George R.R. Martin still hasn’t finished The Winds of Winter.
After visiting Belfast, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, and Glasgow, he returned to his blog to hint at an upcoming clash concerning HBO’s House of the Dragon.
He mentioned he has many emails and tasks waiting for him, adding, “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.”
“Not today, though,” he clarified, as he was more focused on the Burning of Zozobra event in Santa Fe.
Before his summer trip, Martin hinted at some problems with how House of the Dragon handled the Blood & Cheese storyline from his book Fire & Blood. It turned out very different on TV compared to the book.
“Well, there’s a lot to be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it. The issues are too complicated,” he wrote on July 5. He promised a future post covering “all the issues raised” by this storyline and the character Maelor Targaryen, who is important in Fire & Blood but hasn’t appeared in the show yet. “There’s a lot to say.”
However, in that same July 5 post, Martin praised a change made in Season 2 of the series.
“I am… ahem… not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story. Especially not when the source material is mine,” he wrote. “But that dog was brilliant. I was prepared to hate Cheese, but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog.”
He was talking about Season 2’s premiere episode “A Son for a Son,” where Daemon hires two men named Blood and Cheese to sneak into the Red Keep and kill Aemond Targaryen. They get mad and kick a loyal dog while on their way. In Episode 2, Cheese gets caught and hanged; the last scene shows the dog looking up at his master’s hanging body.
“That damn near broke my heart,” Martin wrote. “Such a little thing… such a little dog… but his presence, the few short moments he was on screen, gave the ratcatcher so much humanity… I wish I’d thought of that dog. I didn’t, but someone else did. I am glad of that.”
Fans sometimes feel like they know these characters personally.
What do you think George R.R. Martin will list as “everything that’s gone wrong” with House of the Dragon? Season 2 got an average grade of “B-”.
