George R.R. Martin’s original pitch for a Westworld-Game of Thrones crossover was pretty elaborate

This past Sunday, fans got a bit of a jolt when three Game of Thrones icons turned up in the newest episode of Westworld. There were Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) making their way around the Delos park facilities, where engineers and artists labor to create realistic robots to populate their fully immersive, futuristic theme parks. They wandered into a part of the building dedicated to a medieval-themed park, and who should be there but Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, together with a giant robot version of Drogon, Daenerys Targaryen’s biggest and fiercest dragon?

Is the park called WesterosWorld?

As Westworld showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have said, this was their way of honoring what Benioff, Weiss and Game of Thrones did for television. And as it ends up, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin had been suggesting some kind of crossover/cameo for years. “People forget that George was originally a TV writer and he came up in the TV world in which you’d occasionally have these crossover shows, which the fans would f—ing freak out over,” Nolan said. “So George had always been pitching the crossover show.”

So now that it happened, how did Martin feel about it? “I thought it was a fun moment, and it made me smile,” he wrote on his Not a Blog.

But of course, the man famous for writing the extremely thick A Song of Ice and Fire novels couldn’t stop with that. “Subsequently, of course, the internet has blown up over the cameo, as the internet is wont to do,” he wrote. “Some people loved the cameo, some hated it, and everybody, it seems to me, is making way too much of it. Hey, folks, c’mon. It was just a bit of fun. A sort of Easter Egg.”

"I have been known to do that sort of thing myself. Sharp-eyed readers of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE long ago noticed the appearance of the Three Stooges in the first novel, and my subsequent mentions of how giants devoured Triarch Belicho and a knight wearing Dallas Cowboys heraldry. And if you missed those… as 98% of the readers did… that’s fine, they were just a tip o’ the hat. I also have houses named after the great fantasists Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Robert Jordan, for what it’s worth."

It’s true: the Song of Ice and Fire books are packed with little nods to authors and sports teams and what-not. And for what it’s worth, I definitely took the cameo as “just a bit of fun,” although I’m sure he’s right about people making something bigger about it somewhere on the net. This article on CBR actually complains that the tongue-in-cheek cameo was “a slap in the face to fans” and that it was “undermining the legitimacy of George R.R. Martin’s entire book series.” The internet, man.

And if Martin had his way, the crossover would have been a good deal more elaborate. “[B]ack during WESTWORLD’s season one, I did suggest to Jonah that, seeing as how the original WESTWORLD film featured a Medieval World, the TV version could easily have a Westeros World,” he wrote. “I never wanted a full crossover, never thought that WESTWORLD’s hosts should adventure in Westeros World as they have in Samurai World and War World… but a brief scene or two could have been fun, and would have been in keeping with the Delos concept.”

"And, hey, I even suggested that they could bring back actors from GOT, characters we had killed. The hosts die almost weekly, after all. The fans might have gotten a kick out of catching a brief glimpse of Richard Madden, Sibel Kekilli, Esme Bianco, Ron Donachie, or Mark Addy again… and I suspect the actors would have been game as well. But it was not to be."

I love that this is Martin’s idea of a small-scale crossover. Can you picture Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon) waking up in a Delos repair bay and telling the tech to go fetch the breastplate stretcher? And man, all the theories and think-pieces it would have inspired. “Game of Thrones is all happening with robots, confirmed.” “Who’s a host and who’s a guest on Game of Thrones?” Oh, we missed out on a world of discourse.

But of course, it’s not too surprising that Martin would suggest something like this; the guy likes to go big. And as he noted, he’s no stranger to cameos himself. He had a couple of cameos on Beauty and the Beast when he was working on that show decades ago, and although it never aired, he did film a cameo for Game of Thrones. He was a wedding guest at Daenerys’ wedding to Khal Drogo, but that was before they had to recast Daenerys, so the scene was scrapped. Photographic proof remains, though:

Cameo Game of Thrones

See what we missed out on?

Unfortunately, Martin never did cameo on Game of Thrones, although there were a couple of attempts over the years. According to his blog post, he “campaigned to die horribly at the Red Wedding, which seemed only fair since I was responsible for it.” But in the end, it was thought his presence would distract from what was supposed to be a very heavy, serious scene, which…fair.

There’s also the prequel show!

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