by Alison Flood)
Negotiating with the sociopathic likes of Joffrey Baratheon or the calculating Tywin Lannister would be a singularly thankless task, so perhaps it's unsurprising that the White House has summarily removed a petition to "assign an ambassador to Westeros in order to negotiate trade with whomever sits the iron throne".
It could also have something to do with the fact that Westeros is the fictional kingdom dreamed up by the bestselling author George RR Martin to house the myriad cast of characters from his A Song of Ice and Fire series, turned into the HBO television show Game of Thrones. A continent divided into the seven kingdoms, Westeros stretches to a snowy north, where a great wall of ice keeps out an unknown enemy. Martin's books show various different factions at war to win the Iron Throne – an uncomfortable seat to gain, by all accounts.
According to the novel's Lord of Dragonstone, Stannis Baratheon, the throne has "barbs along the back … ribbons of twisted steel" with "jagged ends of swords and knives all tangled up and melted".
"Aerys cut himself so often men took to calling him King Scab, and Maegor the Cruel was murdered in that chair," Baratheon continues. "By that chair, to hear some tell it."
Despite these imagined dangers, a Texas radio station has been supporting a petition calling on the White House to appoint an ambassador, according to CBS Houston. The petition seems to have had a short life: the page on the White House website now states it has "been removed from the site under our moderation policy because it is in violation of our terms of participation".
This plea for a Westeros ambassador is only the latest in a series of petitions to the US government inspired by fiction. A call to "secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a death star by 2016" was also rejected, although the White House laid out the reasoning for the decision. "The construction of the death star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it," White House representatives said, adding that "the administration does not support blowing up planets" and asking "why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a death star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?"
There have also been petitions for president Barack Obama to build the USS Enterprise, and to open a jurassic park. None of these have proved to be successful.
*Blogger's note: Can you say superfandom?
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