George R.R. Martin has rarely minced his words when it comes to House of the Dragon, and he’s just made another dig at the Game of Thrones spinoff.
In September 2024, Martin posted a lengthy blog post critiquing House of the Dragon Season 2; specifically, its adaptation of Blood and Cheese and showrunner Ryan Condal’s plans for the rest of the series.
He took it down, and HBO released a statement praising Condal’s work on the show and noting that “difficult choices” had to be made about “the characters and stories the audience will follow.”
It’s simple: Martin doesn’t like it when people change his stories, and he finds it difficult when screenwriters want to adapt his books.
George R.R. Martin slams Hollywood writers making stories their own
During a conversation with Joe Abercrombie (who’s working on an adaptation of his novel The Devils with James Cameron), Martin spoke about the challenges of working with screenwriters.
“Television and film are ultimately collaborative, you always have the director, the actors, and of course the studio will have executives and they will give you notes… and you have deal with all his,” he said.
“The hard part about collaborating is not so much them… but dealing with the other writers. You know they’re adapting your book or your story and they hire someone else to do it… and they empower this writer to take The Great Gatsby but make it your own. I don’t want anyone to make The Great Gatsby their own.”
Martin admitted he may be in the minority with this argument, but “in most of the cases where a Hollywood screenwriter makes something their own,” they don’t improve it. “I think in the majority of cases it’s the opposite,” he added.
HBOIt’s hard not to see this as a jab at Ryan Condal and the House of the Dragon team. Speaking to EW in March, Condal said he hadn’t read Martin’s post, but he had heard about it.
“It was disappointing. 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,” he said.
“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.”
In the meantime, find out what we know about House of the Dragon Season 3 and what else is dropping this year with our 2025 TV show calendar.
