As promised in his Aug. 30 blog post, “Game of Thrones” creator and author George R. R. Martin has gone into detail about what he thought went wrong with HBO’s “House of the Dragon” Season 2.
Martin called out specific changes from his original work, “Fire & Blood,” and what the “Game of Thrones” prequel’s showrunner Ryan Condal has adapted for the screen, as well as upcoming plans for the final two seasons of the show.
Martin’s biggest critique, laid out in a since-deleted Wednesday blog post titled, “Beware the Butterflies,” was around differences between the “Blood & Cheese” plot line in the “House of the Dragon” Season 2 premiere, which features the death of a child character, and the story as its told in “Fire & Blood.” “House of the Dragon” has eliminated one character, Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor, entirely from the story, which Martin, who is co-creator and executive producer on the show, insists has larger repercussions for the future of the series moving into Seasons 3 and 4.
“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 wrote. “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,” he continued. “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. I still love the episode, and the Blood and Cheese sequence overall.”
“Losing the ‘Helaena’s Choice’ beat did weaken the scene, but not to any great degree,” Martin wrote. “Only the book readers would even notice its absence; viewers who had never read FIRE & BLOOD would still find the scenes heart-rending. Maelor did not actually DO anything in the scene, after all. How could he? He was only two years old. There is another aspect to the removal of the young princeling, however.”
Martin went on to outline in detail how the elimination of Maelor could ultimately affect plans for the final two seasons of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” which Condal recently confirmed will end with Season 4, by revealing future spoiler plots from “Fire & Blood”: “Maelor by himself means little,” Martin 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.”
“Losing Maelor weakened the end of the Blood and Cheese sequence, but it also cost us the Bitterbridge scene with all its horror and heroism, it undercut the motivation for Helaena’s suicide, and that in turn sent thousands into the streets and alleys, screaming for justice for their ‘murdered’ queen,” he said. “None of that is essential, I suppose… 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.”
The “A Song of Ice and Fire” series author ended this blog post, which he deleted later Wednesday, by hinting at more issues for “House of the Dragon” moving forwarding, adding: “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…”
Representatives for HBO and Condal did not immediately respond to Variety’s request for comment Wednesday.
On a recent episode of HBO’s official “House of the Dragon” podcast, Condal explained that “we had to make some compromises in rendering the story” when it came to eliminating the Maelor character.
“The casualty in that was that our young children in this show are very young. Very, very young,” he said. “Because we compress that timeline. So those people could only have children of a certain age and have it be believable where it didn’t feel like we weren’t hewing to the realities of the passage of time and the growth of children in any real way. And people, people look at that stuff. And particularly with a show like this, they look at it very closely. So it was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength, instead of playing it as a weakness.”
On Aug. 30, Martin first teased on his blog that he would write a post about “everything that’s gone wrong” with the “Game of Thrones” prequel show.
“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. TODAY is Zozobra’s day, when we turn away from gloom,” Martin wrote, referencing the Burning of Zozobra festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a post about his summer travels.
Martin was originally largely positive in his assessment of “House of the Dragon” Season 2. After watching the first two episodes, he wrote “both episodes were just great. Dark, mind you. Very dark. They may make you cry. (I did not cry myself, but one of my friends did.) Powerful, emotional, gut-wrenching, heart rending. Just the sort of thing I like. (What can I say? I was weaned on Shakespeare, and love the tragedies and history plays best of all.)”
Later on, however, he posted a negative reaction to the show using the incorrect, four-legged dragon sigil for House Targaryen. The correct sigil from his Westeros world uses a two-legged dragon.
“They went with the bad sigil rather than the good one,” Martin wrote at the time. “That sound you heard was me screaming, ‘No, no, no.’ Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.”
