“House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal told Entertainment Weekly that “it was disappointing” when George R.R. Martin came out swinging against the HBO series last year in a series of since-deleted blog posts. It all started in late August when the “Game of Thrones” author wrote on his blog that he would soon post about “everything that’s gone wrong” with “House of the Dragon.” That post arrived in September, with Martin calling out specific changes Condal and his team made during Season 2 that Martin did not support. Martin also warned that “more toxic” tweaks would be made in Season 3.
“It was disappointing,” Condal admitted to EW. “I will simply say I’ve been a fan of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy. George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer.”
“House of the Dragon” is based on George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” which Condal has frequently said was always going to require a looser adaptation since the book is not a traditional narrative.
“It’s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal told EW. “I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.”
“At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job,” he continued. “So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”
Martin’s biggest critique about “House of the Dragon” Season 2 as written in his September blog post was about the differences between the “Blood & Cheese” plot line. The show eliminated one character, Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor, entirely from the story, which Martin said he argued against doing because it will have larger repercussions for the future of the series moving into Seasons 3 and 4. In Condal’s version of the story, Aegon and Helaena have only two children, twins Jaehaera and Jaehaerys.
Condal reassured “Thrones” fans in his EW interview that “there’s nothing we do on the show without talking it through and thinking about it very deeply for usually many months, if not years. I will just say that the creative decisions that we make in the show all flow through me, every single one of them, and this is the show that I want to make and believe, as a fan of ‘Fire & Blood’ and a deep reader of this material, it is the adaptation that we should be making to not only serve ‘Fire & Blood,’ but also a massive television audience.”
“House of the Dragon” Season 3 is now in production.
