The Greens and The Blacks aren’t the only factions facing off in “House Of The Dragon.” THR reports that there’s another conflict behind the scenes between series co-creators George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal that could lead to some serious fallout. The “Game Of Thrones” creator used his blog this week to blast Condal for creative changes to the story “House Of The Dragon” Season 2. Martin’s post stressed that Condal’s changes are so egregious they’ll have dire consequences for the show’s next two seasons before deleting the post hours later. Both HBO and Condal have since responded to Martin’s criticisms, but it’s unclear if the parties have settled their differences.
Martin’s criticism focuses on a specific change Condal made to a major sequence in Martin’s book “Fire & Blood“: the absence of Aegon and Helaena’s toddler son Maelor in the infamous pedicide scene in the Season 2 premiere, “A Son For A Son” (fair warning: spoilers ahead). Also known as the “Blood & Cheese” sequence, the book scene sees two hired thugs force Helaena to choose which of her children they’ll murder: the twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera or the younger Maelor. In the book, after offering her own life to no avail, Helaena chooses Maelor, but the thugs kill Jaehaerys anyway. However, Condal cut Maelor from the series, and instead has Helaena attempt to bribe the thugs with precious jewelry before killing Jaehaerys. In his blog post, Martin claims the change, seemingly minor on paper, dilute the “Blood & Cheese” scene of its power, and will result in a “butterfly effect” of negative consequences for “House Of The Dragon” S3 and S4.
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While Martin stated that he thinks the show’s version of the events works to a degree, “I still believe the scene in the book is stronger.” For the writer, it’s about having Helaena’s “Sophie’s Choice” decision be as cruel as possible. “The readers have the right of that,” he continued. “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 online, most of the fans seemed to agree.”
Martin claimed he argued about Maelor being cut from the scene back in 2022, and conceded on the condition Maelor would eventually show up in a later season. “I argued against [the change], for all these reasons,” Martin continued. “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.”
However, Martin claims that Condal has cut Maelor from the series entirely, which the writer argues will upend the show entirely. “Sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made,” said Martin. “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.” Thus, while Martin says the first two episodes of “House Of The Dragon” Season 2 “were terrific episodes” and “a great way to kick off a new season,” Maelor’s absence will force Condal to make more serious cuts to Martin’s story in S3 and S4, and Martin can’t abide that. “Will any of that appear on the show?” Martin asked after he detailed some of the things Condal must excise. “Maybe… but I don’t see how. The butterflies would seem to prohibit it.”
That’s too many changes for Martin. “From what I know, that seems to be what Ryan is doing here,” Martin said about Condal’s creative choices. “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 hinted that Condal’s outline for Season 3 has a major character kill themselves “for no particular reason” instead of dying as they do in Martin’s original book. “None of that is essential, I suppose,” Martin went on, “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.”
Martin ended his blog post on a cryptic note, warning that “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…” But the executive producer’s subsequent deletion of his post could be construed on him walking back his statements about Condal’s creative choices. But what does Condal and HBO have to say about Martin’s criticisms? They responded in due time, but both creator and studio stand by the show’s adjustments of Martin’s original story.
Here’s HBO’s response to Martin’s blog post: “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.”
As for Condal, he addressed Martin’s criticisms indirectly on the most recent episode of the “Official Game Of Thrones Podcast: House Of The Dragon.” Here are his comments in full: “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,” Condal continued. “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.”
“Television just moves,” Condal went on. “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.”
Condal also talked about his changes to the “Blood & Cheese” sequence back in June to THR. “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,” Condal said in the June interview. “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.”
Both HBO and Condal’s responses to Martin’s criticisms sound valid. While the show adapts “Fire & Blood,” “House Of The Dragon” is a TV show, not a novel, so it faces much different creative liberties and restrictions. And as original author, Martin is right be sensitive to how Condal adjusts his plot, but he should also be used to showrunners changing his story by now. “Game Of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss cut and switched around plenty in their HBO series. And ironically enough, the pair once thought of cutting the youngest Stark child Rickon from the series before Martin convinced them to keep the character. “Game Of Thrones” would indeed have been different without Rickon, but not by much; he’s a tertiary part of the main story at best, with The Battle Of The Bastards and Theon Greyjoy’s characterization being the only major things he impacts.
So does that mean George R.R. Martin is overreacting to Candor’s changes to “Fire & Blood” for “House Of The Dragon”? Maybe in the sense that he took to his blog to complain about it, but this is simply an author being protective of his work, nothing more. If anything, this squabble offers an uncommon glance at the creative differences that happen while working on a big-budget TV series. Will Maelor’s absence derail “House Of The Dragon” entirely? Of course not. But the series won’t be a pure retelling of Martin’s book because of it, which viewers should have no problem with, because “Game Of Thrones” wasn’t a straight remake either. Both book and series are huge, unwieldy stories with lots of characters and plot points anyway: “Game Of Thrones” fans know what to expect from Martin’s material at this point, for both good and ill.