The fun of adapting “Fire & Blood,” versus what I’m sure David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] struggled with in adapting “A Song of Ice and Fire” [for “Game of Thrones”], is that there isn’t as much detail and information there. In fact, there’s giant swaths of it where George has left things out to leave it up to the imagination of the reader, or, as a fan of history, to illustrate how difficult history really is to put back together after the fact.
The way history is written is inherently biased. This particular history is written by men, about a war they see as being stoked by two women, from one particular side of the argument. A huge amount of bias is implied. So what we’re tasked with is basically taking a stance. We are showing a path of objective truth through this unreliable narrative, this “fake history” — George’s words, not mine — that he wrote. I think it’s going to bring a lot of pitchforks and torches out for me from certain segments of the fandom, but we have to make choices as storytellers about what happened and why. That is dramatic writing.
It’s not always going to be clean, and the characters aren’t always going to fall into these neat archetypes. They’re going to do things that confound and confuse, and seem messy, or angry, or human, or weak, or disloyal. That’s the nature of real people.
That seems to be the case most specifically with Prince Daemon. Much of the fandom wants to see him, as you put it, wearing a white hat or a black hat, to the point that many of them criticized Sara Hess, a writer and executive producer on the show, for her less-than-glowing assessment of Daemon. Did you see this coming?
I’m having trouble understanding it. We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming.
To me, Daemon is the antihero of this story. He’s a character with a real darkness to him, who’s dangerous and charming in equal parts. I knew people would be fascinated by him and latch onto him, but I figured they’d do it in the way they did with Jaime Lannister or Bronn or the Red Viper. I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future.
