House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal has weighed in on George R.R. Martin‘s since-deleted blog posts criticizing the creative decisions that were made in season 2 of the HBO series.
Martin teased late last August that he planned to write “about everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon.” Mainly, he was critical of Condal’s decision to omit a character that was key in Martin’s Fire & Blood and how that will likely impact the story going forward.
Condal previously addressed the challenge of adapting Fire & Blood for the small screen, calling Martin’s tome a “history book” that doesn’t necessarily come with fully fleshed-out moments or characters.
As for Martin’s blog post: “It was disappointing,” he told EW in an interview. “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.”
Condal has previously acknowledged that Fire & Ice is not a traditional narrative. “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,” he explained. “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 reassured fans he does not take any creative decision on House of the Dragon lightly.
“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,” he told EW. “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.”
HBO announced today it has begun production on Season 3 of House of the Dragon.
