Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: game of thrones, house of the dragon

House of the Dragon: Condal Defends "Blood & Cheese," Maelor Changes

HBO's House of the Dragon Showrunner Ryan Condal defended the "Blood & Cheese" and Maelor changes that George R.R. Martin criticized.

This was one of those weeks when HBO & showrunner Ryan Condal's House of the Dragon was making headlines for all of the wrong reasons. After giving everyone a heads-up, George RR Martin (GRRM) took to his Not A Blog post ("Beware the Butterflies," which has since been taken down, but we shared a rundown of) to call out the live-action for the changes it's made to his work – especially "Blood & Cheese" and the absence of Prince Maelor and the "butterfly effect" that decision will have on the remaining seasons. Conveniently enough, a bonus episode of the show's official podcast dropped in the midst of all of the finger-pointing and posts disappearing, one that saw Condal addressing a number of questions regarding bringing "Fire & Blood" to live-action life. Here's what Condal had to say in defense of the decisions made regarding "Blood & Cheese" and Maelor

"Blood & Cheese": "I stand behind the adaptation of how the plot unfolded. I have talked about this quite a bit, but I will just say it in plain text: the children that we had in the story were simply too young to be able to construct that narrative exactly as laid out in the book. Period. I have lots of experience working with very young performers. To ask two four-year-olds to play through that level of drama; it's just not a realistic expectation.

There's also a practical element around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set. Yes, you can do clever cutaways, and dummies, and all those things. We wanted this to be a very visceral, subjective experience, not something that was very 'cut-y' and with closeups. And when you start actually breaking apart what happens in that room, and the things that are said, and the things that are done, 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 [is] 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?"

Losing Maelor: "And Maelor, if he were born yet in this version of the the television timeline, would have been an infant because of the age of Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. 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. 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 lose people. It was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength instead of playing it as a weakness."

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