A Brief Timeline of George R.R. Martin’s ‘House of the Dragon’ Discontent
On August 30, the ‘Game of Thrones’ author wrote that he needed to publish a blog about “everything that’s gone wrong” with Season 2 of ‘HotD.’ On Wednesday afternoon, he did—before deleting it half an hour later.
“Words are wind, but wind can fan a fire.” —King Jaehaerys Targaryen the Wise, Fire & Blood
Every word George R.R. Martin writes these days is precious. Fans of his work have eagerly consumed each syllable for more than a decade, as they await the ever-delayed Winds of Winter, the next entry in his epic fantasy saga. So when Martin publishes and then deletes words he’s written, it’s almost by definition a big deal.
Especially when those words are all directed in opposition to House of the Dragon, the popular HBO adaptation of Martin’s Fire & Blood. It’s not often that a creator so directly criticizes a depiction of his own work: Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, and Rick Riordan lambasted the movie adaptations of his Percy Jackson novels, but such examples are rare.
That dissonance is likely why, after about half an hour on Wednesday, the Not a Blog post on Martin’s site titled “Beware the Butterflies” began returning a “Page Not Found” error—but not before readers were exposed to a host of complaints about the Dragon adaptation, showrunner Ryan Condal’s decision-making, and the future of the show. We saved a copy of the post before it disappeared—read it all here, if you desire.
The post’s title refers to the butterfly effect, and the text goes on to explore how one page-to-screen change in Season 2 of House of the Dragon could influence future seasons. This is far from the first time Martin has used this same concept to express concerns about adaptive choices regarding his work. All the way back in 2011, in the wake of the first season of the Game of Thrones adaptation, Martin mentioned that he’d talked to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss about the butterfly effect, citing and summarizing the implications of Ray Bradbury’s famous short story. And in the wake of the much-derided Thrones finale, Martin returned to the butterfly effect once again to explain why his book series’ ending might differ from the show’s (if we ever get there).
But before analyzing Martin’s latest, especially inflammatory blog post, let’s rewind to earlier this year, around the start of Dragon’s second season, to explore how the author’s discontent had built over the course of the summer. Here is a brief timeline of Martin’s blog drama, and his frustration with the show:
June 16: House of the Dragon’s second season premieres with “A Son for a Son,” which ends with the grisly murder of King Aegon’s young son in the Blood and Cheese affair. Martin doesn’t mention the show’s return on his blog. (But he does, if Deux Moi is to be believed, order a “big dragon-shaped cake” for a party at his house in New Mexico.)
June 22: Martin comments on the world of Westeros on his blog—but he’s focused on the next adaptation of his work, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is slated for 2025. Observing that his mood is “excited,” Martin writes, “I hear that everything is going very well just now. Next month I will get to see for myself. Parris and I will be taking a few of our minions over to Belfast in mid July, to visit the set, meet the cast, and take in some jousting.”
July 5: Now three episodes into the season, Martin writes for the first time about the on-screen depiction of Blood and Cheese—which he’d later go on to slam in “Beware the Butterflies”—saying he’d seen a sneak peak last year. “What a great way to start the season,” he gushes. “The directing was superb. … And I cannot say enough about the acting.”
Martin offers particular praise for how the show changes and deepens Helaena’s character, writing that actress Phia Saban’s “performance is especially noteworthy; very little of what she brings to the part was in my source material. … but once I met the show’s version of Helaena, I could hardly take issue. Phia Saban’s Helaena is a richer and more fascinating character than the one I created in FIRE & BLOOD.”
Martin ends the post with yet more applause for the show—though he tempers it with some glimmers of dissatisfaction that he says will require a “separate post” to tackle (emphasis mine):
“Rhaenyra the Cruel” has been getting great reviews, for the most part. A lot of the fans are proclaiming it the best episode of HotD, and some are even ranking it higher than the best episodes of GAME OF THRONES. I can hardly be objective about these things, but I would certainly say it deserves to be in contention. The only part of the show that is drawing criticism is the conclusion of the Blood and Cheese storyline. Which ending was powerful, I thought… a gut punch, especially for viewers who had never read FIRE & BLOOD. For those who had read the book, however…
Well, there’s a lot of [sic] be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it. The issues are too complicated. Somewhere down the line, I will do a separate post about all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing. There’s a lot to say.
For the nonce, I will just say that I really really liked “Rhaenyra the Cruel.” I liked it in London the first time I saw it, and I liked it even more on second watching. I hope you did as well. Maybe it even made you cry.
July 9: In an otherwise innocuous post about his upcoming travel plans to the United Kingdom, including London, Martin writes a sentence that, in retrospect, seems incredibly ominous: “The writers’ room for HOUSE OF THE DRAGON season 3 is also meeting in London, but I have no plans to attend.”
July 11: In the aftermath of the battle at Rook’s Rest, Martin posts a 1,700-word, lore-rich treatise about the dragons in his fictional world. “Has there ever been a dragon battle to match [Rook’s Rest]?” Martin exclaims. “Our guys knocked this one out of the castle.”
This post was laden with so much information about the Thronesverse’s dragons—their biology, their behaviors, their habits—that it proved incredibly useful for The Ringer’s bloggers and podcasters as we continued to analyze Dragon’s second season. (I know I linked to and quoted it several times over the ensuing month.)
But this entry also contains two grumbles of frustration—one bold and one hidden. For the former, Martin complains that the Targaryen sigils in both late-stage Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon show anatomically incorrect dragons (with four legs plus wings, instead of the two legs plus wings that Martin envisions). “That sound you heard was me screaming, ‘no, no, no,’” Martin writes, adding that the designers have ignored his “strenuous objections.”
The latter frustration concerns dragons’ migratory patterns in Martin’s world. “They are not nomadic,” Martin writes, specifically outlining, “You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale, or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne.”
Well, what do you know? At the end of the second season, viewers learn that the wild dragon Sheepstealer—which, in the book, resides in a lair on Dragonstone—is hunting in the Vale. It doesn’t seem too tricky to figure that Martin knew this adaptive change was coming, and he wanted to pre-register his annoyance with the alteration.
Amid his travels, Martin doesn’t post on his blog between July 11 and August 22.
August 30: Following a couple of short, non-Thrones-related posts, Martin writes a preview of his upcoming Not a Blog content: He’ll share stories about his travel adventures, he says, plus he has some professional matters to address: “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.”
September 4: “Beware the Butterflies” arrives. Martin opts for a soft entrance to his criticism, once again mentioning that Dragon’s first two Season 2 episodes were “well written, well directed, powerfully acted. A great way to kick off the new season.”
But then the tone shifts and the bitterness emerges, as Martin explains his opposition to the greatest change to Blood and Cheese. As a reminder, in Martin’s telling in Fire & Blood, Aegon and Helaena have three children: twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, and their 2-year-old brother, Maelor. Blood and Cheese force Helaena to choose which son she wants to die (they need to kill only one son to avenge Luke and achieve “a son for a son” balance, after all); she eventually selects young Maelor, but the assassins resort to trickery and kill Jaehaerys instead, telling Maelor, “You hear that, little boy? Your momma wants you dead.”
In the show, however, Maelor doesn’t exist, so Helaena’s “choice” is more confusing, and less horrifically harrowing. Instead of picking a son to die, she has to tell Blood and Cheese which of her sleeping children is the male Jaehaerys, and which is the female Jaehaera. Blood and Cheese even say they could check the children’s anatomy, but decide to trust their mother’s honesty instead. (“You would think a glance up his PJs would reveal that, without involving the mother,” Martin observes in a parenthetical in his post.)
“As I saw it, the ‘Sophie’s Choice’ aspect was the strongest part of the sequence, the darkest, the most visceral,” Martin writes. “I hated to lose that. And judging from the comments on line, most of the fans seemed to agree.”
So far, so fair—Martin wasn’t saying anything that plenty of readers hadn’t already voiced. But then he goes behind the curtain, sharing such details as:
- Budget was a problem for the show. Martin says that part of Condal’s justification for cutting Maelor was logistical: “[Casting] 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.”
- Condal originally told him Maelor would be part of the story. “Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him,” Martin writes—but “sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made. 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.”
- He’s either no longer discussing adaptive details with Condal anymore (“I have no idea what Ryan has planned — if indeed he has planned anything,” Martin writes at one point), or he’s sharing story beats directly from Condal’s Season 3 plans. (I won’t say the specific plot point because it’s a spoiler, but Martin writes, “In Ryan’s outline for season 3, [spoiler].”) These points are a bit confusing to reconcile, but either way, it’s messy.
- The show’s creators are planning even more drastic changes to future plot points. After a spoiler-filled lament of how Maelor’s absence would, via the butterfly effect, change the rest of the story, Martin concludes, with foreboding ellipses, “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…”
In a statement to Variety on Wednesday, HBO defended Condal and the adaptation: “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.”
But the funny thing is: Martin isn’t wrong about any of his criticisms. As a book reader, I was disappointed by the omission of Maelor and Helaena’s choice, which I felt diluted the impact of Blood and Cheese; I expected Jaehaerys’s murder to dominate discussion around the show for weeks, but it rather quickly faded. I’m also concerned about what Maelor’s absence means for events and character decisions that I know are coming in Seasons 3 and 4.
I’m just a critic observing from afar, though. I’m not connected to Condal or HBO; I don’t know budgetary details that I can expose to the entire internet. I suppose that’s why this post won’t be deleted, while Martin’s was!
Given the quick removal of “Beware the Butterflies,” I can’t imagine further entries “about everything that’s gone wrong” with the show—remember, Martin’s August 30 tease promised “posts,” plural—are forthcoming. That’s probably for the best, so Martin can look elsewhere instead of directing his energies toward the now-finished Dragon Season 2. He still has The Winds of Winter to finish, and he’s just a bit behind schedule.
