George R.R. Martin Details, Deletes House of the Dragon Gripes

George R.R. Martin made good on his promise to share his thoughts on “everything that has gone wrong” with House of the Dragon in a new blog post Wednesday — until he deleted it.

The tell-all post, titled “Beware the Butterflies”, was published Wednesday, but is now missing from the author’s official “Not a Blog” WordPress site. It was a follow-up to his Aug. 30 blog post, in which he promised to share all his gripes about the Game of Thrones prequel HBO series on which he is a co-creator and executive producer.

Reps for Martin did not immediately respond to MovieMaker’s request for comment Wednesday as to why he deleted the post. However, the contents of it can still be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In it, Martin bemoans the loss of a character named Maelor who was present in his book, Fire & Blood, but was cut out of House of the Dragon, which is based on said book.

The main idea of the post was Martin’s warnings about “the butterfly effect” — when huge, unforeseen future implications result from making small, barely noticeable changes — that will take place without Maelor, the youngest son of Queen Helaena Targaryen. He pointed the finger at showrunner Ryan Condal’s decision to cut Maelor from the show altogether, arguing that his absence will weaken the plot as a whole and cause other, more important scenes to be drastically altered.

Martin explained the context of why Maelor is important in his summary of House of the Dragon season two episodes “A Son for a Son” and “Rhaenyra the Cruel”. In the book, he explains, Helaena has to choose one of her three children to sacrifice in order to avoid losing all of them. But without the youngest child, Maelor — the one she chooses to sacrifice in the book — it’s not as strong of a scene.

However, Martin’s biggest gripe was not that Maelor was cut out of Season 2, but that Condal has apparently decided to delete him from the series altogether. Martin says he agreed to delay Maelor’s appearance in the series, but that he was not consulted about cutting him completely — a choice he he has some serious misgivings about.

Also Read: George R. R. Martin Hints at ‘Everything That’s Gone Wrong’ With House of the Dragon

George R. R. Martin Warns of House of the Dragon “Butterfly Effect”

“When Ryan Condal first told me what he meant to do, ages ago (back in 2022, might be) I argued against it, for all these reasons. I did not argue long, or with much heat, however. The change weakened the sequence, I felt, but only a bit. And Ryan had what seemed to be practical reasons for it; they did not want to deal with casting another child, especially a two-year old toddler,” Martin wrote.

“Kids that young will inevitably slow down production, and there would be budget implications.  Budget was already an issue on HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, it made sense to save money wherever we could.  Moreover, Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him.”

He adds: “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.”

Martin went on to question Condal’s plans for the rest of the show, given the butterfly effect that could unfurl as a result of losing Maelor.

“I have no idea what Ryan has planned — if indeed he has planned anything — but given Maelor’s absence from episode 2, the simplest way to proceed would be just to drop him entirely, lose the bit where Alicent tries to send the kids to safety, drop Rickard Thorne or send him with Willis Fell so Jaehaera has two guards,” he wrote.

“From what I know, that seems to be what Ryan is doing here. It’s simplest, yes, and may make sense in terms of budgets and shooting schedules. But simpler is not better.”

To end his blog post, Martin expressed fears about disappointing House of the Dragon fans by making too many changes to the story.

“What will we offer the fans instead, once we’ve killed these butterflies? I have no idea. I do not recall that Ryan and I ever discussed this, back when he first told me they were pushing back on Aegon’s second son.   Maelor himself is not essential… but if losing him means we also lose Bitterbridge, Helaena’s suicide, and the riots, well… that’s a considerable loss,” he wrote.

“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…”

HBO and Ryan Condal Respond to George R. R. Martin

An HBO spokesperson provided the following response to Martin on Wednesday.

“There are few greater fans of George R.R. Martin and his book Fire & Blood than the creative team on House of the Dragon, both in production and at HBO. Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary  job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”

On an episode of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon released on Tuesday night, Condal addressed making some changes to the story due to Fire and Blood not having a reliable narrator.

“There are plenty of opportunities in reading Fire & Blood to say, well, there is 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 giving, there’s a connect the dots puzzle, and some of the lines are drawn, and we’re kind of filling it in and adding color. And a lot of that color is admittedly our own,” Condal said on the podcast.

“And that’s part of, I think, the challenge, but also the fun of creating a show like House of the Dragon versus doing something that is just a literal adaptation of a narrative, a book that has thousands and thousands of pages of it.”

Specifically addressing the deletion of Maelor as a character, Condal explained his reasoning.

“To ask two four year olds to play through that level of drama is it’s just not a realistic expectation. And then there’s also a practical element around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set,” he said. “…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 are 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?”

He continued: “Maelor, who is the the third son, who’s a little older in the book, would have been an infant because of the age of Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. And, you know, 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. And 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 just frankly, lose people.”

The first two seasons of House of the Dragon are now streaming on Max.

Main Image: George R. R. Martin speaking with attendees at the 43rd Annual TusCon at the Radisson Hotel Tucson Airport in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0