House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal finally responded to George R.R. Martin’s now-deleted blog post criticizing the previous season of the show, saying that he didn’t even see the post himself before it was taken down. Back in September, Martin wrote a lengthy post criticizing the show for seemingly small changes that have piled up over time, creating a butterfly effect that has frustrated him by changing the story and its emotional impact. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Monday, Condal said that this was disappointing to hear from one of his personal heroes, and he felt that Martin was not being honest about the practical issues at play in cases like this.
“It was disappointing,” Condal said bluntly. “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.”
Condal went on to discuss how unique House of the Dragon is — adapting a fictional history book with an extremely unreliable narrator into a more conventional TV format, with definitive answers that Martin left hanging in Fire & Blood. “I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process,” Condal went on. “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.”
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“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,” Condal 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.”
Shortly after House of the Dragon Season 2 concluded, Martin published a blog post titled “Beware the Butterflies” on his Not A Blog website. The post was removed within hours without explanation, but by then it had been copies and archived in many places, including robust fan discussions. In it, Martin gave a few example of changes the show had made with massive implications for the later story, and hinted that there were other examples he wasn’t sharing here.
The biggest example in Martin’s post was the omission of Aegon and Helaena’s son, Prince Maelor Targaryen, who should have been present during the gut-wrenching “Blood & Cheese” confrontation. In his post, Martin explained how this seemingly small change could completely change the tone of Helaena’s story down the line, but Condal told EW that he has had a plan in place for that from the beginning.
“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,” he said. “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 filming now, and is expected to return sometime in 2026 on HBO. Before that, another prequel called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will hit HBO and Max sometime this year. In the meantime, Martin’s books are available in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
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