Earlier this month, George R. R. Martin took a break from his feverish work on the next A Song Of Ice And Fire book to solicit charitable donations for the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico. He did so through Prizeo, a site that offers Kickstarter-type prizes for those who donate at certain levels. For $20,000, he offered one lucky man and one lucky woman the chance to be fictionalized, then brutally killed, in the next chapter of the saga, most likely as a ploy to silence skepticism that he’s writing another chapter of the saga.
And now we know that the next Game Of Thrones character you’ll develop an emotional attachment to, before seeing him brutally murdered, will have the decidedly non-Westerosi name “Dave Goldblatt”. The female winner chose to remain anonymous, so we may never know which prostitute, lady-in-waiting, prostitute, unlucky bridesmaid, or prostitute she’ll be, out of the thousands of prostitutes who will be murdered before the series comes to a close. (Just kidding. The series will never come to a close.)
Goldblatt, on the other hand, spoke at length about his desire to be roasted alive by a dragon while being married, consumating a marriage, attending a wedding, catering a wedding, or after suffering a very severe papercut from a copy of Modern Bride. A 30-year-old who works for Facebook (and who now has a lifetime of Comic-Con appearances to fall back on, if the whole social media thing doesn’t pan out), Goldblatt acknowledged, “I’m just lucky enough to be in a position to do this.” He also admitted that charity wasn’t foremost on his mind; he was mostly in it for the being-murdered-in-a-surefire-bestseller.
As the campaign already met its goal of $200,000, well ahead of the August 4 deadline, Martin has now raised it to $500,000, and will add a new, $20,000 prize every Wednesday. The latest is a trip to July’s Comic-Con in Martin’s company; it was claimed in an hour. As of yesterday, the wolf sanctuary had raised a number of U.S. dollars roughly equivalent to all the gold in Casterly Rock.