George R.R. Martin has decried the “toxic” changes to the source material in the new series of House Of The Dragon that he believed “weakened” his original story.
The second season of the Game Of Thrones prequel series is based on Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood. Although the author praised the adaptations to the original story in some of the season’s early episodes, he has been more critical about other changes made throughout the season.
Martin’s biggest grievance was related to a change to the ‘Blood & Cheese’ plot line in the season premiere, which features the death of a child character that doesn’t take place in the book. The show has cut the character of Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor, entirely from the story, which Martin has said will affect the future of the show, which has now been confirmed to end with Season 4.
In a blog post published today (September 4) titled Beware the Butterflies, Martin wrote: “When Ryan Condal [showrunner] first told me what he meant to do, ages ago (back in 2022, might be) I argued against it, for all these reasons. 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. 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. 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.”
He continued: “Maelor by himself means little. 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. 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.”
Martin concluded by suggesting the show would face more story-related issues moving forward. “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…”
Martin’s comments on the situation follow Condal’s explanation on HBO’s official House of the Dragon podcast of the practical reasons for why the changes were made.
“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.”
This isn’t the first time Martin has criticised changes made to House Of The Dragon’s story. In July, he accused the show of “sloppiness” after the show got the House Targaryen sigil wrong.
In his latest blog post, the Song of Ice and Fire author stressed that the dragons in the Game Of Thrones universe were designed to be like real animals, possessing just two legs “not four, never four”. He added: “No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs.”
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