Any time a book is adapted for the screen the people doing the adapting risk the ire of everyone who adores said book by making changes, however small those may be. In the case of House of the Dragon (which will return for Season 3 in the future), fans have had a lot to say about the differences between Season 2 and Fire & Blood, but it’s also pretty clear that author George R.R. Martin has some strong thoughts on the matter. After he went off about the drama in a now-deleted blog post, the showrunner has already addressed the “challenge” of adapting Martin’s book.
What Did House Of The Dragon’s Showrunner Say About The Challenges Of Adapting Fire & Blood?
By now, we all realize that it would be extremely difficult to win every viewer over when adapting the work of George R.R. Martin for a television show. Despite its enduring popularity, there’s still controversy over how things were handled on Game of Thrones, so it’s little surprise that the same has been true for House of the Dragon across its two seasons so far.
The second season wrapped on the 2024 TV schedule in early August, and Martin was originally rather dramatic when indirectly writing about his thoughts on the many changes by describing the “gloom” of having to eventually address his feelings on Season 2. Then, Martin unloaded on HOTD about the absence of Maelor, a character who becomes very important in the narrative of his book. Now, in a conversation with HBO’s official HOTD podcast, showrunner Ryan Condal has addressed the many challenges of turning such complex material into a TV show, saying:
As dramatists, I think we have to approach this history, though it is fictional, as anyone would do, as trying to adapt a chapter from real history. So we have to construct this three-dimensional reality and this full story for the world to inhabit and provide the characters with internal lives and flaws and desires that might not necessarily have made it into the historical account.
Condal noted that he has, since the beginning, looked at Fire & Blood with as much “reverence as possible and respect,” adding “but it’s important to draw the line between reverence and worship.” As he pointed out during his interview (and something that more casual fans who haven’t read the book might not know), the tome on which this series is based isn’t told as a narrative, but as a history that’s been documented by “three unreliable narrators.” This means that there are either purposeful holes in the historical account or places where the narrators disagree on the “how and why” of what occurred.
So, along with compressing events, removing characters, etc., Condal and his team also had to choose a point of view for the story (those in the Targeryen family tree, specifically Viserys’ massive extended family) and then construct things in a way that explains the “how and why” of what happens from that POV. He added:
Now there are plenty of opportunities in reading Fire & Blood to say, well, there was actually a flaw or a desire or something that does make it into the record, but it’s often an incomplete picture. So really a lot of what we do is, as dramatists and adapters of this, is coloring in the lines that we’re given … and a lot of that color is admittedly our own.
Basically, the writers had to choose characters to focus on and also create motivations for those characters’ actions, because those things aren’t usually spelled out in F&B. I’m sure a lot of fans are sympathetic to Martin’s position on the changes, as well as many likely feeling the same way for Condal and his team. It will be a while before we see how those differences impact Seasons 3 and 4, but we can all hope that the story continues to be engrossing even if it does veer greatly from what was previously written.
