Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin wrote a blog post where he took to ask HBO's Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon for changing too many elements from his book Fire & Blood. In particular, he took issue with showrunner Ryan Condal's decision to cut the character of Maelor Targaryen, a choice Martin thinks will have negative ripple effects later in the series. It was pretty clear he had complaints about how Condal and company have adapted his work, possibly even bigger ones than just Maelor, but it's unclear if we'll get to see them; Martin took down the blog post shortly after it went up.
We'd guess that there was some back-and-forth with HBO involved, although that's just us speculating. While this was happening, HBO dropped an emergency episodes of its House of the Dragon podcast where Condal talked through why he'd made changes to Fire & Blood. That included a discussion of why he'd cut Maelor Targaryen, the change that so upset Martin.
In Fire & Blood, Maelor Targaryen is the third and youngest child of King Aegon and Queen Helaena Targaryen. King Aegon's rival Daemon Targaryen sends assassins into the Red Keep, where the king's family lives, and they end up finding Queen Helaena with her three children: Maelor and his older siblings Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. The assassins, known to history only as Blood and Cheese, force Helaena to choose which of her sons — Jaehaerys or Maelor — they will kill. After pleading with them to kill instead, she chooses Maelor, only for Blood and Cheese to kill Jaehaerys.
On House of the Dragon, Maelor doesn't exist, so the scene plays out very differently. To start, the kids are asleep rather than awake and terrified for the whole ordeal, Helaena's mother Alicent isn't present as she is in the book, and Helaena doesn't offer herself up in her children's place. Blood and Cheese ask Helaena to identity which of her twin children is her son, she correctly points out Jaehaerys, and Blood and Cheese decapitate him while Helaena picks up Jaehaera and runs away.
Like Martin, I thought this scene more or less worked on the show, but I think the version in the book is stronger. On the podcast, Condal addressed why he'd made some of these changes, focusing on why Maelor was cut.
Condal starts by explaining the difference in staging. In other words, why were the kids asleep in the show but awake in the books? "I have talked about this quite a bit but I'll just say it in plain text: the children that we had in the story were simply too young to be able to construct that narrative exactly as laid out in the book, period. I have lots of experience working with very young performers. To ask two 4-year-olds to play through that level of drama is just not a realistic expectation," Condal said. "And then there's also a practical element around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set."
I think that's reasonable. It's one thing to write about children enduring horrible murder and another to hire child performers and make them act it out. I'm less convinced by Condal's explanation for cutting Maelor from the story:
"And Maelor...who's a little older in the book, would have been an infant because of the age of Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. And this goes back to our first season, trying to adapt a story that takes place over 20 years of history instead of a story that takes place over 30 years of history. And we had to make some compromises in rendering that story so that we didn't have to recast the whole cast multiple times and really just frankly lose people. I mean, we were walking right up against the line with it in season 1, and I think we did a really great job and I think the response to season 1 extols that. But the casualty in that was that our young children in this show are very, very young because we compress that timeline. So those people could only have children of a certain age and have it be believable where it didn't feel like we weren't hewing to the realities of the passage of time and the growth of children in any real way."
So here, Condal is saying that Maelor was cut because the timeline of the story was compressed; in season 1, time often jumped ahead between episodes, sometimes up to 10 years ahead. Between Episodes 7 and 8, there's an eight-year gap. Before that jump, Aegon and Helaena are not yet married. After it, they're husband and wife and have two young children: Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. Maelor, obviously, is nowhere in sight.
The reason I don't buy this is because it was Condal's choice to construct the time jumps this way. If he's saying that it wouldn't be realistic for Maelor to be born yet given that not enough time had passed, write it so that more time had passed. Make it so that 10 years had passed in between Episodes 7 and 8 ather than eight. Or simply say that Aegon and Helaena had children earlier within that original eight-year jump; that way the kids are already older on the other side of it and Maelor could be born.
It sounds like Condal and his team have had difficulty when it comes to planning ahead. In his blog post, Martin said that, at first, Condal told him that they were going to bring Maelor in later in the story, that Helaena would be pregnant and give birth towards the end of season 2, which means Maelor would be around and involved in a key event that comes later. But at some point, Condal and his team decided to cut Maelor entirely.
You're free to buy or not buy Condal's explanations as you see fit. A third season of House of the Dragon is in the works, but suddenly the direction seems up in the air. Either way, it'll likely come out on HBO and Max in 2026.
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