffrey Baratheon. They step out of the shadows around the young Helaena, Alicent and her two SonsJaehaerys and his younger brother Maelor.

“We only want the honest stuff,” Cheese purrs to the Queen. “Won’t hurt the rest of you fine folk, not a single hair. Which one do you want to lose, Your Grace?” So it’s a much more obvious and unnecessarily cruel riff on the Sophie’s decision Dilemma, the famous film in which Meryl Streep plays a Holocaust survivor who must choose which of her two children will be sent to the gas chamber. As Blood and Cheese explain, they supposedly don’t care which son they kill… but they want Helaena to make the choice anyway. When she begs them to kill her instead, Blood warns, “A wife is not a son,” and (as is typical of Martin’s villains) Blood will rape their daughter if the Queen doesn’t decide soon.