Spoilers For House of the Dragon will be found below.
About a week ago, George R.R. Martin promised/threatened to blog about everything that he feels has gone wrong on the current Game of Thrones prequel series. His turnaround time on such vows might be improving, but also, it feels like GRRM is only getting started because he did indeed go on a lengthy rant about HotD, but he centers his concern upon Season 2’s “A Son for a Son” episode, otherwise known as the Blood and Cheese atrocity.
Martin does not hold back and delivers 1,800+ words on the subject, and much of his discussion revolves around the chaos theory-related “Butterfly Effect,” which holds that the tiniest aberrations/alterations in events can spark wide-ranging, even destructive impacts on the whole. His essay is actually rather wild, considering that HotD is halfway finished and multiple other GoT spin offs are in the works (with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms arriving in 2025), so Martin needs to preserve his working relationship with HBO. Yet Martin’s displeasure with a certain Blood and Cheese change led him to conclude his (SPOILER FILLED) essay like this:
“And there are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…”
Very dramatic stuff for sure. He’s essentially upset about the absence of Maelor, who is the third child of Helaena and Aegon II Targaryen yet does not appear in the show for what Martin suggests are budget-related reasons. Martin explains why he acquiesced to the omission under the understanding that Maelor would appear in the third season, and then this happened:
“Sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made. The prince’s birth was no longer just going to be pushed back to season 3. He was never going to be born at all. The younger son of Aegon and Helaena would never appear.”
I will not even attempt to summarize the rest of Martin’s layered argument, but he outlines the many reasons why he believes that removing Maelor from the story will smash the emotional resonance of significant future HotD events into smithereens. He also publicly (albeit vaguely) calls out future story decisions from showrunner Ryan Condal by referring to “Ryan’s outline for season 3,” and overall, man, this predicts serious tension between Martin and the prequel spin off’s creatives.
Of course, Martin is not known for mincing words, so perhaps this dust-up will blow over with time. However, if you are looking for a GRRM-related show that does not seem to upset him, he’s a producer on AMC’s Dark Winds, which recently found a new audience on Netflix and will be moving into a third season in 2025. Enjoy!