Ryan Condal, the House of the Dragon showrunner, is responding to George R.R. Martin‘s post detailing “everything wrong” with the HBO series.
Last year, the author and Dragon executive producer shared in a candid blog post — which he deleted within hours — his concerns about the fantasy drama, including a key change that Condal made from Martin’s book Fire & Blood that he disagreed with.
“It was disappointing,” Condal recently told Entertainment Weekly, months after Martin’s initial post. “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.”
The showrunner also explained why some changes were necessary for the adaptation, noting that Fire & Blood wasn’t a traditional narrative.
“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,” 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.”
Condal continued, “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.”
Martin specifically disagreed with the omission of Maelor Targaryen, Aegon and Helaena’s third child, in the series, saying that it impacted the “Blood and Cheese” scene in season two. He also felt the change would cause more problems in seasons three and four.
Condal told EW of the change, “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. 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.”
