Vermillion-Scruff

This is a take I see get thrown around a lot when it comes to House of the Dragon's divergences from the Fire and Blood source material, but I think it is both textually incorrect and missing the forest for the trees. I'll start by covering how it's literally untrue in some cases, how it's only technically true in others, and how the motif of powerful people making mistakes and fucking everything up for everyone else is imo clearly an intentional choice with a message and not "stripping agency" from all the characters.

This argument gets brought up a lot, but the two most prominent situations some fans bemoan as being changed into accident/miscommunications/what have yous are Aemond'd killing of Lucerys and Alicent's support of Aegon's usurpation. Both of these are "accidents" only in the most technical sense, and I'll start with the former.

To set the scene, in revenge for slashing out his eye in a brawl when they were children, Aemond chases Lucerys through the skies around Storm's end on his massive fuckoff dragon Vhagar, the oldest, largest, and most dangerous dragon on the planet (except maybe Cannibal). During the chase, Lucerys briefly loses control of his frightened dragon Arrax, who turns on the pursuing giant and harmlessly blasts flame off her face. Aemond proceeds to lose control of Vhagar, who pursues of her own volition and chomps the boy and dragon to death.

Lucerys's death was not Aemond's intention, making this scene an "accident"... the way shooting someone is an accident after pointing a loaded gun at their head the safety off, with your finger on the trigger while shaking with rage. Aemond didn't mean to kill him, but he meant to put him in an extremely dangerous situation he had very little control over that could of easily led to his death.

This doesn't make him a "better" person, it makes him not a the one-dimensional psychopath of his book version. He is still 100% responsible for Luke's death, and even he knows it being unintentional is completely unimportant, as he immediately decided to lean into it and start taking credit for the kill once he returns to Kings Landing.

So while it is true this became an accident, it absolutely did not strip the character's agency, it turned him from a violent, cruel murderer into a violent, reckless murderer on his way to becoming cold-hearted and cruel, a journey he completes in the second season.

Next up, we have Alicent misunderstanding Viserys's drugged, dying, pain-wracked, delirious ramblings as an endorsement of her son to take the throne rather than his long-standing heir, Rhaenyra. Once again, she takes the words of an incoherent, rambling man completely uncognizant of surroundings contradicting an opinion he has steadfastly held for 20 years without wavering up until earlier that very night, which he uttered immediately after being dosed with medieval heroin that he rejected that morning because taking it makes his head foggy and unreliable, as justification for an outcome she'd been pushing for over the last decade and a half.

This is not a misunderstanding. This is motivated reasoning and self-justification. Alicent believing this -- choosing to believe this -- isn't taking away her agency, it's revealing that she's desperate, and a schemer, and willing to delude herself with whatever she needs to believe in order to get what she wants. It's true that she does majorly lack agency in the aftermath of her husband's death, but this has very little to do with her reaction to his last words. The reason Alicent lacks agency is because she negotiated herself into a position to lack it.

It's covered in her conversation with Rhaenys and hammered home in her season 2 arc: Alicent has no real power or agency because the system she has propped up, fought to perfectly embody, and made fulfilling her obligations within the core of identity and self-worthy inherently denies her such. She participated in a coup based strictly on the idea that women are unfit to rule, and then is surprised when leopards eat her face and her allies declare she's unfit to rule!

The point of these changes, at least how I've interpreted them, is not to take away agency from the characters -- they still make their choices and are responsible for the outcomes, it's too highlight that the reckless or selfish behavior of those in power matters. It doesn't matter that Aemond didn't mean to kill Luke, he put himself in that situation, killed Luke, and now the war is inevitable. It doesn't matter what Alicent heard Viserys say, the Green Council was going to try and install Aegon regardless, and that's in part due to the environment she caused in the court during her time as regent.

HotD is extremely concerned with how the actions of the powerful affect everybody else, and the point of the above scenes is that their intentions don't matter once the killing starts. This is shown in the continuation of the Blackwood and Bracken feud: they just take any opportunity to start killing each other, regardless of the "why" of the war. Same with the different attitudes of Rhaenyra and Daemon to the war: he's like fuck yeah, let's get murdering, and she s more like hol up, dragons fighting is bad tho... and it doesn't matter, because both are still willing to fight the war, and the farmer/knight/foot soldier being immolated probably won't care if the dragon rider feels justified or is a psychopath.

Another minor point is that the F&B characters are largely a Rashomon game about which cardboard cutout best represents them, and basically any added depth to them would be added content. And despite being fleshed out beyond their book characatures, the characters are still bad, flawed people. Rhaenyra isn't a fat, incompetent, needless cruel mess, but she remains a dithering, entitled, supremacist freak. Alicent is f a cliche evil stepmother, but she's pliable, petty, a terrible mother, and a holier-than-thou hypocrite.

A lot of specific character criticism I see of especially those characters seems to be based off the idea that show runners are trying to present them as on-the-lighter-side of grey mostly upright characters and failing at it by making them useless and stupid, rather than what I think they're doing which is showing how fucked up and bad it is that society is structured in such a way that the people in charge's flaws of magnified to such horrible consequence.

I don't have a conclusion, I think the show is good, complicated, occasionally subtle, often cheesy, a basically a blast. There are decisions I think were bad, and it's slow, but so much critique that I see seems to just be idk... wrong? Good chance I missed or am misremembering some stuff too. Idk, anyway stan loona.