By Last year, after House of the Dragon Season 2 finished airing, author George R.R. Martin made a blog post criticizing some aspects of the show, which resulted in a controversy among fans. Some sided with Martin, some sided with showrunner Ryan Condal. Now Condal responds to that.
Ryan Condal defends his decisions
In a new interview with EW, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal started adressing the topic by saying how much George R.R. Martin means to him as a fan: “It was disappointing. 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.“
He then continues about the issue at hand: “[Fire & Blood is] this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way. 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. 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. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.“
Condal ends the topic by further defending his position and saying they have a plan: “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.
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.“
Martin’s now-deleted blog post criticized such things as cutting Maelor, King Aegon and Helaena’s son, from the show, making the Blood and Cheese scene slightly different, practically and morally. Martin also highlighted the importance of following the source material as the more you change things in one place, the more you have to change in others and that can quickly go out of hand i.e. Martin’s recurring reference to the Butterfly effect.
House of the Dragon Season 3 will premiere on HBO in 2026. We will keep following the show as the production kicks into high gear.
Where you can find us:
