GRRM's (now deleted) blog post criticizing HotD | IMDB v2.3 (2025)

web.archive.org/web/20240904154210/https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/09/04/beware-the-butterflies/

No reason has been given, but I imagine HBO wasn't happy about what he said. He also technically spoiled an element of season 3 (albeit technically from his own work).

If the writer is not happy is never a good sign .

GRRM's complaints are misplaced. He's worrying about things he fears could happen when the story has been wrecked long ago.

His big issue is that

Helaena won't have a reason to kill herself if she doesn't receive news her last son was slaughtered, then he deducts that it won't trigger the riots in King's Landing. Well, there will be another reason for Helaena's death. Maybe it will be left unexplained and we'll just get the rumour she was murdered. Or there will be another trigger for the riots. They will still happen for the same reason: people going against the lizard peddlers who trample them in their internal war.

After all, the man is no better than the book wankers who whine about any change for existing and for his childish, over the top "shocking scenes" to be made more realistic. I think Blood & Cheese was better in the show. The original is a bad cartoon.

Here's Preston Jacobs listing worse problems GRRM is not complaining about:

So

Removing this chain of events from the story keeps Rhaenyra blameless in this regard, which would indeed be a reason to worry about future seasons given her saintly peace keeping attitude for most of S2 but her turning into a dragon cult leader willing to sacrifice dragonseeds with a grin can compensate for this. Rhaenyra will turn bad in other ways than eating all the cake.

I can't recall seeing him this pissed before. I don't think he was ever this outspken against D&D. Seems like this vlog was a calculated manuever to get HotD show back on track, because whatever they have planned for seaons 3 and 4 he really doesn't like.

It seems like a significant miscommunication. I can't understand how someone would allow their material to be used without any input or control over how their story is presented, especially in tv/cable production.

This is normal.
Here's an excerpt from an interview GRRM gave on the subject:

Ashaya:So could you elaborate a little bit on how much creative control you feel like you have on these new endeavors, these new projects, like House of the Dragon, versus before? Do you feel like your role has changed at all?

George:Yeah. I don’t have any creative control, as you say. That is the hardest thing to get in Hollywood. No matter what the project is, whether it’s a feature or a film. It’s given out very infrequently.

JK Rowling had a certain amount of creative control on Harry Potter, cause every studio in Hollywood wanted Harry Potter and they were all queuing up and she demanded script approval and other things…

Ashaya:But you don’t demand script approval.

George:Hollywood will give you money a lot easier than they’ll give you creative control, you can go to negotiations and say yes, I will thank you for paying me 8 million dollars, but I would like creative control as well. And they will say, how about 10 million? Haha. They would rather give millions of dollars than any creative control.

Ashaya:At a certain point, I feel like, you’ve got a lot of money. You have to be able to decide, I don’t want the money. Gimme the control.

George:Which was obviously JK Rowling’s attitude. I don’t really know privately for negotiations, but she had a number of suitors. What I do have is influence, I have creative influence. Yeah, but that depends largely on the relationship between myself and the showrunners and so forth. I mean, I can make points, I can argue and they can listen, but if they decide not to listen, then you know, I can persuade them. I don’t have the power to hire or to fire.

I don’t have the power to dictate things, but what I have, if they listen to me and I can be fairly persuasive and I know this material pretty well, so, there’s that something and it’s always changing. I mean, it’s… you know, I had a lot of input in the beginning of Game of Thrones, partly cause I had these books out there.

But at a certain point, as the show went on I found I had less and less influence until by the end, I really didn’t even know what was going on. Some of these things I watched like everybody else, and ‘oh, okay.’

It is a common misconception that authors of the original have to approve of adaptations in their details and it is the very opposite. They sell the right to adapt their work, use their story, character names and everything that makes it identifiable but they never get an approval or veto right on anything.

Here is another example of this with Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings adaptation, Simon Tolkien speaking (grandson of the author):

There is a childish belief that a film with the same title as a book has to tell the same story as the book, but a film is not a book. This is like believing that an apple pie is an apple. It's not. You can make a square apple pie, call it an apple pie and no apple producer has any right to stop you from doing it, as long as you pay for the apples and have some in it.

For the most part I agree - Kubrick changed a lot of The Shining from King's book, and the movie is all the better for it. GoT and even HotD occasionally made changes that improved the story. That said, I'm on George's side with the Maelor thing. The scene in the book was disturbing for psychological reasons, not just grisly sounds of a kid having his head sawed off. Swapping the Sophie's Choice for B+C asking her which one is a boy like a couple of dipshits lessened the impact, as did removing any agency or even emotion from Helaena. By the season finale, everyone forgot it even happened - including the characters. Rhaenyra demands a son for a son from Alicent like Little J never existed.

I also reckon there's worse decisions coming, which is why George deemed it necessarily to call them out before they could make things even worse.

The man gives more importance to junk TV shows designed for young American idiots than to his own creation. It's like Beethoven wasting his time complaining about bad pop songs made by others from his symphonies.

He could have gone in history as a serious writer but he'll be remembered as a spineless wimp who got bogged down by the vulgarisation of his 2nd rate filler material.

From one of his latest blogs:

I get the feeling that if the season had been very successful, he would be saying different things. I don't know, it's just a hunch. I stumbled upon another article where he complains about the show; his biggest issue appears to be the omission of Helaena's third child in the "Blood and Cheese" episode.