George R.R. Martin is right to be upset about House of the Dragon

George R.R. Martin is an author best known for writing A Song of Ice and Fire, an epic fantasy book series adapted for TV as Game of Thrones. Martin also wrote Fire & Blood, a sort of fake history book about the Seven Kingdoms "written" by a historian trying to piece together the tale years after the fact. HBO is currently adapting that book as House of the Dragon, which just started production on its third season.

Although if you ask Martin just how well House of the Dragon is adapting his book, he might have have some pointed things to say. While he was a big fan of the show's first season, he publicly aired his grievances about the second on his blog, an extraordinary step for an executive producer on the show to take. He focused on how the show had cut a minor character from his book, Maelor Targaryen, and the harmful effects to the story that caused. But reading his critique, you get the idea he had a lot more to say.

But he didn't say it. Martin took down the blog post, HBO did some damage control, and Martin has remained pretty much mum on the topic ever since. Things went on like that for a while until, just this week, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal was asked about Martin's criticism.

"It was disappointing," said Condal, who shared how Martin had been an influence on him as a writer. "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."

I don't know either of these men personally. I don't know the particularities of the adaptation process. But I have read Fire & Blood and watched House of the Dragon closely, and I can easily understand why Martin would be upset with this adaptation.

Rhaenyra X Alicent

Whenever a book is adapted for the screen, things are going to be changed. Some characters are going to be cut. Others might be added. Ideally, the story will still get from A to B, but the path might be a little different. Every reasonable person understands and expects that.

This has been true of House of the Dragon from the start. For instance, in Fire & Blood, the character of King Viserys Targaryen is a festive ruler who's too busy having a good time to notice that his potential successors are forming harmful factions. The show turned Viserys into more of a tragic figure who earnestly wants to keep his family together but finds that the situation has slipped beyond his control. Martin actually loved this change, and even said he wishes his version of Viserys were like this. If you change a book and make it better than what was there originally, you rarely have to worry about people getting upset.

Crucially, although the details changed, Viserys' arc remained the same; he was a well-meaning ruler who came up short in some important ways, and ultimately the rival factions of his family go to war with each other after his death. We can also look at the example of Viserys' daughter Rhaenyra Targaryen and his wife Alicent Hightower, two of the main characters in this drama. In the book, these two have a more or less amicable relationship at the start of the story. But as time goes on and Alicent tries to maneuver things so her son Aegon will inherit the throne rather than Rhaenyra, relations sour. The show changes things a bit — Alicent and Rhaenyra are closer in age and better friends than they are in the book — but still keeps their basic arc intact...until it doesn't.

War breaks out in Westeros because there are two people vying to sit the Iron Throne: Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen and her half-brother King Aegon Targaryen. Noble houses declare for one claimant or the other, and the realm bleeds. In the book, Rhaenyra and Alicent are on opposite sides of this conflict to the bitter end. But in the season 2 finale of House of the Dragon, Alicent smuggles herself to Rhaenyra's home base on the island of Dragonstone and makes a deal with her: Alicent will help Rhaenyra take the city of King's Landing and the Iron Throne. She will also let Rhaenyra execute Aegon, her son, so she can rule without rival.

In Fire & Blood, the shape of the story is something like this: two sides of a family go to war with each other over a throne. Neither is willing to back down. They get caught in a spiral of revenge and violence that gets worse and worse as time goes on. In the end, the few who survive realize the war that they have fought destroyed their family, their country and their souls for nothing. It's a bleak but compelling shape, and House of the Dragon seems to have left it behind. In the show, the family is still fighting, but two of the most important members from the rival factions form a secret alliance. In this version of the story, the war isn't a tragic act of escalating bloodshed driven by pride and pain on both sides. Rather, Rhaenyra has been singled out as the "correct" choice to rule the Seven Kingdoms; in the finale, her husband Daemon literally has a vision of her sitting on the Iron Throne bathed in golden light. Meanwhile, the opposition is led by the likes of Aemond Targaryen, a fratricidal egomaniac who burns down cities when he's feeling upset.

So in the book, we have flawed, compromised characters fighting each other for the chance to rule the Seven Kingdoms. In the show, we have one potential ruler stuffed so full of destiny and greatness — Rhaenyra — that even those who fight her tooth and nail in the book, like Alicent, repent of their actions and join her cause in secret, giving up their sons for the slaughter in the offing. Condal said that Martin became unhappy because he was "unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way." But I don't see this change — taking hugely important characters who are rivals in the book and turning them into secret allies in the show — as a change born of practicality. The kind of story being told in House of the Dragon is fundamentally different than the one being told in Fire & Blood.

Crossing the line

To be fair, I'm mostly outlining why I have problems with the way Ryan Condal and his team have been adapting Fire & Blood. Martin never mentioned the changes to Alicent and Rhaenyra's arcs. At least outwardly, he was more concerned with how events and characters were being cut and changed in ways he felt would harm the overall narrative. And Condal and his team have indeed made many changes to the source material, both large and small. If they're willing to change the fundamental shape of the story, obviously the details aren't off limits.

Personally, I could handle some of the smaller changes as long as the show captured the general thrust of the story from the book. For instance, in season 2, Condal and company added a subplot where Daemon Targaryen has a series of repetitive dreams full of leaden symbolism. They got old fast, but as long as we leave them behind in season 3, I'll live with them. I'm even willing to overlook the cutting of Nettles, a delightful character from the book who's being replaced with another character named Rhaena Targaryen in the show. I love Nettles and was looking forward to seeing her on TV, but if there really isn't room for her in the show, I could get past it.

It's harder for me to accept the Rhaenyra-Alicent alliance because it seems to go against what Fire & Blood is at bottom: a story about a family driven apart by human temptations and frailties, and a tale about flawed people who can't help themselves from taking revenge on each other until everything escalates well past the point of no return. House of the Dragon takes a rivalry that drives the story of Fire & Blood and dissolves it. That's not just a nip or the tuck made so the story will work on TV; it's the opposite of what the book says. And when an adaptation does that, I think it crosses the line separating "streamlining a story so it fits in a new medium" from "disrespecting the source material."

And I don't think that crossing that line can be accounted for by Condal saying that it's his job to keep "the practical parts of the process [marching] forward." This doesn't feel like a practical issue; it feels like a mistake at the ideation stage. Condal has said that "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." I have no doubt he earnestly believes that. I just don't agree with him. And I'm not surprised that George R.R. Martin, who is much more invested in the source material than I could ever be, doesn't either.

I really liked the first season of House of the Dragon and thoroughly enjoyed parts of the second; the fourth episode, "The Red Dragon and the Gold," was spectacular. I even enjoyed a bunch of the changes, like the intriguing new relationship between Rhaenyra and her advisor Mysaria. I hope I enjoy season 3, which is due out on HBO and Max sometime in 2026. But I think the producers need to think very carefully about the difference between expanding, contracting and streamlining the story so it's the best version of itself, and turning it into something else entirely.

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