George R.R. Martin Says He’ll Reveal “Everything That’s Gone Wrong With ‘House of the Dragon'”

James Hibberd
·3 min read
4

George R.R. Martin is suggesting he’s about to go “dracarys!” on House of the Dragon.

The Game of Thrones author and Dragon co-creator posted an eyebrow-raising message on his blog Friday, saying he’s going to reluctantly describe what’s gone wrong with the hit series.

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Innocuously snuggled into the bottom of a blog post about a Santa Fe festival, Martin added, “I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON… but I need to do that too, and I will. Not today, though.”

Martin added on a more personal level, “I have had a pretty wretched year as well, one full of stress, anger, conflict, and defeat. I need to talk about some of that, and I will, I will… I was away from my computer traveling from July 15 to August 15, so a lot of things that needed saying did not get said.”

The message is striking because Martin has always been very publicly supportive of his HBO projects. Even as Game of Thrones diverted from Martin’s source material and made choices that he has since said he wasn’t thrilled about, he was always complimentary to showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss and the series as a whole.

Martin has also had regular praise for Dragon, and particularly lauded the recent season’s fourth episode, saying it contained the best dragon battle put to screen, and enthused, “Our guys knocked this one out of the castle.”

Dragon season two received flak from fans for feeling truncated, with the show’s eight episodes halting just before a battle that was teased all season was set to begin. The read-between-the-lines reason for this was that the season originally was set to include 10 episodes, just like the first season, but HBO pushed the final two to season three as a cost-saving measure.

The show also had received other criticism, as well. The season’s few intense and action-oriented scenes typically involved minor characters the audience wasn’t invested in. The show’s two strong female leads (Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke) notably spent the season largely hanging about their respective castles without impacting the show’s action and viewers also accused the season of sidelining fan-favorite Daemon (Matt Smith). Another criticism was Dragon generally had a depressive and humorless vibe (Martin’s books do not, and are full of dark humor, as was Thrones).

It’s unclear, however, if any of the above is what bothers Martin — who likely watches the series from an entirely different perspective as the creator of this world and an executive producer. HBO did not reply to a request for comment.

Also, it’s important to point out that Dragon‘s ratings were huge — the biggest for any HBO show since Thrones ended. But season two was slightly below the first season (whereas the ratings for Thrones started quite modest, then grew every season).

After the recent finale, co-creator Ryan Condal said the show will end with its fourth season and pledged that season three will hit the ground running.

“We are building to that event that will happen very shortly in terms of the storytelling, and it should be the biggest thing to date that we’ve we’ve pulled off,” he said. “We just wanted to have the time and the space to do that at a level that is going to excite and satisfy the fans in the way it’s deserved. We also wanted to build some anticipation toward it. So I apologize for the wait, but … with the team that we have together, we’re going to pull off a hell of a win with The Battle of the Gullet.”

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