‘House of the Dragon’: Princess Rhaenys Targaryen is ‘the Queen Who Never Was.’ Here’s her backstory — she was only a minor character in GRRM’s other books, and she never had a scene during the show. But her story will continue in the upcoming Game of Thrones season four!
Rhaenys Targaryen was only a minor character in the TV show, and she didn’t appear in the books. But her story will continue in the upcoming Game of Thrones season four, thanks to a book-to-show adaptation!
The books were written when the HBO series Game of Thrones was in its early seasons, but Rhaenys only lasted until the end of season three. But according to books author George R.R. Martin, he was originally planning on including her in the series when it got underway.
“I planned one big battle scene that would have shown that Rhaenyra had already established herself as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” he said during a 2013 HBO video chat. “The Queen who Never Was. The story had some merit. But I had to leave it to HBO to figure out the rest.”
“There was one reason when I finished the book I was going to tell the story of Rhaenyra Targaryen and her marriage to King Daeron IV,” Martin told Variety back in 2013. “The rest can be told by anybody else.”
Rhaenyra Targaryen was the daughter of Renly Baratheon – the man Daenerys is supposed to marry in Season Four. The show’s producers apparently liked her story idea enough to include her storyline into the fourth season… but it never aired.
“I’ve never actually watched Game of Thrones, so I don’t know why that episode was cut,” Martin told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. “I have heard it’s a really good show with a lot of interesting characters, but my guess is that they cut that because they wanted to have one big battle with the Mountain, as Renly would have liked it. They had already written the big battle scene, but they needed to figure out what to do with her.”
When asked about whether he would include Rhaenys as a character in a season five or a sixth season, Martin told Entertainment Weekly: “The show is so long and so complicated that I don’t know. There are