House of the Dragon is far better than what George R.R. Martin wants you to think

Fire & Blood is a historical text with very few answers and so many questions

If there’s one thing that George R.R. Martin, author of the legendary A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, hasn’t been quiet about, it’s his level of discontent with Ryan Condal’s handling of the adaptation of his Fire & Blood novel in the HBO series House of the Dragon. As Martin revealed in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, his relationship with Condal is “worse than rocky. It’s abysmal.”

That's not a big surprise. The cracks between GRRM and Condal began to show early in season 2’s production, and Martin himself even took to his own blog on September 4, 2024, to post about changes he disagreed with on the show. The original post, titled ‘Beware the Butterflies,’ has since been deleted, but like the North, the internet remembers. Martin’s promise to write about "everything that’s gone wrong" with the adaptation has also not materialized. After taking a step back from production, Martin's thoughts on House of the Dragon season 3 are unknown, though some fans are convinced Condal has been using the show itself to poke fun at his former collaborator.

As someone who’s read both Fire & Blood and watched House of the Dragon, let me make something abundantly clear: Martin is justified for feeling the way he does about his material being changed so significantly. However, I fundamentally disagree with his view that these changes negatively impact the story that House of the Dragon is telling. They actually make it better.

While House of the Dragon is set in a very specific period in the Westeros timeline, the 2018 novel Fire & Blood is a complete history of House Targaryen, covering everything from the conquest carried out by Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-wives of the six of the seven Kingdoms right up to the later, pitiful years following the Targaryen civil war. The novel is presented as historical and told by in-universe historians, and as a result is a very dry, matter-of-fact text. The chapter detailing the Targaryen civil war between the Blacks and Greens is no exception, with most of it told through Grand Maester Munkun in his The Dance of the Dragons, A True Telling, or through Mushroom, a fool who served in the courts of Viserys I and his daughter Rhaenyra, in The Testimony of Mushroom.

That doesn’t mean that what is being said is inaccurate, but Fire & Blood itself acknowledges that what is presented in the chapters is largely up for interpretation. That makes it the perfect story to adapt because, as we all know, history is written by the winners, and revisionism does take place.

With that in mind, Condal's adaptation has taken several liberties with the text — Rhaenyra and Alicent being the same age, and the erasure of characters like Nettles and Maelor, to name a few. If you’re a die-hard Fire & Blood fan, I understand the frustration, but for me, these changes do not negate the novel’s overall themes. This isn’t just about a brutal civil war; it’s about how the refusal to change, influenced by misogyny and power-hungry sycophants, leads to nothing but destruction in the end — both for those grasping for the Iron Throne and for the dragons the Blacks and the Greens wield like weapons.

Taking it a step further, I’d argue House of the Dragon enhances Fire & Blood massively by allowing us into the mindset of all its major (and sometimes even minor) players. Alicent Hightower (played to perfection by Olivia Cooke) perfectly demonstrates the upside of Condal's interpretation. Her role in the historical text feels more akin to a shrieking, hysterical stepmother you’d find in fairy tales than to the complex woman she's become on the show. Even Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), whose rise to power demonstrates her as a vindictive and overtly cruel woman, is given room to be more than what Fire & Blood makes her out to be. It’s not that the original text is awful, it’s that Fire & Blood is a surface-level historical retelling, where nuance and personality for the characters we see in House of the Dragon are few and far between.

It’s true Condal has made some big changes, but I’ve yet to see one that strips the text of its original meaning. If that does happen, I’ll be the first to admit that, hey, maybe Martin had a point. Until then, I’m going to enjoy the tale that House of the Dragon is weaving, book purists be damned.