‘House of the Dragon’s Ryan Condal Talks George R.R. Martin Criticism

In late 2024, George R.R. Martin came for House of the Dragon. The Game of Thrones prequel spinoff based on another one of the author’s books, Fire & Blood, had to make changes to the story as it was adapted for the screen. Changes, as it turned out, Martin was none too pleased about. So much so, in fact, he wrote not one, but two blog posts about “everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon“ (though the second one has since been deleted).

Now, in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal has addressed the author’s criticisms and tried to explain his side of the story. Calling the whole situation between him and Martin “disappointing,” the Colony co-creator broke down in a bit more detail how things unfolded and ultimately devolved between himself and the man he called “a monument, a literary icon,” and “a personal hero.”

Speaking with EW, Condal explained the situation thusly:

“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.”

For those that need a short version of the disagreement, it’s basically this: the show cut a character — Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor — mostly for production reasons. But Martin firmly believes that doing so will have major repercussions for the series’ emotional throughline moving forward, going so far as to cast a dark shadow over the series’ future, claiming 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…”

You can see why the post maybe got deleted, no?

Condal And Martin Were Friends Before This: Will That Friendship Ever Return?

In his response, Condal sounded decidedly heartbroken about the devolution, which would make sense, given his self-professed fandom and the — as he put it — “mutually fruitful” and “really strong collaboration” the two men shared. But at the end of the day, Condal has a job to do: a job that requires managing thousands of jobs, millions of dollars, and a hundred different choices that affect everything therein. So, when telling a story that was written to be purposefully incomplete by its author, is it really a surprise that Condal had to change things up?

As he explained it to EW:

“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. 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.”

“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,” Condal ended his Martin thoughts. “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.”

So, we have to ask: do you think we’ll see another Martin passive-aggressive rebuttal and/or all-out response via-blog-post in a few weeks’ time?

Source:

Entertainment Weekly