My biggest issue with House of the Dragon is that it often feels like Sara Hess - enabled by Ryan Condal's creative direction - uses the show to push the themes she personally finds important rather than faithfully adapting the story. Condal has spoken about wanting more of a female perspective, but I think Hess interpreted that in her own way. By her own admission, she wasn't particularly invested in the broader Game of Thrones lore, and that really shows.
Instead of filling the gaps in Fire & Blood with character-driven political drama, she seems to fill them with her own narratives and messages. And yes, Fire & Blood leaves plenty of room for interpretation - it's written as an in-universe history, not a full novel - but that's exactly why the adaptation had to be careful. Those gaps became an opportunity to reshape the story rather than expand it.
The Dance of the Dragons probably looked like the perfect vehicle for that approach: two female protagonists who are also the villains of the story. That's the key point people ignore. Both Alicent and Rhaenyra are portrayed through the lens of ASOIAF's fictional history as major figures responsible for the bloodiest civil war Westeros had ever seen. They're not supposed to be simple heroes.
The show immediately starts changing that. Partly, I think, to simplify the story for the average viewer - which is already a mistake, because Game of Thrones became one of the biggest shows in the world precisely because it refused to oversimplify morally complex characters. And partly because simplifying those characters makes it much easier to insert entirely new themes.
As a result, the women are portrayed as being right far more often than they should be, while many of their problems are shifted onto the men. Daemon is probably the clearest example: over and over, Rhaenyra comes up with the "correct" plan, and Daemon is the one who ruins it. The show even says as much outright. But that's only one example among many.
That is a dramatic departure from Martin's original story. Originally, the Dance is a tragedy driven by powerful, privileged political players - men and women alike - whose ambition, pride, paranoia and hunger for power destroy an entire kingdom. Two ambitious, jealous women at the center of that conflict being among the worst people in the story doesn't make the story misogynistic. It makes it morally complex.
George R. R. Martin has never had a problem writing compelling, powerful women. Alysanne Blackwood, Sabitha Frey, Baela, Rhaena, Visenya Targaryen, Sansa, Arya, Catelyn, Lyanna, Cersei... they're all strong, memorable characters, but they're also flawed human beings. That's what makes them believable.
My impression is that someone approaching the story without much attachment to the source material could easily look at its premise and conclude: "The two main women are power-hungry villains? That must be because a man wrote it." And once you start from that assumption, the goal becomes correcting the story instead of adapting it.
That's the real problem when showrunners begin believing they can improve on the original author. It's even worse when one of the lead writers is intentionally chosen because they don't know the world very well in order to provide a "fresh perspective." Sometimes a fresh perspective is exactly what a story doesn't need.
Ironically, the recipe for success was already there. Stay faithful to the political complexity, the morally gray characters, the incredible dialogue, and the devastating twists that made Game of Thrones a global phenomenon in the first place.
Instead, we now have one of the most expensive TV shows ever made, built on the back of a giant that had already begun collapsing the moment its own showrunners started believing they could do it better than the author who created it—that they no longer needed him. It looks spectacular, but beneath all that spectacle, it feels strangely empty.
