‘House of the Dragon’ Author Addresses Criticism of Time Skips, Missing Characters

Author George R.R. Martin wrote a new blog post on Tuesday, reflecting on House of the Dragon for the first time in a few weeks. Martin addressed some of the biggest critiques of the show up to this point and showered praise on the cast and crew. He also gave some hints about what is coming for the show, and what his biggest hopes for it are.

Fair warning: there are light spoilers for House of the Dragon and Martin’s book Fire & Blood ahead! Martin reiterated the other hints that House of the Dragon Episode 8 would be the last one with a major time skip in it, meaning the rest of the show will follow a more straightforward timeline. With all those jumps out of the way, he shared his “musings” on them at last. He wrote that he felt they were handled relatively well, especially with consideration for viewers who had not read his book first.

“Do I wish we’d had more time to explore the relationship between Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin, the marriage of Daemon and Laena and their time in Pentos, the birth of various and sundry children… and everything else we had to skip? Sure,” Martin wrote. “But there are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season.”

Martin reflected on how TV seasons have shrunken over the years, from 39 episodes each “when I was a boy” to 22 episodes each when he was a screenwriter. He noted that The Sopranos was considered short with 13 episodes per season, but just a few years later Game of Thrones was only granted 10. He wrote: “If HOUSE OF THE DRAGON had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to “time jump” over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.’”

As it is, I am thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale,” the author went on. Still, in terms of pacing, Martin wrote that he would prefer for the show to get as many seasons as possible. Showrunner Ryan Condal previously said that he expected to complete this story in three or four seasons, and Martin came down strongly in favor of four. He wrote: ” It is going to take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.”

Finally, Martin made one major announcement for book fans in his post as well. So far, House of the Dragon has completely left out one character – Viserys and Alicent’s son Daeron. Martin wrote: “YES, Alicent gave Viserys four children, three sons and a daughter, their youngest son Daeron is down in Oldtown, we just did not have the time to work him in this season.”

There are two episodes left in House of the Dragon, with Season 2 already in the works. The show airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. It is streaming now on HBO Max.