Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Or how to stop the story drowning after treading on a butterfly

Potential spoilers for House of the Dragon

In September, George R. R. Martin blogged about a plot decision taken by HBO hit House of the Dragon (2022-current) which many took to be a criticism of the show. Martin deleted the post soon after, although this being the internet it lives on in perpetuity anyway.

For me, Martin’s blog was less an explicit and overt criticism of House of the Dragon and Ryan Condal, and more an exploration of why ripples matter in storytelling. Martin explained why the decision to remove Prince Maelor not only as a character in season 2, but also potentially going forward from the narrative completely, would have an impact on the future storyline.

In the book, Maelor’s survival as an infant during an attack by villains Blood and Cheese is reversed with his later death when Helaena sends him to safety protected by a Kingsguard and they are set upon by a mob wanting the reward Rhaenyra has offered. Helaena upon hearing the news then commits suicide leading to the people turning against Rhaenyra, driving her back to Dragonstone and, ultimately her death.

Martin is right that removing that one character completely would ripple across his original narrative. For whatever my opinion is worth, I think it was a valid point to raise.

Ripples matter.

In building the narrative of any story, a solid reasoning is necessary behind why events transpire the way they do and why the characters do something, otherwise the narrative loses cohesion and believability. Hence removing one brick in that reasoning build (or treading on the metaphorical butterfly) has a rippling effect in the narrative.

Let’s take Harry Potter as an example.  Let’s say that having the Weasleys have seven children is too much for our movie budget and we decide we need to tread on a Weasley butterfly and remove them completely from the narrative. Maybe we choose the dragon-loving Charlie who is not around a lot being away in Romania. But he isn’t absent for all of the story.

Our first ripple comes at Christmas because the Weasley children end up staying at Hogwarts because Molly, Arthur and Ginny head to Romania to see Charlie. No problem. We just change that to them going to see Bill in Egypt. Ripple neutralised!

But then we have the problem of Norbert, the dragon. We need a solution for getting Norbert out of Hogwarts, which leads to Harry seeing Voldemort feeding on unicorns when he’s in detention. Perhaps, we find another reason to have Harry get detention – maybe he and Draco have a fight. But then, if Norbert never exists, why does Hagrid give information to the man in the pub about Fluffy if there is no dragon egg tempting him?

Ultimately, we might decide that rather than having to deal with the ripples of not having Charlie in the narrative, he’s there but we just never see him, allowing us to save budget. Indeed, this seems to have been the approach the Harry Potter movies actually took with the character.

But changes are not always for the negative if the ripples are followed through and accommodated. Indeed, adding another brick to the wall or changing out one brick for another can be a powerful ripple.  

Take the tale of Sleeping Beauty.

In the 1959 Disney film, the evil fairy Maleficent curses baby Aurora to die because she is upset at not being invited to the party, (Aurora is only saved by Merryweather diluting the curse to sleep until true love’s kiss awakens her). The rest of the story hinges on this event. It’s a very weak character motivation for such a heinous action. While it works in the very simplistic frame of a child’s fairytale to have ‘Maleficent is Evil,’ it lacks nuance and character-building.

By comparison, Maleficent (2019) creates a more rounded variant of the character, because the narrative shows that Maleficent only curses Aurora because King Stefan betrayed her first. Further, they follow this ripple through by having Maleficent curse Aurora to sleep until woken by true love’s kiss rather than to death. This also builds another brick in the ‘Maleficent was not Evil just misunderstood’ theme.  Of course, the narrative is massively changed with these ripples. Stefan becomes the villain and Maleficent the misunderstood heroine of the tale. The ripples here mean that the entire story changes and becomes its own thing.

It’s a different challenge to create a ripple which doesn’t disturb the rest of the story, but just adds depth. But, let’s say rather than a redemptive Maleficent we just want to give her a better motivation than being upset she wasn’t invited to the party. Perhaps we say Maleficent is actually Stefan’s sister and addicted to Dark Magic; she is outcast from the family because of her addiction which has driven her to do bad things. She turns up to Aurora’s christening and curses her to die to punish the family for abandoning her. With such a vengeance motivation, it is possible to have Maleficent scheme further to keep Philip away from Aurora, and for him to kill Maleficent to save Aurora.

One of the joys of fanfiction is to explore potential changes and follow the ripples. If Sirius stays and fights to raise Harry after The Prisoner of Azkaban, what happens? If Tony DiNozzo doesn’t join NCIS, does he ever meet Gibbs? What if Ba’al had a back-up plan and changed the timeline again after the events of Stargate: Continuum, learning from his previous failure? Of course, the other joy of fanfiction is that these changes are done for fun not because of the constraints of adapting for a television or film.

Adaptations of source material into other media sometimes do have to compromise because they are working with real world constraints of budgets, sets, even what is possible and not possible in special effects and CGI.  But any compromise needs to take into the narrative ripples from those butterfly decisions otherwise the whole story ends up drowning, or at the very least, it will be a little soggy around the edges.

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