The dragons aren’t the only ones breathing fire in the world of Westeros. As HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ continues its third season, the rift between the show’s creators and the saga’s original mastermind, George R.R. Martin, has erupted into open warfare. The latest casualty? Literary purity. Director Nina Lopez-Corrado has boldly—some would say brazenly—defended the series’ sweeping deviations from Martin’s source material, essentially telling the book’s “diehard” fans to saddle up and deal with it.

The most recent episode served up a heaping plate of changes: a vision of a dragon-riding Helaena that never existed in ‘Fire & Blood,’ and a high-stakes kidnapping of Corlys Velaryon that has purists clutching their leather-bound editions. “We do deviate just a little bit,” Lopez-Corrado teased with magnificent understatement to Entertainment Weekly, arguing that the alterations “really helped evolve the character storylines.” A little bit? It’s more like taking a Valyrian steel axe to the family tree.

This creative rebellion follows Martin’s own scorched-earth blog post last year, where he lamented a “pretty wretched year” and all but disowned the “larger and more toxic” changes made by showrunner Ryan Condal. The author, credited as a co-creator, now seems as distant from the production as Winterfell is from King’s Landing. Condal, for his part, has admitted the criticism was “disappointing,” painting a picture of a once-fruitful collaboration that soured when Martin became “unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand.”

In other words, the man who invented the Red Wedding is now getting a taste of his own medicine. As the show charges toward its third-season finale and the epic Battle of Tumbleton, the real battle is being waged not with swords, but with press releases and carefully worded interviews. Will the fans side with the grumbling godfather of the series, or will they bow to the dragon-riders who actually bring the spectacle to screen? One thing’s for sure: in the game of thrones, you win or you write a blistering blog post.