What Early Screening Reactions Are Actually Saying

The 72nd Taormina Film Festival opened on June 10 with a screening of House of the Dragon Season 3's first episode to nearly 5,000 people gathered in a 3rd-century B.C. Greek theater beneath the shadow of Mount Etna. Cast members in attendance included Steve Toussaint (Corlys Velaryon), Harry Collett (Jacaerys), Tom Glynn-Carney (Aegon II), Bethany Antonia (Baela), and Phoebe Campbell (Rhaena). The audience responded with gasps and cheers. That part is not in dispute.

What the reactions confirm: Season 3 opens with the Battle of the Gullet. Showrunner Ryan Condal has called it "arguably the craziest episode of television ever made," and the runtime bears that out. The premiere clocks in at 72 minutes, making it the longest premiere episode in the show's history. It was plot originally intended to close Season 2 before script rewrites restructured the season count.

Audience energy was high. But "gasps and cheers" in a 5,000-seat amphitheater at a film festival premiere tells you exactly nothing about whether the Hightower characters got what they deserved. A crowd that size has every ship represented. The reactions you need to watch are the ones coming out of the book-reader communities, and those are considerably more guarded.

The Alicent Problem: Betrayal as Character Arc

Let me be direct about what Season 2 did to Alicent Hightower and why it matters heading into Season 3. The show took a character who, in Fire and Blood, is a political survivor: calculating, self-preserving, quietly vicious when she needs to be, and turned her into a woman who walks across a battlefield to hand Rhaenyra the keys to King's Landing. Her entire arc in Season 2 culminated in her becoming Team Black's most significant asset. For Team Green fans, this did not read as nuance. It read as erasure.

The show's defense is that this Alicent is more complex. And to be fair, Olivia Cooke has been extraordinary in the role. She earned every complicated beat of that performance. But complexity and agency are not the same thing. Alicent Hightower ended Season 2 by stabbing her own faction in the back, motivated by guilt over a misunderstanding about Viserys’s dying words, guilt she had been carrying for two full seasons, and the show frames this as a kind of liberation. Cooke has described this as Alicent reaching a point where she simply "doesn't want to play anymore."

The problem is that the show's Alicent has been in the process of opting out since roughly Season 1, Episode 6. Every escalation that defines the Green cause, from Aegon's coronation to the war itself to the Blood and Cheese retribution, has pushed Alicent further away from Team Green rather than deeper into it. The show has essentially turned the matriarch of the Green faction into a character who was never really Green at all.

Now Season 3 has Alicent as a prisoner. Gold Cloaks bring Alicent and Helaena before the Iron Throne after Team Black takes King's Landing. And what does the Season 3 trajectory look like for her? The trajectory is grief. The trajectory is Otto's execution, her father caged since Season 2, finally pulled out to face Rhaenyra's justice. The trajectory is watching Aegon and Aemond tear each other apart. The show has positioned Alicent as a witness to her family's destruction rather than a participant in it. That is a meaningful creative choice. It is also one that makes a lot of Team Green readers very tired.

I have read Fire and Blood more times than I'm prepared to admit. The book Alicent does not have more screen time in Season 3's source chapters; she genuinely fades as the war consumes her children. But the show created a version of Alicent with so much interiority and agency that her absence from Green strategy now feels like a void. They built her up to watch her fall, and that's either brilliant tragedy or a squandered investment depending on where you sit.

Sunfyre: Dead in the Show, Alive in the Books

This one is genuinely painful if you read Fire and Blood. In the source material, Sunfyre survives Rook's Rest. Badly injured, one wing half-burned and grounded for months, but alive. In the book, Sunfyre remains at Rook's Rest in recovery, only to reunite with Aegon later. That reunion is not incidental. Sunfyre's eventual fate in the source material is one of the most emotionally resonant payoffs in the Dance of the Dragons: a dragon that refused to abandon its badly burned rider, who came back scarred and diminished but loyal, and then becomes the instrument of one of the war's most shocking turns.

The show killed Sunfyre in the Season 2 finale via Larys Strong's offhand declaration. Gone. A line of dialogue, not a scene. The dragon that carries an enormous amount of symbolic and narrative weight in the final chapters of the Dance of the Dragons was apparently too expensive or inconvenient to keep around. There is a small chance Larys lied, given the show has given him room to be manipulative, but the framing of that scene was not ambiguous. The dragon community has been debating this for months with no satisfying answer.

Aegon's new Season 3 motivation, "I'm going to kill my brother, or die in the attempt," is entirely invented and directly tied to Sunfyre being gone. In the books, Aegon's obsessive relationship with his injured dragon is part of what humanizes him. In the show, with Sunfyre removed, Aegon instead pivots to a vengeance arc against Aemond. It's dramatically coherent. It is just a different story.

Actor Tom Glynn-Carney has spoken about Aegon doing "self-reflecting" this season, and that tracks with the show's version of events. But if you came for book Aegon, the broken king who crawled back to a burned dragon and held on, the show has replaced that story with something else entirely. Whether the replacement is better is almost beside the point. It's just not what was on the page.

Where Is Aemond? The Missing Prince

Look at the trailers carefully. Aemond Targaryen, played by Ewan Mitchell, appears far less than you might expect for a character at the center of one of the Dance's most anticipated clashes, specifically his confrontation with Daemon above the God's Eye. We know that confrontation is coming. Helaena warned about it in Season 2. The books are explicit. What the trailers do not show is much of Aemond doing anything between now and that battle.

In the trailers, we see Aemond seated on the Iron Throne with Blackfyre in hand while Alicent warns him about Rhaenyra's dragonseeds. He is described as the de facto ruler of King's Landing during Aegon's incapacitation. That is accurate to the source material; Aemond served as Prince Regent when Aegon was bedridden. But book Aemond in this period is busy: he is terrorizing the Riverlands, burning Harrenhal, hunting Daemon. The trailers suggest the show is pulling his Riverlands campaign into the background in favor of the Aegon vs. Aemond brotherly conflict.

The show's version of Aemond has been brilliant: calculating, unstable, the most compelling Green on screen. Season 2, Episode 4 (the Battle of Rook's Rest) was his defining episode, and it deliberately crossed a line the books never crossed: show Aemond turned Vhagar on Aegon himself. That was a huge deviation, turning a complicated political relationship into open fratricide. Season 3's Aegon revenge arc flows directly from that choice. For Team Green fans who wanted Aemond as a true prince regent, cold and effective and loyal to the Green cause in his own brutal way, the show has made him a man consumed by brotherly guilt and violence instead.

All of this feeds back into the same central frustration: the show's Team Green exists primarily as foils and casualties. Their personal moments are rich, but their political and strategic agency has been systematically hollowed out.

George R.R. Martin vs. Ryan Condal: The War Behind the War

The public split between GRRM and Condal is not a footnote. It is context that every book-reader fan bringing pre-season frustrations to Season 3 should understand, because it explains exactly why Team Green fans feel like they are watching a different book.

Martin told The Hollywood Reporter directly: "It's worse than rocky. It's abysmal." He described his working relationship with Condal as having functioned well through Season 1, when he read early drafts and gave notes. Then Condal, now the sole showrunner after Miguel Sapochnik's departure, reportedly stopped including him. Martin's September 2024 blog post, since deleted, called out specific Season 2 changes and warned that Season 3 would bring more. He wrote, regarding Helaena's trajectory, that she was going to die "for no particular reason" because the decision to cut Prince Maelor from the show had removed the triggering event that makes her death make sense in Fire and Blood.

Condal called it "disappointing" and said he had "made every effort to include" Martin, framing the author as "unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues" of adaptation. Both things can simultaneously be true: adaptations require changes, and Martin has legitimate creative grievances.

What this conflict clarifies for Team Green fans is that the choices being made are not accidents or misreadings. They are deliberate decisions by a showrunner who has a different vision for where the Hightowers end up, what the war means, and who the audience should be rooting for. The show has always been structurally sympathetic to Rhaenyra. Season 3 looks like it will continue that lean.

As of Season 3's premiere week, Martin has stated that House of the Dragon "is not my story any longer." That is not a throwaway comment from a disgruntled author. That is the creator of Fire and Blood telling you that what you are about to watch diverges significantly from the book you loved. Know that going in.

Can Season 3 Win Back Team Green?

Honestly? Partially. And on specific terms.

The Battle of the Gullet opening is a genuine gift to book readers who have been waiting two seasons for the Dance to actually start. The introduction of Daeron Targaryen, the youngest Hightower son who has been absent from the show entirely until now, is long overdue and something Team Green fans have been asking for since Season 1. Leaked casting information confirms Daeron and his dragon Tessarion will appear, along with Ormund Hightower, which means the Green military cause is finally getting on-screen representation it was denied for two full seasons.

The Aemond-Daemon confrontation above the God's Eye remains one of the most anticipated sequences in the show's history. If the show delivers that well, it will be the kind of moment that transcends faction allegiance. Ewan Mitchell and Matt Smith have the screen presence to make it an all-timer.

What Team Green fans are unlikely to get: Alicent as a political force, Sunfyre with any narrative resolution, or an Aemond who fully resembles the Prince Regent of the books. What they will get: Tom Glynn-Carney doing what appears to be some of his best work yet, the long-awaited Green military campaign, and a season that, by all accounts, moves at a pace Season 2 never achieved.

I am going in with calibrated expectations. The show has consistently been best when it gives Olivia Cooke and Emma D'Arcy space to pull the story apart between them. That is still on the table for Season 3 even inside the prison dynamic. But if your love for this story comes from the Hightowers as written, the political cold of Otto, Alicent's survivor instincts, Aemond's pure menace, you have needed to grieve that version of the story for a while now. Season 3 is unlikely to bring it back.

House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres June 21, 2026 on HBO and Max, with eight episodes running through August 9. HBO has already renewed it for a fourth and final season, set for 2028.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and References

1. House of the Dragon Season 3 Stuns 5,000 Fans at Taormina Film Festival, FanBolt, June 2026
2. House of the Dragon Season 3 Full Trailer and Premiere Details, Deadline, May 2026
3. House of the Dragon Season 3 Premiere Runtime Revealed, Newsweek, June 2026
4. George R.R. Martin: House of the Dragon Season 3 "Is Not My Story Any Longer", THR/AOL
5. Ryan Condal Calls Martin's Criticism "Disappointing", EW/AOL
6. House of the Dragon Season 3: Could Sunfyre Still Be Alive? Screen Rant,, 2025
7. 6 Major House of the Dragon Season 3 Book Changes, ComicBook.com, May 2026
8. House of the Dragon Has Already Ruined a Key Storyline for Season 3, Winter Is Coming, March 2026
9. Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke on the Rhaenyra-Alicent Plan in Season 3, TVLine, June 2026
10. House of the Dragon Season 3 Official Premiere Date, Variety, April 2026