HBO was apparently unsurprised that George R.R. Martin posted all that

Given the Game Of Thrones of it all, it’s not entirely a surprise to discover that HBO and George R.R. Martin have been at odds. It was a little surprising that Martin came out and detailed his issues with House Of The Dragon, given he mostly kept quiet as GOT ran right off the rails. Well, not for HBO: an insider at the network tells The Hollywood Reporter that executives were “frustrated but not surprised” by the author’s since-deleted blog post lamenting the exclusion of Prince Maelor. Per THR, “Martin and HBO have been increasingly at loggerheads, with the author privately making his concerns known for a while.”

The truth is, Martin sounds a bit stressed and depressed about his adaptation issues. In other blog posts, he’s admitted to having a tough year personally and said that hasn’t been able to find much “solace” in work. He hasn’t produced as many pages of The Winds Of Winter as he’d like (what else is new), and he wrote on September 9 that his TV projects were eating up a lot of his time. “Some of that was pleasant (DARK WINDS, and THE HEDGE KNIGHT), most of it was not,” Martin shared. “The stress kept mounting, the news went from bad to worse to worst,  my mood seemed to swing between fury and despair, and at night I tossed and turned when I should have been sleeping. When I did sleep, well, my dreams were none too pleasant either.”

Poor George sounds like he’s at the end of his rope, which makes his decision to put HOTD on blast make a little more sense. We can only speculate that Martin was attempting to leverage his power against some of the adaptation changes being discussed for the show’s future. (“There are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if House Of The Dragon goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…” he ended the now-deleted post.) However, HBO seems to be standing by its product, releasing a statement at the time that read, “Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”

Oddly, it’s not all bad between the author and the network. THR reached out for a comment from Martin about his HOTD feelings, and he instead responded with praise for the upcoming HBO series A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms (an adaptation of The Hedge Knight). “I visited the set in Northern Ireland in July and loved what I saw,” Martin shared. “Great cast. [The lead characters] Dunk and Egg look as if they walked out of the pages of my book. My readers are going to love them. I certainly do. [Showrunner Ira Parker] is doing a great job.”