That blockbuster first episode of House of the Dragon went down well enough, but it didn’t answer the single biggest question about this show: why does it exist? Why do this story specifically, seemingly just another story in the Game of Thrones universe, instead of a story that might be more immediately relevant to the main series?

And why craft a story that had apparently already been told in full in the George R.R. Martin novel Fire & Blood? We apparently know all these characters’ life stories from beginning to end, after all.

While that first episode may not have provided the answer I was looking for, I think the second episode may have. And the answer I came away with is intriguing in a way I didn’t expect: that the book is just the “official story,” and what we’re seeing here is what really happened.

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