George RR Martin says a lot has ‘gone wrong’ with House of the Dragon

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

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Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin said that he will reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with House of the Dragon in a cryptic post on his blog.

In a post on the aptly titled ‘Not a Blog,’ shared on 30 August, Martin hinted at his potential dissatisfaction with the prequel series but stopped short of sharing his full opinion.

The majority of the blog post in question was about the Burning of Zozobra, a celebration over Labor Day weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

However, the final paragraph saw the 75-year-old author write: “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.”

Earlier in the post he 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 clear when Martin intends to share his opinions on House of the Dragon, or what his gripe with the show is. The HBO series, which is adapted from Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood, is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and recently finished its second series to mixed reviews.

Martin has previously had a mixed response to screenwriters adapting his work but was full of praise at the beginning of season two. “What a great way to start the season. The directing was superb,” he said of the second season’s first two episodes.

He was also full of praise for Rhys Ifans and Phia Saban’s performances before naming the addition to the series that he wished he’d thought of himself.

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“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,” Martin 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.”

However, in May before the new season aired, Martin wrote a post called ‘The Adaptation Tango’ where he slammed screenwriters for rarely improving on the source material.

He wrote: “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.

“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.”

House of the Dragon’s co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal confirmed in August that the show will end after four seasons and that production on season 3 will begin in “earlyish 2025.”