House of the Dragon is missing its source material’s most fun character

polygon.com:

Fire & Blood, the Game of Thrones prequel that HBO’s new series House of the Dragon is based on, is positioned as an in-universe history book. Much like our own histories, multiple sources are important. Fire & Blood features several different accounts of the events of the Dance of the Dragons. But House of the Dragon melds these accounts into one single timeline, showing the real history of events. It’s a smart decision for an already complicated show, but it also eliminates Fire & Blood’s funniest character in the process.

The book can essentially be divided into two halves: The first is about the history of the Targaryen family around the time they came to Westeros, while the second half is about their civil war, called the Dance of the Dragons. The first part of the book is told very straightforwardly, but the second half divides the narrative between three accounts: Septon Eustace, Grand Maester Munkun, and Mushroom the fool.

Mushroom is described in Fire & Blood as “a three-foot-tall dwarf possessed of an enormous head.” He was the court fool of the Targaryens during the Dance of the Dragons and, according to himself and others, was well liked by both sides and thought too “simple” to repeat the sensitive information he heard — a clear mistake by all involved. These facts lent him an interesting perspective on the events of the war, recalling conversations from some of the most important moments firsthand, which he recorded in The Testimony of Mushroom.

While Eustace and Munkun’s histories are frequently more accurate, they often err on the side of decency and present a clean and chaste version of history, two things that history often isn’t. Mushroom, on the other hand, prefers the most salacious version of all