*Spoiler Warning: This piece contains spoilers for House Of The Dragon Season 2*
With another critically acclaimed season of Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon having been and gone and production already well underway on new Westeros spin-off series A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, Thrones author George R. R. Martin must be feeling pretty chuffed with himself right about now. Or at least, that's what you would've thought. But having ominously warned that he needed to discuss "everything that has gone wrong with House Of The Dragon" in a blog post titled "Burn him! Burn him!" last week, Martin took to his website once more in a mysteriously now-deleted follow-up to vent his frustrations with how Season 2 of the show seemingly meddled with his source material.
After observing some pleasantries, complimenting the "well written, well directed, powerfully acted" first two episodes of Ryan Condal's second season of HOTD, Martin revealed the nub of his frustrations with the show's latest outing: a discrepancy between the child-killing "Blood and Cheese" storyline seen on screen and how it plays out in his Fire & Blood book. Basically, as Martin sees it, showrunner Condal's decision to excise Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Helaena Targaryen's (Phia Saban) youngest son, Prince Maelor, from the TV series — an otherwise routine casualty of adaptation that boils down to filming schedules and budget — will have unforetold consequences for the show at large.
On a macro level, Martin is unhappy that Helaena having only two children in the show — one boy, Jaehaerys, and a girl, Jaehaera — robs the "Blood & Cheese" plotline of the book's "Sophie's Choice" moment where the traumatised mother has to decide which of her sons is to die at the hands of armed thugs. "As I saw it, the “Sophie’s Choice” aspect was the strongest part of the sequence, the darkest, the most visceral," wrote Martin, "I hated to lose that. And judging from the comments on line, most of the fans seemed to agree." But despite that specific grievance, and asserting that Helaena shows "more courage" and "more strength" in his book, Martin conceded that he does still "love the episode" — and the brutal sequence in question — "overall".
Martin's bigger concern however is that the excision of Prince Maelor from the show entirely, something the author claims Condal had promised him wouldn't happen ("Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him," he writes), will have "Butterfly Effect" ramifications for future series of House Of The Dragon. Now, we won't get into what those consequences are here (we suspect the reason Martin removed the blog post may have been to do with its spoilerific nature regarding Condal's Season 3 plans), but suffice it to say that Martin is not best pleased. "What will we offer the fans instead, once we’ve killed these butterflies?" writes Martin towards the tail end of the lengthy blog post, only to then forebodingly tease that "larger and more toxic butterflies" await if Condal follows through with his outline for Season 3 and 4 for the fantasy epic.
This evening, Variety shared a response to Martin's grievances from a HBO spokesperson, which reads as follows: “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.”
As you can probably tell from all the he-said, he-said hullabaloo, cloak and dagger comments, and Martin's extraordinarily public rebuttal to creative decisions made on the show, it would appear that the Targaryens aren't the only ones with some measure of a civil war on their hands on the House Of The Dragon front at the moment. But with a third season already prepping to enter pre-production and a fourth and final season of HOTD already greenlit, of one thing we can almost certainly be sure: we'll probably still be waiting for the Winds Of Winter by the time Condal has completed his House Of The Dragon.