George R.R. Martin Blasts ‘House of the Dragon’ Changes, Details Problems: “I Argued Against It”

James Hibberd
·9 min read

George R.R Martin has made good on his promise to detail “everything wrong” with HBO’s House of the Dragon.

The author and Dragon executive producer has posted a candid chronicle of his concern about the fantasy drama, giving readers a rare glimpse of behind-the-scenes creative friction of a major TV series.

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Martin essentially said on his blog that co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal has made a key change from Martin’s book Fire & Blood that he strongly disagreed with. In Martin’s view, this change has already weakened the adaptation in season two and will cause much greater problems in seasons three and four (Condal has said the show will end with season four). Martin post was deleted within hours, HBO then issued a statement about Martin’s comments, and Condal is seemingly addressing the riff on the show’s podcast.

At first glance, the change Martin is against seems rather minor: In the show, Aegon and Helaena have two young children (the 6-year-old twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera). In the book, they have three — there’s an even younger brother, 2-year-old Maelor. In a sprawling show with many characters for viewers to remember, having one less child seems like a rather routine adaptive choice. But, Martin notes, this is resulting in a “butterfly effect” of consequences.

The most immediate consequence of this was altering the “Blood and Cheese” sequence in the season two premiere, where two hired thugs kill Jaehaerys in front of his mother. In the book, the sequence was a more grueling “Sophie’s Choice” moment where Helaena was forced to choose among her three children. She picks Maelor to spare her twins, and then Blood and Cheese kill Jaehaerys instead. In the book, Helaena offers her life to try and save her child; in the show, she tries to bribe them.

While Martin still finds the sequence powerful, he notes, “I still believe the scene in the book is stronger.  The readers have the right of that. The two killers are crueler in the book. I thought the actors who played the killers on the show were excellent… but the characters are crueler, harder, and more frightening in FIRE & BLOOD. … I would also suggest that Helaena shows more courage, more strength in the book, by offering her own own life to save her son. Offering a piece of jewelry is just not the same … As I saw it, the ‘Sophie’s Choice’ aspect was the strongest part of the sequence, the darkest, the most visceral. I hated to lose that. And judging from the comments on line, most of the fans seemed to agree.”

Martin said he argued against losing Maelor during a conversation with Condal in 2022.

“I argued against it, for all these reasons,” Martin writes. “I did not argue long, or with much heat, however. The change weakened the sequence, I felt, but only a bit. And Ryan had what seemed to be practical reasons for it; they did not want to deal with casting another child, especially a two-year old toddler. Kids that young will inevitably slow down production, and there would be budget implications. Budget was already an issue on HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, it made sense to save money wherever we could. Moreover, Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him. Queen Helaena could still give birth to him in season three, presumably after getting with child late in season two. That made sense to me, so I withdrew my objections and acquiesced to the change.”

But, Martin adds, “Sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made. The prince’s birth was no longer just going to be pushed back to season 3. He was never going to be born at all. The younger son of Aegon and Helaena would never appear.”

All that said, Martin said the first two episodes of the season “were terrific episodes: well written, well directed, powerfully acted. A great way to kick off the new season.”

What’s of greater concern to Martin is how losing Maelor impacts the show’s next two seasons. Martin notes several sequences from his book (I’m avoiding posting any spoilers here) that would seemingly be cut.

“Will any of that appear on the show?” Martin asks after detailing the moments from his book. “Maybe… but I don’t see how. The butterflies would seem to prohibit it … From what I know, that seems to be what Ryan is doing here. It’s simplest, yes, and may make sense in terms of budgets and shooting schedules. But simpler is not better … Maelor by himself means little. He is a small child, does not have a line of dialogue, does nothing of consequence but die… but where and when and how, that does matter.”

Martin also reveals a character death from Condal’s outline for season three, noting the character now kills themself “for no particular reason” instead of how it happens in his book.

“None of that is essential, I suppose… but all of it does serve a purpose, it all helps to tie the story lines together, so one thing follows another in a logical and convincing manner … that’s a considerable loss.”

Then Martin warns, rather forebodingly, “And there are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…”

Martin’s full post, it should be said, contained more detail and nuance than the summary above.

HBO responded to the post with the following statement: “There are few greater fans of George R.R. Martin and his book Fire & Blood than the creative team on House of the Dragon, both in production and at HBO. Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”

Martin is a co-creator on Dragon and even more closely involved with HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Interestingly enough, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss considered likewise removing from their adaptation the youngest Stark child — Rickon — but Martin convinced them to keep the character.

Yet this issue is perhaps particularly sensitive to Martin given the original show had other small changes the resulted in bigger changes down the line, and he similarly warned about “the butterfly effect” of such moves, though not in such publicly blunt detail.

Condal also discusses the issue, albeit not specifically, in the season’s final episode of the Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon. During the podcast, Condal was asked about working Martin and seemed to address Martin’s concerns about changes to the story.

“The writing that we do on the show is always available to [Martin],” Condal said. “The things that we create and do, we show casting tapes and cuts, and when there are art department presentations we put together before the start of a season, everything is made available to him. And I’ve always taken aboard his feedback wherever possible. There are, of course, places where we have not agreed and and departed. And some of those things are just things that are a specific condition in the making the show. Telling a subjective story, not telling the objective history. We can’t do 17 set pieces across the making of the show. We have to pick our spots. And the trick with this show is when you go big, you have to go really big, but you can’t go big everywhere. I’ve always tried to take aboard the notes. I’ve always tried to pivot and make the thing work. Does this help or does this help? Sometimes I think it works and connects and other points, it doesn’t. And I’ve accepted that. I’ve had to accept that as a condition of being a showrunner on a giant franchise.”

Continued Condal: “Television just moves. It’s a giant moving train, and it’s very heavy. And even though it takes two years to make the show, it happens very fast. The job of showrunning is making a million decisions, and then a season of television appears at the end of it. And you have to make a decision and then run with that decision and accept that decision and how it affects all the other decisions that you’re going to make. That is the condition of making TV. The act of doing a solo art form — like painting a painting or writing a book or even writing a comic book — these things are different. The demands of television are great and heavy, and sometimes it’s beyond even the showrunner to be able to change the nature of a thing in order to jam [something] into place on TV. A lot of what my job is, is figuring out how to pivot and move and think laterally. And we can’t do that thing, but we can do this thing or this thing, because this is not a book. It’s a television show.”

The Hollywood Reporter also previously asked Condal about changing the Blood and Cheese sequence from the book, and he replied: “The period of history season one covered, it was still a compressed time period — the book covered 30-plus years, and we crunched it down to 20. One of the side effects is you have: Rhaenyra and Daemon’s children are much younger than they were in the book, as are Helaena and Aegon’s children. They haven’t been together long enough to have two generations of kids. So Maelor does not yet exist, and we only have the twins. So working from that place, we just wanted to try to make Blood and Cheese a visceral television sequence. We decided to tell it from their point of view and make it like a heist gone wrong. Whereas in the book, it’s depicted purely from Helaena and Alicent’s perspective.”

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