House Of The Dragon Season 3 Hints At A Different Ending For A Major Team Green Character

This article contains references to suicide.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3, episode 4.

Earlier this year, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was hailed as a return to form for the Game of Thrones franchise, and there are many reasons for its success — Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell’s electric on-screen chemistry being the main draw — but one of the best things about the new spinoff was its faithfulness to the source material. That debut season more or less followed George R.R. Martin’s first Dunk and Egg book to the letter, and it was all the better for it.

The last couple of seasons of Game of Thrones didn’t even have source material to be faithful to, and House of the Dragon’s writing staff has used Fire and Blood more as a gentle suggestion than the basis for their adaptation. One of the most baffling changes to the book was the omission of Helaena’s youngest child, Maelor. In the book, Aegon and Helaena have three children — two boys and a girl — but in the TV show, they just have the twins. This seemingly random change has had a knock-on effect that has torpedoed Helaena’s character arc.

In the book, after Lucerys Velaryon was killed, assassins named Blood and Cheese forced Helaena to make a Sophie’s Choice and pick one of her sons to die. Since Jaehaerys was the eldest boy and heir to Aegon’s throne, Helaena reluctantly chose Maelor to die. Then, Blood and Cheese killed Jaehaerys and left Maelor to live with the knowledge that his own mother marked him for death. It’s a really dramatic turn in the book, but the TV show made it much less impactful.

House Of The Dragon Has Butchered Helaena’s Fire & Blood Story

In House of the Dragon season 2, when Blood and Cheese arrive to assassinate Jaehaerys, they simply force Helaena to point out which of her twins is the boy. It’s still a heartbreaking decision, but it’s not the same emotional gut-punch. In the book, after choosing a son to die and then having to look him in the eye every day as he grows up resenting her, Helaena’s guilt compounds to the point that she can’t stand it anymore, and she takes her own life.

There’s a morbid, almost Shakespearean irony in how it all plays out: the people of King’s Landing revolt against Rhaenyra, because they loved Helaena, and in the ensuing chaos, as Maelor tries to escape from King’s Landing, he’s ripped to shreds by a mob of peasants. He gets that early grave his mother marked him for after all, and meets a much grislier end than he would at Blood and Cheese’s hands, and it’s all because she couldn’t take the guilt anymore.

Helaena’s Pregnancy Feels Like A Desperate Attempt To Speedrun The Maelor Storyline

At the end of House of the Dragon season 3, episode 4, Alicent notices subtle changes in Helaena’s body and realizes her daughter is pregnant. This worries her, because any offspring of Aegon and Helaena is a potential threat to Rhaenyra’s throne, and there couldn’t be a worse time for another contender for the Iron Throne to show up.

But Martin never wrote a pregnancy in Helaena’s storyline during the Dance of the Dragons. This seems to be the TV show’s desperate attempt to speedrun the Maelor storyline. After cutting Maelor for no real reason, and then cutting the inciting incident of Helaena’s life-ending guilt as a result, House of the Dragon is probably giving Helaena a new baby so it can race through the Maelor storyline, or just give her another reason to take her own life. Maybe this baby will be stillborn, and that’s what pushes her to end her life. Either way, it feels like House of the Dragon is repenting for its sins (poorly).