George R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire and creator of the world of Westeros, has taken to his Not A Blog to share an interesting update today, which lends more credence to the rumors that Martin had issues with the second season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon. As we always do here at Winter Is Coming, we're going to pull out the most pertinent bits and discuss. But of course, a trip to Martin's blog is always worth the time, so make sure to read that as well.
The post itself, titled "Burn Him! Burn Him!," isn't just about House of the Dragon. It's Martin's first big update since he returned from his travels in Europe, which kept him abroad from July 15 to August 15. But now he's home, and just in time for Fiesta in Santa Fe, "one of the oldest festivals in the City Different," which will culminates with the "burning of Zozobra (the original Burning Man, for those of you who have never heard of him)."
I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of Zozobra. Martin talks about a bit about the Burning Man tradition, saying "It is Santa Fe’s way of devouring the darkness, to clear the way for the light and joy that will hopefully mark the new year."
The festival sounds especially important for Martin this year. "This has not been a good year for anyone, with war everywhere and fascism on the rise… and on a more personal level, I have had a pretty wretched year as well, one full of stress, anger, conflict, and defeat." He goes on to discuss how "a lot of things that needed saying did not get said" while he was traveling.
"I am glad I took that trip, though. My stress levels beforehand were off the charts, so much so that I was seriously considering cancelling my plans and staying at home. I am glad I didn’t, though. It was so so good to get away for a little, to put all the conflict aside for a time. I began to feel better the moment the plane set down in Belfast, and we all headed off to Ashford Meadow to see the tournament. We had five great days in Belfast and environs, and that made me feel so much better. The rest of the trip was fun as well, a splendid combination of business and pleasure that included visits to Belfast, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, and Glasgow. I look forward to telling you all about our adventures… though it may take a while. I had a thousand emails waiting for me on my return, and then I went and brought a case of covid back with me from worldcon, so I am way way behind."
It's great to hear that the trip was ultimately rejuvenating for Martin, but unfortunate that he caught a case of COVID at Worldcon, a major science fiction and fantasy festival he attended. Hopefully he's well on the mend at this point. The other big tidbit in there is the five days he spent in "Belfast and environs," which included a trip to "Ashford Meadow to see the tournament." He's talking about the set of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a Game of Thrones spinoff show based on Martin's Dunk & Egg novellas. It features a big old tourney, filled with pageantry and drama and larger-than-life personalities. It sounds like Martin enjoyed his set visit, which hopefully bodes well for the adaptation.
And it would be good if they handled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in a way that made Martin happy...because it sounds like he's less than satisfied with the second season of House of the Dragon:
"I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON… but I need to do that too, and I will. Not today, though. TODAY is Zozobra’s day, when we turn away from gloom."
That's probably the most public that Martin has been about having beef with House of the Dragon season 2. Reports started surfacing that he said something similar at Bubonicon in Albuquerque, New Mexico last weekend, but that wasn't recorded and was in front of a small crowd. Now it's on the internet, and the internet is forever.
What's going on with George R.R. Martin and House of the Dragon?
Over the past few months, Martin has talked about have issues with television adaptations of beloved novels. Back in May, the author wrote a blog post decrying screenwriters who were so eager to put their own stamp on adaptations that they diminished the qualities of the source material, even if that source material was written by treasured authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, Mark Twain or Ursula K. LeGuin. "No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and 'improve' on it," Martin wrote. "They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse."
He later echoed these sentiments during a talk he gave at Oxford in early August. "Even if they're adapting Dickens or Tolkien or Shakespeare or whoever, they decide to make it their own, but they never make it better because usually the people who are making it their own are simply not as good as the people who wrote it in the first place."
Martin didn't name House of the Dragon specifically in either of those cases...but a lot of fans started to wonder whether he was throwing shade at the HBO series, since House of the Dragon notably made a lot of deviations from the book in season 2. Martin's novel Fire & Blood is a fake history book; it's purposely written to obfuscate the truth about what went down during periods of Westerosi history like the Dance of the Dragons, invoking the tricky job faced by real-world historians when they write about historical events. But there's still quite a lot of stuff in there that's not really up for debate. From Daemon Targaryen's ineffectual attempts to raise an army in the Riverlands to Alicent and Rhaenyra joining forces to characters getting completely different storylines like Otto Hightower's imprisonment and Rhaena Targaryen hunting for a dragon in the Vale, there were deviations on top of deviations in season 2. It was still often compelling television, but it's a very different story from the one Martin wrote.
One of the biggest changes involved the story with Rhaena. It seems like the show is giving her material from another beloved book character, Nettles, who in Fire & Blood searches for a dragon on Dragonstone, not the Vale. At this point it seems pretty likely that Nettles has been cut altogether. Martin seemed to address this in another blog post published in July a few days before he left for Europe. He dropped this tidbit which felt pretty pointed: "You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale , or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne. Fantasy needs to be grounded. It is not simply a license to do anything you like. Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused. Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper."
It's also possible that budgetary issues at HBO contributed to Martin's stresses. I think it's pretty safe to say that one of House of the Dragon's biggest weaknesses in season 2 was that it had a reduced episode count, from 10 down to eight; it's been reported that climactic events originally meant for the end of season 2 were moved to the beginning of season 3, leaving season 2 without much in the way of a climax. Back before the season aired, writer and producer Sara Hess told Entertainment Weekly that "it wasn't really our choice" to slash the episode count. Could that be a factor in this equation?
For now, we can only guess. But if Martin holds true to his word and ends up writing those blog posts, we may not have to guess much longer. We'll be eager to read whatever he has to say about it all.
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