Forget Team Black versus Team Green. When it comes to House of the Dragon, the bigger conflict appears to be Team George R.R. Martin versus Team Ryan Condal.
In a Hollywood Reporter interview, the Song of Ice and Fire author revealed that his relationship with the House of the Dragon showrunner is “worse than rocky. It’s abysmal.”
The pair co-created the Game of Thrones prequel together, but during Season 2, cracks in their relationship began to surface. In an Aug. 30, 2024 post on his Not A Blog blog, Martin wrote, “I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON.”
That post came just days later, on Sept. 4. In a now-deleted post titled, “Beware the Butterflies,” Martin argued that, by removing Helaena (Phia Saban) and Aegon II Targaryen’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) baby Maelor from the show’s infamous Blood and Cheese sequence, House of the Dragon had unleashed a butterfly effect that would negatively impact its adaptation of plot points from the rest of Martin’s Targaryen history Fire and Blood.
How ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 is different from George R.R. Martin’s ‘Fire and Blood’
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Beware the Butterflies” was meant to be the first of six posts Martin would write about House of the Dragon. However, the other five never saw the light of day.
The post was a culmination of what appears to be a strained creative partnership.
“I thought Ryan and I were partners,” Martin told The Hollywood Reporter. “And we were all through the first season. I would read early drafts of the scripts. I would give notes. He would change some things. It was working really well — I thought.”
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Then came Season 2.
“He basically stopped listening to me,” Martin said. “I would give notes, and nothing would happen. Sometimes he would explain why he wasn’t doing it. Other times, he would tell me, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, I’ll think about that.’ It got worse and worse, and I began to get more and more annoyed. Finally, it got to a point where I was told by HBO that I should submit all my notes to them and they would give Ryan our combined notes.”
Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Martin and Condal’s falling-out escalated in a Zoom meeting with producers and HBO executives where Condal outlined his season plan. Following that, Martin allegedly told him, “This is not my story any longer.”
Following the call, Martin reportedly stepped back from House of the Dragon at HBO’s request. However, a few months later, he returned to the show for reasons he told The Hollywood Reporter he “can’t talk about.”
In a March 31, 2025 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Condal gave his side on Martin’s critiques of Season 2, citing practical needs for the adaptation changes.
“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,” Condal told EW. “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.
“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.”
House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres this summer on HBO and HBO Max.
