House of the Dragon: George R.R. Martin to Detail ‘Everything That’s Gone Wrong’ With HBO Adaptation

Matt Webb Mitovich
·3 min read

George R.R. Martin is still not finishing The Winds of Winter.

Instead, upon returning from a jaunt to Belfast, Amsterdam, London, Oxford and Glasgow, he fired up his blog to warn that a war… of words… is coming, aimed at HBO’s House of the Dragon (on which the novelist is an executive producer).

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Discussing on his blog all the emails and work he needs to catch up on, Martin wrote, “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,” he said, focused as he is on the Burning of Zozobra festivities in Santa Fe, N.M.

Prior to his summertime getaway, Martin had hinted at some dissatisfaction, namely with how House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel based on his novel Fire & Blood, resolved the Blood & Cheese storyline, which played out much differently on screen than it did on the page.

“Well, there’s a lot of be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it. The issues are too complicated,” he hedged in a July 5 blog post. Instead, GRRM promised to one day compose a post about “all the issues raised” by the storyline and the character of Maelor Targaryen, who figures prominently in Fire & Blood but who has not yet been introduced in the show. “There’s a lot to say.”

Yet in that same July 5 post, Martin applauded a change that Season 2 of the TV series had made to his source material.

“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, but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog.”

Martin was referring to the events of the Season 2 premiere, “A Son for a Son,” in which Daemon hires a thug (referred to as “Blood”) and a ratcatcher (“Cheese”) to infiltrate the Red Keep and murder Aemond Targaryen. On their way to the royal family’s private quarters, the pair get frustrated and angrily kick the loyal dog who’d been by Cheese’s side the entire episode. Cheese eventually is apprehended and hanged in Episode 2; our final shot of the pup is as it gazes up at its master’s swinging body.

“That damn near broke my heart,” Martin wrote. “Such a little thing… such a little dog… but his presence, the few short moments he was on screen, gave the ratcatcher so much humanity…. I wish I’d thought of that dog. I didn’t, but someone else did. I am glad of that.”

What do you think might land on GRRM’s list of “everything that’s gone wrong” with House of the Dragon, which TVLine readers gave an average grade of “B-” for Season 2?

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