To say Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon has had an interesting last couple of weeks would be an understatement. For starters, creator George R.R. Martin teased and then posted a rundown of everything he deemed went wrong with the show’s second season, chock full of spoilery details on its third and fourth season with a tease of more “toxic” changes to come. Then Martin swiftly deleted said blog post, followed by HBO releasing a statement defending showrunner Ryan Condal—whom Martin name-dropped—and praising him for his work on the series. Now, Condal is speaking out about his creative changes on House of the Dragon‘s official podcast, From Book to Screen.
Yesterday, Game of Thrones‘ official YouTube channel dropped a new podcast episode; it featured Condal discussing the “unique challenges of adapting the beloved George R.R. Martin book.” Throughout the episode, Condal characterized adapting Fire & Blood into House of the Dragon as “coloring inside the lines” of the in-universe historian’s recounting of Targaryen lore. Naturally, the podcast episode discussed House of the Dragon‘s alteration of Blood & Cheese—an incident where King Aegon II’s young heir Jaeherys meets his grisly end. Although Martin took umbrage with how the show changed the details of the infanticide, Condal said he stands by his decision to alter its events.
“I stand behind the adaptation of how the plot unfolded,” Condal said. “I have talked about this quite a bit, but I will just say it in plain text: the children that we had in the story were simply too young to be able to construct that narrative exactly as laid out in the book. Period. I have lots of experience working with very young performers. To ask two four-year olds to play through that level of drama, it’s just not a realistic expectation.”
He continued: “There’s also a practical element around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set. Yes, you can do clever cutaways, and dummies, and all those things. We wanted this to be a very visceral, subjective experience, not something that was very cut-y, and with closeups. And when you start actually breaking apart what happens in that room, and the things that are said, and the things that are done, it became such a challenge to think about and mount that we started looking for—what are the base elements of this story, that Daemon and Rhaenyra send assassins into the Red Keep, and as a result the king’s child and heir [is] murdered—and how do we dramatize that in a way that’s exciting, and visceral, and horrifying, and do it in the best way possible?”
After discussing how difficult it would be to directly stage the gruesome murder in Martin’s book from both a technical standpoint and from the perspective of unnecessarily traumatizing child actors, Condal also addressed Martin’s gripe with the show’s postponing of Maelor, the third child of Aegon II. The heart of Condal’s argument for why the show postponed Maelor’s arrival—as Martin put it—was to prevent a problem the showrunners ran into in season one with the recasting of its younger stars.
“And Maelor, if he were born yet in this version of the the television timeline, would have been an infant because of the age of Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. Frankly, this goes back to our first season and trying to adapt a story that takes place over 20 years of history instead of a story that takes place over 30 years of history. We had to make some compromises in rendering that story so that we didn’t have to recast the whole cast multiple times, and really lose people,” Condal said. “It was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength instead of playing it as a weakness.”
As one might expect, the comment section for the podcast episode is a mix of fans pointing out how convenient its release was, with a majority of commenters lambasting Condal as a glorified fanfic writer complaining about doing his job. One top comment from user _.raudes._4401, took the middle road by writing simply, “This is my Drake vs Kendrick.” If their comment is any indication that there’s more sneak disses in stock from either camp, be sure to send a kiss to the sky to your favorite nerd journos tasked with summarizing Martin and Condal’s beef about blond-haired fantasy characters with Habsburg jaws and dragons.
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