House of the Dragon just kicked off Season 3 with The Battle of the Gullet, and it clearly raised the franchise’s bar for what “big” looks like. But even now, not every fight makes it onto the screen. In Season 3, Episode 2, Daemon (Matt Smith) is seen celebrating a major win as Riverlands soldiers and their new Stark allies talk around campfires about a past massacre known as the Fishfeed. That casual campfire language is the setup. The payoff is that the Fishfeed was actually one of the bloodiest battles of the Targaryen civil war, and the show only shows the aftermath, not the full slaughter.

That pattern matters because it is not a one-off. The source is explicit that House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones have repeatedly “cut around major battles” during the various wars the franchise chronicled, often for budget concerns. Translation: the franchise still tells you wars happen, but it selectively decides which moments get the full production scale. When fans are riding high on the spectacle of Battle of the Gullet, it is jarring to realize the most brutal beats can still be treated like background lore.

Start with House of the Dragon’s early war chaos. The Battle of the Burning Mill is lightly featured in Season 2, Episode 3, and is considered the first true skirmish of The Dance of the Dragons civil war. It sparks because two families, the Blackwoods and the Brackens, finally act on a generations-long feud. That feud is already deeply entangled with the political split over who should sit the Iron Throne: the Blackwoods back Team Black and the Brackens back Team Green, tied to the question of whether Aegon or Rhaenyra belongs there. So a land border dispute devolves into shouting about which side the other family supports, and the shouting becomes the first bloody “moment” of the coming war. The battle also signaled that the Blacks had much more power and support through Westeros than Aegon and the Greens thought, despite reputation-damaging moments like Blood and Cheese that the Greens believed would help them.

Now zoom into the Fishfeed itself, the battle name that instantly perks up book readers. The Battle by the Lakeshore, later called the Fishfeed, earned infamy in The Dance of the Dragons for being the bloodiest land battle during the entire war. In Season 3, Episode 2, House of the Dragon shows the aftermath, not the battle. The bloody affair is mostly fought by a contingent of Lannisters supporting Aegon and Starks with other northmen who arrive after being convinced by Jace to side with Rhaenyra. The Lannisters meet Roderick Dustin, known during the war as Roddy the Ruin, and 2000 of his Winter Wolves mounted units on the shores of the God's Eye Lake. The Winter Wolves charge on the Lannisters multiple times, taking hellish casualties themselves, and still win. That is the kind of sequence that screams “we should spend the money,” yet the show doesn’t fully stage it here, it just lets you absorb it after the fact.

Game of Thrones has its own list of skipped-or-shrunk battles, and the omissions help explain why the TV version sometimes feels like it leaps. The Battle of the Green Fork is one of the first major military conflicts in the War of the Five Kings, which breaks out after King Robert Baratheon’s death. It is a battle between Lannister forces and northern armies in the Riverlands. The Lannisters win soundly, with Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) leading his clan of Vale mountainmen into combat. The series briefly features the battle in Season 1, Episode 9, but it skips the entirety when Tyrion is knocked unconscious. The outcome stays the same: Tywin (Charles Dance) begrudgingly celebrates the deaths of 2,000 northmen while also learning that Robb Stark (Richard Madden) willingly split his army to divert Lannisters’ focus. Crucially, even though the battle itself is not fully shown, it sets up the next big event on this list: Robb’s capture of Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) in the following battle.

Then there is the Battle of Whispering Wood, another early War of the Five Kings clash. In Game of Thrones Season 1, the aftermath celebrations for a young Robb Stark and the spoils of the clash, including Jaime’s capture, show up toward the end of the season. But the actual book version has more moving parts. In the books, Robb uses a small force led by his uncle, The Blackfish, to lure Jaime out of siege that Robb’s forces are holding. The over-eager Kingslayer charges out to seize the legendary fighter and the small force, only for that smaller unit to pull him into an ambush. The Blackfish’s army manages to lead Jaime and his forces all the way to where the rest of Robb’s forces are lying in wait. It is a decisive win for the Starks that earns more trust to Robb’s side. Jaime’s capture also kickstarts his arc, leading to him being escorted by Brienne of Tarth back to King’s Landing. Again, TV compresses the “why” and keeps the “consequence.”

The same compression shows up in the Siege and Camps Riverrun storyline, which the source describes as essentially not shown in its full form. In George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels, Riverrun is technically besieged two times. The second appears in part in Game of Thrones Season 6 when Jaime travels to the besieged House Tully stronghold to secure it for House Frey in return for their help with the Red Wedding. But the first besiegement comes earlier in the war. Jaime leads westermen against Riverrun, briefly capturing Ser Edmure Tully. After laying groundwork for a siege, Jaime is ambushed and captured by Robb Stark in the Battle of the Whispering Wood. Robb kills Jaime’s scouts and outriders, leaving siege forces outside Riverrun unaware that their commander is gone. Robb’s forces overrun the three camps of westermen left outside Riverrun. The pivotal victory lets riverlords join forces with the Starks and their marching northerners. Then in the Great Hall of Riverrun, a gathering between northmen and rivermen becomes where Robb’s war council proclaims him the King of the North. The TV adaptation, per the source, “just straight-up not shown,” with Robb’s coronation happening “in the middle of a, frankly, random forest.”

If that seems like a lot of invisible war, the show’s Siege of Riverrun is where the “invisible” becomes a production strategy. The HBO series brings more of the Siege of Riverrun to life in Season 6, but the conflict is shrunk down from the book version, with only edges truly shown. After the Red Wedding, the siege is led by combined Lannister and Frey forces to remove House Tully and remake it as a new House Frey stronghold. Ser Brynden Tully, also known as The Blackfish, leads the defense of Riverrun, and the defense is eventually broken by Jaime Lannister. Jaime first treats with the Blackfish, then threatens Lord Edmure Tully so terrifyingly that Edmure surrenders. The series adapts parts of the siege, including Jaime’s meetings with both the Blackfish and Edmure, but skips most of the actual military conflict. It also changes the ending: HBO ends the siege with the Blackfish’s death, while the books include Edmure helping him escape before the Lannisters can take Riverrun.

Finally, the source flags another omission with a twist. It notes that George R.R. Martin has not written the Sack of Highgarden yet, and it is even unknown whether there will be a Sack of Highgarden in the Song of Ice and Fire novels. Still, Game of Thrones skips over the pivotal military conflict in Season 7. That season’s third installment, titled “The Queen’s Justice,” culminates with Jaime taking a page out of Robb Stark’s playbook by luring Daenerys’ (Emilia Clarke) forces into taking the Lannister stronghold of Casterly Rock while he leads the bulk of his Lann… (the source cuts off there, but the central point stands: major military beats get skipped, truncated, or replaced by other set pieces).

For executives and board-level types, the second-order lesson is blunt: storytelling budgets force hard triage. When a franchise chooses which battles to animate at full scale, it reshapes what audiences remember, what characters’ arcs feel like, and which “earned” consequences get delivered in real time versus hinted at afterward. In Westeros, skipping the wrong fight can turn a war into a slideshow. In TV economics, it is usually rational. The question is whether it’s also worth it.