Today's an exciting day for the Seven Kingdoms, because House of the Dragon season 3 has officially begun production. The third season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series is set to be its biggest and most ambitious yet, with war breaking out across the realm and four major events from George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood set to make it to the screen. That includes the Battle of the Gullet, a brutal naval clash we know is coming early in the season.
"This is certainly our biggest season to date, both in terms of ambition and just the practical size, the amount of sets," showrunner Ryan Condal told Entertainment Weekly. "We're cresting that narrative parabola here and starting to come down into, if not the endgame, the midpoint and getting into the late Act 2 and moving onto the start of Act 3. Anybody that's read that book knows that the narrative gets bigger and grimmer as it goes along, and the show has to match that ambition as best it possibly can."
One of the common criticisms of House of the Dragon's second season was that it took quite a while for the war to really get underway. Aside from a breathtaking battle at Rook's Rest, most of season 2 was spent setting the pieces in place for the war; by the end, armies are on the move. I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say we expected the show to get into the meat of the story a little quicker. But according to Condal, our wait is at an end.
“I will say that the war this season goes very hot, very, very quickly,” he said. “I think the people that were waiting and waiting for all of the horrible, brutal, pitiless bloodshed will be getting it in copious amounts.”
Ryan Condal breaks silence on George R.R. Martin's critical blog post
As excited as I am to see how Condal and his team handle the show's third season, that excitement is tempered somewhat by the drama which surrounded season 2. After the show's second season, author George R.R. Martin — whose book Fire & Blood forms the basis for the show — took to his blog to voice some of his frustrations with how the show was adapting his book.
What followed was one of the most spectacular clashes between an author and a television studio I've ever witnessed. Martin took aim at specific changes, like the show's handling of the Blood and Cheese incident, using it as an example for how even more "toxic" changes to the source material were likely to ripple out into future seasons. A short while later HBO issued a statement defending the show, an emergency episode of the House of the Dragon podcast with Condal defending his adaptation choices went live, and Martin deleted his blog post. But by then, the damage had been done. No matter how much damage control anyone did, it was clear that there was a rift between Martin and the studio over its handling of the show. As for why Martin, an experienced author as well as television writer and producer, felt the need to go to his blog rather than settle things with HBO discreetly, we have our theories.
Condal hasn't spoken a lot about Martin's blog post since the whole snaffu happened, but that just changed. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Condal finally addressed the elephant in the room, admitting that while he hadn't actually read Martin's blog post, he had been told all about it.
"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 chalks up part of the issues to the strange task of adapting Fire & Blood. The book isn't a novel in the traditional sense, but a fake history book, detailing the rise and fall of House Targaryen from the perspective of a maester sifting through numerous historical sources. Those sources often contradict one another, and the maester wasn't around to actually witness any of it himself. That leaves a fair amount of room for interpretation.
"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," Condal 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."
Is George R.R. Martin really being unreasonable toward House of the Dragon?
I'll admit, my jaw may have dropped when I read Condal's words about Martin; the public shade in this controversy is just off the charts. But I also don't entirely buy his explanation here. Martin is an experienced TV producer, and despite the many issues Game of Thrones had late in its run, he never spoke out against the television show in the way he has with House of the Dragon. He's also been effusive with his praise for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the other prequel series coming down the pike later this year. It's hard for me to imagine this is just a case of Martin being unreasonable, especially since Condal didn't even actually read his blog post to take in the criticisms he was leveling at the show. For example, Martin talked about how Helaena's young child Maelor Targaryen was cut; Condal has defended that decision. But part of Martin's issue is that he was told repeatedly Maelor would be in the show, and those plans gradually changed without his knowing. That has nothing to do with what ended up on screen, and everything to do with the behind-the-scenes politics of the production.
And while there are challenges to adapting a big, sprawling story like the Dance of the Dragons, I also can't help but think about a few of the stranger decisions the show has made which have absolutely nothing to do with scale or scope or the like. The main example that comes to mind — which is one Martin pointed out in his blog as well — is that when Helaena Targaryen was confronted with the murder of one of her children by the assassins Blood and Cheese in the show, she offers them a necklace to try to bribe them out of it. In the book, she begs them to kill her instead.
It's a much more dramatic scene than in House of the Dragon, and while an argument can certainly be made that Helaena's shock is so great that she's numb in that moment, I do think it's a much weaker scene than what we got in Martin's novel. Some parts of that are totally reasonable, such as having Helaena's child Jaehaerys die off screen; no one actually wants to watch a child get beheaded on television, and I'm sure there are regulations about that sort of child violence anyway. But the drama of the scene itself was also altered in ways that weakened it, right down to a small lines of dialogue making less sense.
"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," Condal 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."
We'll see how House of the Dragon handles this next stretch of the story when season 3 premieres, sometime in 2026.
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