There was plenty of onscreen drama in House of the Dragon season two: painful betrayals, fiery deaths, powerful awakenings, wanderings in the spirit world, Aemond being Aemond… you name it. But a behind-the-scenes tiff may have overshadowed them all, when source material author George R.R. Martin spoke out about his dissatisfaction with plot changes made in HBO’s adaptation. With season three’s production now underway, there’s no way showrunner Bryan Condal wasn’t going to be asked about the controversy.
To recap the kerfluffle, in July 2024, Martin published a blog post praising a new addition to House of the Dragon. He loved that the show added a faithful dog to the assassin duo of Blood and Cheese, though he couched it in a warning: “I am not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story. Especially not when the source material is mine.”
That same episode—the season two premiere, featuring Blood and Cheese offing King Aegon II Targaryen’s todder-aged heir to the Iron Throne—stuck in Martin’s craw, however, due to a different change to that very sequence, one he didn’t much care for. Another blog post went up in August in which the author promised he’d dig into “everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon.” Then, a few days later in early September, he spilled the promised tea in a post that was swiftly deleted.
As part of that now-scrubbed post, Martin said that he’d pushed back about the changes initially, including his concerns about how altering events in season two will affect the futures of certain characters down the line. A few days later, Condal defended his choices on HBO’s official House of the Dragon podcast. A few days after that, Martin was asked to weigh in on the back-and-forth by the Hollywood Reporter, but instead took the opportunity to shower praise on another of HBO’s Westeros-set adaptation of his works, the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
All’s been quiet on that front since mid-September 2024… until today. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Condal said he found Martin’s criticism “disappointing.” He’s obviously still a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, 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.”
He also, again, defended the choices the show has made in transferring the work from page to screen. Fire & Blood, he pointed out, isn’t written as a novel the way Martin’s A Game of Thrones and its sequels are. “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. 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.”
That’s no longer the case, Condal said. “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. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”
Head to EW to read more from Condal, including some teases about the battles and new characters that’ll hit the screen in House of the Dragon season three.
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