George R.R. Martin’s conflicted feelings about House of the Dragon are back in the headlines this week as showrunner Ryan Condal responded to the author’s criticisms for publicly for the first time. Martin’s commentary on this adaptation started out very positive, and there were signs that his opinion was shifting, but many fans were still caught off guard by his highly critical blog post “Beware the Butterflies” when Season 2 ended. Below, you’ll see the progression of Martin’s commentary in blog posts and interviews, along with all the concerns he raised. Condal responded to Martin in a general sense, but has not directly tackled many of the specific story concerns that Martin has brought up.
Condal is the showrunner in charge of adapting Martin’s fictional history book, Fire & Blood, into a TV show — a very different task from adapting a straightforward novel. In many ways, fans have preferred Condal’s take on Westeros to that of Game of Thrones, with a greater emphasis on the eerie magic of the Wierwood trees and a hard reset on the formal dialogue, among other elements. Martin’s critiques have mostly been about changes to the source material and how it will effect the story down the line. Condal was asked about Martins’ rhetoric in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Monday.
“It was disappointing,” he said. “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.”
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“I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process,” Condal continued. “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,” Condal went on. “So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”
“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,” Condal concluded. “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.”
The rift between Martin and Condal has never seemed greater, and for Game of Thrones fans, a disconnect between the author and the showrunner(s) can seem particularly grim. Some are hoping this will put Martin’s focus back on his novels, while others worry the show will flounder without his voice. For context, here’s a look back at all of Martin’s criticisms and how they developed.
Season 1
Martin was very positive about House of the Dragon before, during, and after the debut of Season 1 back in 2022. He praised the cast and crew and touted Condal as perfect for the job, noting in blog posts that he was a fan of Condal’s previous work on the USA series Colony. Martin even defended Condal and the writers from common criticisms at the time.
“Do I wish we’d had more time to explore the relationship between Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin, the marriage of Daemon and Laena and their time in Pentos, the birth of various and sundry children… and everything else we had to skip? Sure,” Martin wrote. “But there are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season… If HOUSE OF THE DRAGON had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to ‘time jump’ over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.’”
The most foreboding part of this post was that Martin felt the show would already be hard-pressed to tell its entire story in “four full seasons of 10 episodes each,” and that has clearly gone out the window. The abrupt cut from ten episodes per season to eight is clearly the source of a lot this show’s issues right now, and Martin seems to know that as well as anyone.
‘The Adaptation Tango’
Martin’s ire seemed to shift toward the screenwriters in May of 2024, just before Season 2 began airing. At the time, fans were excited because this blog post seemed like it could have been a dig at the Game of Thrones showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. In hindsight, it seems clear it was aimed at Condal and his team.
“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own,’” Martin wrote. “No matter how matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it. ‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
‘Here There Be Dragons’
Martin made one post in the middle of House of the Dragon Season 2 that was ostensibly a positive review of the episode “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” however, upon closer inspection it could be read as a carefully veiled criticism of a massive change the show is making. Here, he wrote at great length about the dragons of Westeros, comparing them to the dragons of other books and stories. He explained some of the choices he made, saying he wanted his dragons to be fundamentally magical, yet “still beasts,” which is why they don’t speak and are not immortal.
“My dragons are creatures of the sky. They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles… but they don’t, unless their riders take them there,” Martin wrote. “They are not nomadic. During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them… but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer. From time to time a dragonrider might visit Volantis or another Valyrian colony, even settle there for a few years, but never permanently. Think about it. If dragons were nomadic, they would have overrun half of Essos, and the Doom would only have killed a few of them. Similarly, the dragons of Westeros seldom wander far from Dragonstone. Elsewise, after three hundred years, we would have dragons all over the realm and every noble house would have a few.”
“You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale, or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne,” Martin added later. “Fantasy needs to be grounded. It is not simply a license to do anything you like… Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.”
It seems likely that this was an allusion to the Season 2 storyline of Rhaena Targaryen seeking out a wild dragon in the Vale, which was not in Martin’s books. Many fans expect this original storyline to take the place of Nettles from Fire & Blood, who should have been introduced to the story by now. Condal has been cagey about whether or not Nettles will be appearing in House of the Dragon, but either way, Martin seems frustrated with the way Rhaena’s story has changed.
‘What Went Wrong’
House of the Dragon Season 2 concluded on August 4, 2024, and Martin really piqued fans’ interest with a blog post on August 30. He wrote a wide-ranging post about all the things he meant to catch up on on his blog, from his personal life to his travel experiences and his own latest media reviews. He promised posts about all these topics coming soon.
“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,” he wrote. “Not today, though.”
‘Beware the Butterflies’
It was only a few days later that Martin made the most infamous blog post in this saga, titled “Beware the Butterflies.” The author dedicated an entire lengthy essay to criticizing House of the Dragon Season 2 and its changes from his book, using one main change as an example but hinting that there were several others he wasn’t mentioning directly. Martin deleted the post within a few hours, and HBO issued a statement about it, saying they respect Martin and hope to continue collaborating with him.
Although the post has been deleted from Martin’s blog, you can find copies of it in web archives, fan forums, and other places online. Here, I’ll summarize the main point of contention Martin brought up — the removal of Aegon and Helaena’s third child, Prince Maelor Targaryen. House of the Dragon included their twins, Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, but aged them down while omitting their infant son Maelor. Martin felt that this had an immediate negative impact on the “Blood & Cheese” incident in the season opener.
“I still believe the scene in the book is stronger,” Martin wrote. “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 life to save her son. Offering a piece of jewelry is just not the same.”
“When Ryan Condal first told me what he meant to do, ages ago (back in 2022, might be) I argued against it, for all these reasons,” Martin revealed. “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.”
Martin went on to explain how the butterfly effect gave this change a much larger impact than he had originally anticipated. The show made it clear that Aegon is not equipped to father another son after his battle with Rhaenys and Melys, meaning Maelor can no longer join the story late. This means the show will miss out on Maelor’s harrowing escape from the Red Keep later in the war, and his encounter with an angry mob at Bitterbridge. Martin lamented that this entire subplot now seems impossible for the show, wroting, “The butterflies would seem to prohibit it.”
Martin admitted that the story is simpler without this tangent, writing, “But simpler is not better. “The Bitterbridge scene has tension, suspense, action, bloodshed, a bit of heroism and a lot of tragedy.” He then noted how the news of the toddler prince’s encounter at Bitterbridge would impact other characters in the story, weaking some of the biggest plot points coming down the line. In the process, Martin directly spoiled not only what will happen, but when Condal is planning for it to happen in his outlines for the show.
“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 concluded the post.
The Collider Interview
In March, Martin was out promoting a different adaptation of his work — In The Lost Lands, in theaters now — when he was asked a few questions about adaptation again. He spoke about his mixed emotions on the topic, and his reaffirmed desire to focus on his books where he has complete creative control. He also noted that authors are “not always invited” to participate in the adaptations, “but it’s nice when they do involve you, and even more when you have the feeling that they listen, [and] have an understanding of the original material, because many times they don’t.”
“I’m not talking about anybody that I’m involved with, here, so please don’t turn it around to some current project,” Martin added.
The author also acknowledged that some changes are necessary for budgetary reasons or logistical limitations, and that sometimes changes can elevate the material. For example, he mentioned Paddy Considine’s portrayal of King Viserys Targaryen I in House of the Dragon Season 1. However, in general, he feels that “when you’re adapting, if you respect the original material, you should try to stay as close to it as possible.”
Fan Responses
Fans on Reddit, YouTube, forums and all over social media have been hard at work dissecting Martin’s comments in order to shape their own impressions of the show, and predict where it might be going. There is a broad range of reactions here, but one very common take is that this outrage is too little, too late. Many wonder why Martin didn’t have this much to say about the ending of Game of Thrones, which they still feel is far more egregious than any changes to House of the Dragon.
A big part of that is fans’ belief that Benioff and Weiss chose to end Game of Thrones when and how they did, which is based primarily on a statement from Martin. At the red carpet premiere of Season 8, Martin said that both he and HBO encouraged Benioff and Weiss to keep the show going for more episodes and more seasons, but they chose to end it because “they wanted a life.” By contrast, fans point out that it was HBO’s decision to cut House of the Dragon Season 2 from ten episodes to eight — and to do so just before production began, with a WGA writers strike underway so that the scripts couldn’t be re-written.
Still, there may be more to this story we don’t understand yet, especially when it comes to Rhaena’s storyline in the Vale. For now, it seems clear at least that Martin is not a close collaborator on House of the Dragon these days, but the show will go on without his input. Season 3 is in production now, and is expected to premiere sometime in 2026. The other spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is due to premiere sometime this year on HBO and Max. Martin’s books are available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
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