Major House of the Dragon updates have been few and far between since the Season 2 finale back in August 2024 with the show's strongest Game of Thrones connection yet, but fans can now celebrate that production has started on Season 3. While that doesn't mean a premiere before the end of the 2025 TV schedule, the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood is moving forward. That said, it'll move forward in the wake of some scathing comments from the author, and showrunner Ryan Condal responded with a claim about what Martin wouldn't acknowledge.
Within a month of the Season 2 finale, George R.R. Martin wrote in a since-deleted post on his Not A Blog website about his thoughts on Ryan Condal cutting Maelor, Aegon and Helaena's youngest son in the book, from the "Blood and Cheese" sequence of House of the Dragon. Readers know that Maelor's presence made the murder of young Jaehaerys all the more devastating in Fire & Blood, with the House of the Dragon version actually making Daemon look better.
In that post, Martin cited a conversation with Ryan Condal in which the showrunner said that there were "practical reasons" for cutting Maelor, including the challenges of casting a toddler to film, and Maelor could be born in Season 3. The author wrote that he then "withdrew my objections and acquiesced to the change." Now, months later, Ryan Condal spoke to EW about Martin's post about the source material and cutting Maelor:
It's this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way. I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.
I can honestly see both points here. Fire & Blood was never going to get a precise page-to-screen adaptation thanks to its status as an in-universe Targaryen history book with unreliable narrators as sources, and the budget to fully create the Dance of the Dragons as written was implausible even for HBO, so practical cuts had to be made by Condal. I can be reasonable!
At the same time, cutting Maelor isn't the same as trimming some of the battles to cut costs. As a reader, I definitely see how his absence could hurt Season 3, and it already made Blood and Cheese less ghastly than it was in the book. I'm all for Team Black and still think Season 1 was easier on the Greens than necessary, but it felt wrong for Season 2 to dampen Daemon's most despicable act. Condal went on:
At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that's my job. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that's what I have to say about it.
With House of the Dragon reportedly aiming to end after four seasons, there's still time for Ryan Condal and George R.R. Martin to potentially finish the adaptation in "harmony," as the showrunner hopes. I'm just curious about how Martin will react to any further major changes from the book. I don't want to spoil anybody who hasn't read Fire & Blood, but the show seemingly combining Rhaena with another character is bound to have repercussions on the endgame, and I have no idea what the direction is for Alicent moving forward.
Three more characters from Fire & Blood have been revealed for Season 3 at this point. James Norton was announced as playing Ormund Hightower first, with news of Tommy Flanagan as Ser Roderick Dustin and Dan Fogler as Ser Torrhen Manderly breaking alongside word of filming starting for the next batch of episodes. Check out Emma D'Arcy back in costume as Rhaenyra:
No premiere date has been announced for House of the Dragon Season 3 at the time of writing, and that's undoubtedly a ways off since filming has only just begun. You can always revisit the first two seasons as well as every episode of Game of Thrones streaming with a Max subscription now. A return to the world of Westeros is on the way before the end of the year with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which George R.R. Martin is much happier with than he seemingly is with House of the Dragon.
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