George RR Martin: Much Has ‘Gone Wrong’ with House of the Dragon

Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin recently took to his blog to express his forthcoming plans to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the prequel series House of the Dragon. In his post, dated August 30 on his ‘Not a Blog’ platform, Martin hinted at his disappointment with the series but refrained from elaborating.

The main focus of the blog post was actually about a local event, the Burning of Zozobra, a Labor Day weekend celebration in Santa Fe, New Mexico. However, Martin shifted gears in the final paragraph, stating, “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.”

In another part of his post, Martin wrote: “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.” It’s not entirely clear when Martin plans to share his detailed thoughts on House of the Dragon or what specific issues he has with the show.

The HBO series, based on Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood, is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and recently completed its second season, which received mixed reviews from audiences and critics alike. Initially, Martin had positive remarks about the new series, particularly at the beginning of season two. “What a great way to start the season. The directing was superb,” he said of the season’s first two episodes.

Martin also complimented the performances of actors Rhys Ifans and Phia Saban, mentioning that there was an addition to the series that he admired. “I am… ahem… not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story. Especially not when the source material is mine,” he wrote. “But that dog was brilliant. I was prepared to hate Cheese (Mark Stobbart), but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog.”

In May, before the new season aired, Martin had written another blog post called ‘The Adaptation Tango’ where he criticized screenwriters for often failing to improve upon the original source material. “Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K Le Guin, JRR Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen or…well, anyone,” Martin lamented.

“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. ‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

Meanwhile, House of the Dragon‘s co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal confirmed in August that the series would conclude after four seasons, with production on season 3 expected to begin in “earlyish 2025.”