House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal has shared how he feels about George R R Martin‘s now-deleted blog posts on “everything that’s gone wrong” with the second season of the HBO series.
In a post on his blog, Not a Blog late in August last year, the Game of Thrones creator wrote he had a “pretty wretched year” and wasn’t looking forward to writing “about everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon”.
In another post, he detailed his issues with Condal, which primarily stemmed from the latter eliminating Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor, from the story. In the series, the couple only have two children, twins Jaehaera and Jaehaerys.
Martin, who also has co-creator and executive producer credits on the series, wrote: “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.”
The writer added that there were “larger and more toxic” changes being made in the forthcoming third and fourth seasons.
In a new interview, Condal talked about the “disappointing” criticism, explaining that the source material, based on Martin’s Fire & Blood and covers the history of the Targaryen family, was not a straightforward narrative and required a looser interpretation.
“It was disappointing,” Condal told Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
“It’s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal said.
“I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time.
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“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,” he 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.”
After Martin published his blog posts, HBO responded saying that adapting a title came with its own challenges and a showrunner would have to work within them.
“There are few greater fans of George RR Martin and his book Fire & Blood than the creative team on House of the Dragon, both in production and at HBO,” said a spokesperson.
“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.”
Condal ended with saying there was no creative decision made flippantly, and made only after “usually many months” of discussion.
“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.”
Before his blog posts on House of the Dragon, Martin had taken to his blog to share his dissatisfaction at Hollywood screenwriters and their approach to developing adaptations.
“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own,’” he wrote.
“No matter how major a writer it is, no 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.”
However, Martin has been full of praise for the forthcoming Game of Thrones prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Starring Peter Claffey as Ser Duncan ‘Dunk’ the Tall, the series is based on Martin’s novella The Hedge Knight and is is expected to arrive in late 2025.
“Ira [Parker, showrunner] and his team wrapped the first season months ago, and moved right on to post production,” the author wrote.
“I’ve seen all six episodes now (the last two in rough cuts, admittedly), and I loved them. Dunk and Egg have always been favourites of mine, and the actors we found to portray them are just incredible.
“The rest of the cast are terrific as well. Wait until you guys meet the Laughing Storm. and Tanselle Too-Tall.”