In a blog post on Friday, author George R. R. Martin said he’s almost ready to speak out about what he thinks went wrong with House of the Dragon Season 2.
“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,” Martin wrote. “Not today, though.”
It’s a surprising comment from the author, as he’s so far largely avoided saying anything too negative about the series. Even when Game of Thrones turned into a widely-panned disaster in season 8, Martin avoided any severe criticism of the showrunners.
However, fans have speculated for a while now that Martin is frustrated by some of the HotD creative decisions. The HotD showrunners have taken some major liberties with the source material, and they’ve been met with mixed reception from the fandom for it.
In a July 2024 blog post, Martin implied that he particularly wasn’t happy with the show’s choice to water down the intensity of the book’s infamous Blood and Cheese incident. The show removed a lot of the psychological horror of the scene, and cut multiple characters from the sequence.
“Well, there’s a lot of be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it,” Martin wrote at the time. “The issues are too complicated. Somewhere down the line, I will do a separate post about all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing.”
In May 2024, Martin wrote another blog post that included what many fans interpreted as a veiled critique of HoTD. “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,” he wrote. “They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
That said, Martin has praised some of HotD’s changes over the years, particularly its depiction of Paddy Considine’s King Viserys, who the author described as “more powerful and tragic and fully-fleshed than my own version.” More recently, he’s praised Phia Saban for her “wrenching, powerful, heart-breaking performance as Helaena Targaryen.”
For A Song of Ice and Fire fans who’d prefer Martin prioritize writing The Winds of Winter instead of writing about a TV show, Martin’s latest blog post offered little hope that the long-awaited sixth book will be published any time soon.
“This has not been a good year for anyone,” Martin wrote, “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.”
