House of the Dragon Boss Horrified by Fandom Attacking the Writer
House of the Dragon's reception by audience, reviewers and social media is generally positive-to-excellent, but that does not mean it faces no criticism.
All the really popular films and series are bound to be analyzed and nitpicked by curmudgeonly critics and vitriolic parts of their fandom to the extent, which mediocre works escape by simple lack of attention.
Sometimes, writers of an otherwise great show might commit a genuine writing blunder, and sometimes the fandom might overreact, but either way, it is difficult to be highly popular without ever provoking Internet outrages.
Sometimes fans might go too far, and their condemnations of people, deemed responsible for a writing blunder, turn into personal attacks. And sometimes showrunners pretend that online criticism of someone's blunders is the same as personal attacks. Is the former or the latter true regarding the controversy around Sara Hess, a writer for House of the Dragon? You can read a detailed description and discussion of the controversy currently surrounding her on Reddit here.
The short version is, Sara Hess made at least one writing decision, which, as we've covered before, was extremely divisive and provoked significant outrage among the fandom. Sara Hess took credit for that decision, appeared to be proud of it, and then added some disparaging comments regarding the character of Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith ), which also were poorly received, thanks to the combination of Daemon's extreme popularity and the fandom's already-sinking opinion about Hess' writing abilities.
Some even made a petition to remove Hess, not because they expected it to be successful, but just to draw some attention to the issue. At that point just letting the outrage to die down naturally probably would have been the best choice.
But Sara Hess' bosses reacted by circling the wagons to defend against the fans, and employed the common tricks used to deflect criticism nowadays, pretending that the accusations were related solely to her interpretation of Daemon, appealing to the fact that she is a woman, and branding attacks on her writing ability as attacks on her person
"I was actually pretty horrified at the way Sara has been treated," Ryan Condal, co-showrunner of House of the Dragon said (via THR). "She was horribly attacked in a way that's completely unacceptable."
Well, fandom can be pretty unfair to showrunners and writers, and listening too much to the opinions of social media is not a good way to create. But Ryan is almost certainly mistaken if he thinks that calling accusations of sloppy writing and comparisons to worst parts of Game of Thrones' later seasons "completely unacceptable" is the way to quell the Internet rage and ensure smooth sailing for his show.