If you thought fans were unhappy about the second season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” spin-off “House of the Dragon,” author George R.R. Martin is apparently pretty ticked off too.
In a recent post on his website Not a Blog titled “Burn Him! Burn Him!” Martin — who penned both “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the unfinished saga that was adapted into “Game of Thrones,” and the Targaryen family history “Fire & Blood,” which serves as the source material for the spin-off — penned an ode to the Burning of Zozobra, a major part of the Fiesta festival that takes place in Santa Fe (where Martin resides). Still, he couldn’t resist making a dig at the expense of “House of the Dragon,” even promising to dish on the show’s (somewhat unpopular) second season before long.
“I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with [‘House of the Dragon’] … but I need to do that too, and I will,” Martin mused. “Not today, though. TODAY is Zozobra’s day, when we turn away from gloom.” Martin, rather than writing the long-delayed next book in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” titled “The Winds of Winter,” seems to have some tea to spill about the show, which is pretty interesting based on some of his previous comments.
George R.R. Martin has praised House of the Dragon before — but has also had misgivings
In a post on Not a Blog from July of this year titled “Blood, Cheese, and Grief,” George R.R. Martin noted that he got to see the first two episodes of season 2 of “House of the Dragon” before they aired — the season premiered in June — and made it quite clear that he thoroughly enjoyed them. “What a great way to start the season,” he said. “The directing was superb […] And I cannot say enough about the acting.” Still, after praising performances by Emma D’Arcy and Phia Saban — who play Rhaenyra Targaryen and Helaena Targaryen, two queens on the opposite side of the family conflict — Martin took issue with the infamous “Blood and Cheese” sequence from the season 2 premiere “A Son for a Son,” noting that it’s much more intense in “Fire and Blood.” As the author put it, “Well, there’s a lot of be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it. The issues are too complicated. Somewhere down the line, I will do a separate post about all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese … and Maelor the Missing. There’s a lot to say.” (As of this writing, Martin hasn’t written this “separate post,” but it could be part of his forthcoming takedown.)
Elsewhere, Martin noted that he won’t be joining the “House of the Dragon” writers room for the third season, which will begin production in early 2025, and also penned a pretty lengthy and in-depth screed about sigils and dragons as they’re depicted in “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” For fans of “Fire & Blood,” his point about how dragons would never wander to regions like The Vale on their own seems to indicate his displeasure with the moment in the season 2 finale, titled “The Queen Who Ever Was,” when Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell) finds a dragon there.
Fans felt like House of the Dragon’s second season was sort of a letdown
If George R.R. Martin has misgivings about the sophomore season of “House of the Dragon,” he has that in common with some of the show’s fans. The biggest complaint one can make about the season, to be frank, is that it’s paced sort of strangely, which could be chalked up to the fact that it’s only eight episodes. Because of this, the season 2 finale really felt abrupt, particularly because it set up two huge battles we didn’t get to see: the Fall of King’s Landing and the Battle of the Gullet. Without either of these battles even happening in season 2 — and especially when we consider that season 3 likely won’t air for quite a while — the entire enterprise felt like it built to absolutely nothing, simply ending before anything could really happen.
Whether Martin’s complaints are about the pacing and lack of action or center on something else entirely remains to be seen, but he definitely has a bone to pick with showrunner Ryan Condal and the show’s creative team. In any case, the first two seasons of “House of the Dragon” are now streaming on Max.
