Contains spoilers for “House of the Dragon” Season 2 Episode 8 — “The Queen Who Ever Was”

A fair amount of fans felt totally disappointed by the Season 2 finale of “House of the Dragon,” and apparently, they’re not alone. George R.R. Martin, who penned “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the fantasy series that serve as the source material for “Game of Thrones”) and the Targaryen family history “Fire and Blood,” has some misgivings about the HBO adaptation.

On his blog “Not a Blog,” Martin wrote about some of his quibbles with the series … though it should be noted that he wrote the post on July 11, shortly after the season’s fourth episode “The Red Dragon and the Gold” aired. First, he praised the show, saying, “A lot of you have been wanting for action, I know; this episode delivered it in spades with the Battle of Rook’s Rest, when dragon met dragon in the skies.” From that point on, though, Martin went on an enormous tangent about dragons, from the “Lord of the Rings” beast Smaug to cute little Toothless from “How to Train Your Dragon.” Martin makes one thing clear, though: dragons have two back legs with their wings serving as their front legs, and both “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” get this wrong with their house sigils, apparently. 

“Dragons DO exist in the world of Westeros, however (wyverns too, down in Sothoryos), so my own heralds did not have that excuse,” Martin writes. “Ergo, in my books, the Targaryen sigil has two legs, as it should. Why would any Westerosi ever put four legs on a dragon, when they could look at the real thing and could their limbs?”

According to George R.R. Martin, both “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” got the sigil thing “half-right,” which definitely doesn’t feel promising. “[‘Game of Thrones’] gave us the correct two-legged sigils for the first four seasons and most of the fifth, but when [Daenerys Targaryen’s] fleet hove into view, all the sails showed four-legged dragons. Someone got sloppy, I guess. Or someone opened a book on heraldry, and read just enough of it to muck it all up. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Apparently, the error just ballooned in the spin-off and prequel: “A couple years on, [‘House of the Dragon’] decided the heraldry should be consistent with [‘Game of Thrones’].. but they went with the bad sigil rather than the good one. That sound you heard was me screaming, ‘no, no, no.’ Those damned extra legs have even wormed their way onto the covers of my books, over my strenuous objections.”

After explaining that the dragons found within his books — including Daenerys’ (Emilia Clarke) dragons Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion and some of the ones found in “House of the Dragon” like Vhagar, Syrax, and even Sheepstealer — are tied to specific climates and terrains, Martin concludes by saying that there’s one important thing people need to remember about his genre: “Fantasy needs to be grounded. It is not simply a license to do anything you like. Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused. Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.”

It’s certainly fair for George R.R. Martin to express his frustrations with errors in his adaptations that have persisted for years, but it’s safe to say that fans are not really worried about the dragon legs on Targaryen sigils — they’re more worried and frustrated by the fact that Season 2 of “House of the Dragon” felt entirely underwhelming. The sophomore season of the massive HBO original apparently was supposed to span ten episodes but ended with just eight installments, which means that both the Battle of the Gullet and the Fall of King’s Landing — which are both clearly foreshadowed and set up in “The Queen Who Ever Was” — will have to wait for Season 3. (Showrunner Ryan Condal told a press conference today that Season 3 will hopefully start production early next year … which still means we’re in for a long wait.)

Sure, Martin’s concerns seem frivolous, but do they point to a larger issue? “House of the Dragon” has, to be sure, changed some things in the adaptation process; just in “The Queen Who Ever Was,” Olivia Cooke’s Alicent Hightower makes a shocking deal with her friend turned nemesis Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) that’s not in the source material. In any case, Martin’s sigil quibbles could point to the fact that Condal and his team are playing fast and loose with the source material in a way that could ultimately prove detrimental to the show, but fans will just have to wait and see how they handle the next two seasons.

“House of the Dragon” is streaming on Max now.