House of the Dragon season 2 didn’t go how anyone had hoped, apparently. The mostly good second season ended on a sour note for some fans. Now, a few weeks after the finale of the shorter-than-normal eight-episode season, both A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin and showrunner Ryan Condal released explanations to fans on Wednesday about their similarly complicated feelings on the show so far.
Martin’s response to the season came in a since-deleted post on his Not a Blog website, which he teased last week. The post is mostly about Martin’s overall feelings on some of the changes that Condal and the rest of the House of the Dragon team made during this season, and how they compare to the books. He frames most of his discussion around the concept of the butterfly effect, in this case how small changes to the source material can have huge implications in adapting a story.
Martin’s largest point in the post is about the changes made to the Blood and Cheese sequence in episode 2 of the season. As Martin says, the sequence received praise from people who had only watched the show, but was met with a bit of skepticism from those who read Martin’s Fire & Blood book first. The book version is meaner, nastier, and more affecting. Martin agrees with the book readers, which makes sense considering he wrote it, but he doesn’t dismiss the show’s handling of the scene altogether. Instead, what bothers him most is the way the show has approached Aegon and Helaena’s third child, Maelor — or more specifically, the way the show has seemed to eliminate him from the story completely.
While Maelor’s role in the story is small on the whole, cutting him out does have quite a few implications for characters and their motivations. Martin gets into this in more spoiler-filled detail, which you can and should read if you want the whole story. But if you don’t want the spoilers just yet, we’ll instead summarize by saying: Martin has a lot of concern about how losing Maelor may weaken some of the show’s characters and themes later in the story, and how this might be a bad sign for the adaptation as it heads into seasons 3 and 4.
Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO
Of course, the part that Martin doesn’t say out loud but that longtime fans are sure to be thinking about is the fact that excising seemingly small characters from adaptations has burned him in the past. In the original Game of Thrones, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss made a few decisions early on about what characters to cut from the plot because their roles seemed unimportant to the larger story. But as the story wore on, it became increasingly clear that those characters had a thematic and narrative role to play, some more important than others. While nothing about House of the Dragon’s cuts could possibly be anywhere near as important as the ones made in Game of Thrones, it’s hard not to see a few of those echoes, particularly for fans who felt burned the first time around.
Condal’s response to the season came in a surprise appearance on HBO’s official House of the Dragon podcast, also released on Wednesday, that was all about the difficulty of adapting stories from the page to the screen. Condal is a little bit less candid in his response to the season, understandably, but stresses that there will always be mistakes and regrets and opportunities to improve or have done things better, but that he’s overall very proud of the work he and the cast and crew did on season 2. He also acknowledges that a lot of changes are necessities of timing, schedules, and budgets, something you don’t have to take into account if you’re, say, writing a book, for instance.
The podcast’s final question is specifically about Martin’s involvement in production of the show, which Condal handles even more carefully than his previous answers. Condal says that Martin is sent all the material that they write for each season and that Condal tries hard to take Martin’s feedback and thoughts into account as he receives them. But that doesn’t always make it into the finished product. More specifically, Condal stressed that production timing is tight and he, as the showrunner, has to make decisions extremely quickly and he has to make hundreds of decisions a day. That leaves room for regrets, but it also means that sometimes he can’t incorporate all of Martin’s feedback.
All of these explanations from both sides amount to basically the same thing: Adapting a story is hard and compromises always have to be made, and at the end of the day you have to hope you made the right ones. Either way, it’s hard not to feel the unspoken effects of the Writers Guild strike that was happening around the production of season 2.
Speculation among fans has been rampant since the end of season 2 that the strike is what forced HBO and Warner Bros. to shorten House of the Dragon’s second season from 10 episodes to just eight. While this hasn’t been confirmed, it would make sense considering the very strange, fairly anticlimactic cliffhanger the season ends on. On top of that, it would also explain why Condal stressed the tight timing and blinding speed of production in his podcast appearance.
A further complication to all of this is the fact that Martin has now deleted his blog post. It’s possible that the post just got more attention and traction than he had hoped, or maybe that it ran afoul of HBO, but we won’t know for sure why he deleted it unless he puts out an official statement. Whatever the full story is, it’s clear that no one is all the way happy with House of the Dragon season 2 — a funny result for a season that was pretty solid up until its final episode, and might still be good in the context of the finished show. Both Martin’s and Condal’s words are worth reading and hearing respectively; while Martin seems a little more pessimistic about the future of the show and Condal seems more optimistic, we won’t know for sure how things go until House of the Dragon’s third season arrives, which likely won’t happen until 2026.
