House of the Dragon showrunner comments on George R.R. Martin's criticisms for the first time (2025)

George R.R. Martin was critical of certain story elements in the second season of House of the Dragon. In a since-deleted blog post, Martin had argued that creative changes would have a “butterfly effect” on later seasons. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal commented on Martin’s criticism for the first time.

“It was disappointing,” he said. “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 continued, “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.“

Martin’s problem comes from the absence of the third child of Queen Helaena, and although Martin fears this omission will have major repercussions, Condal says he has 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,” he said. “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.“

Production on House of the Dragon season 3 recently began, and there have been a few new additions to the cast, including Tommy Flanagan as Ser Roderick Dustin, Dan Fogler as Ser Torrhen Manderly, and James Norton as Ormund Hightower.