I think his idea is that Paramount would get a monetary incentive to allow high-budget fan films with quality approaching actual official stuff. Their current guidelines allow fan films, but basically require them to be low-budget shorts. I don’t know if his idea would work in real life, or if Paramount would ever go…

They wouldn’t. MikeTheBard’s idea is that the makers of fan films would pay Paramount and CBS a fee proportional to the fan film’s production budget to use the material. The makers of fan films would have to obey certain guidelines (like no nudity), give Paramount and CBS a final veto over their films and clearly…

I just remember hearing a classmate who used to live in a Spanish-speaking country tell me about how when he was first learning English, he said that the teacher who annoyed him was “molesting” him.

Circle gets the square!

Are you arguing against them living in the palace, or against Britain having a monarchy at all? Because if it’s the latter, I’ve actually seen arguments for constitutional monarchies being more stable than other political systems, with the monarch’s lack of democratic legitimacy being paradoxically useful (http://www.v…

Still. Can you see Donald Trump accepting any risk of death or imprisonment for the sake of his political aims?

I think it’s important to remember that Hitler began this book when he was in prison for a failed putsch. Unlike the fascists of yore, most of our current crop are soft as baby shit.

That’s going to be an awkward first day.

Maybe he could do Batman if he subtly subverted all the Batman tropes.

As I said, I’m not going to go to too many lengths to defend Prometheus. There are lots of problems with it, and I can see your points. I will say that I think a lot of people suggested the bioweapon explanation after originally seeing Alien because the creatures were so hostile, they were able to infect a species…

Batman requires heavy suspension of disbelief. For Batman to be Batman, he has to be capable of seriously hampering an entire city’s criminal activity on his own, in secret, while maintaining the moral high ground. That means he has to be a supergenius inventor, the best detective in the world and an Olympic level…

Petting the alien was weird and unlikely. Shaw’s husband was hoping that they would find live aliens - he may have thought they had found the Engineer homeworld, and that the Engineers just stopped visiting Earth for some other reason. They did meet live Engineers eventually, so he wasn’t all wrong. I think the…

A.) Is there a different man turning into a green monster?

I don’t really read comics, but I watch superhero movies, and I had some grasp of superhero tropes when I started reading Watchmen. I found it a bit tedious more because I didn’t think the tropes needed to be subverted. I started it recently, and after years watching io9 and other sites dissect comic culture, I didn’t…

Here are some excerpts from the Hulk’s wikipedia page:

Prometheus was pretty terrible, aside from its visuals and Michael Fassbender. No argument there. But it didn’t include a brilliant, heroic, wise-cracking billionaire playboy, who can defeat entire armies because he’s so smart that he can, on his own, build high-tech combat suits that all the rest of the world’s…

Most of the marines killed in Aliens were killed during the ambush in the power plant. Ripley was waiting back in the tank because she was a civilian. Throughout the rest of the movie, the marines tended to be bringing up the rear during the group’s retreat. Also, the traumatized Ripley took the xenomorphs a lot more…

It’s not that there’s fantastic elements, it’s that those elements are contrived to allow a few randoms to solve all Earth-destroying problems by punching them. Superhero movies are based on a fundamental premise of heavy wish-fulfillment, to which characterization and internal logic take a back seat.

Exactly. It’s not that there’s fantasy elements, it’s that those fantasy elements are contrived specifically to allow one rando to defeat every Earth-destroying threat by fist-fighting it.

Why? Colonization and expansion is present throughout human history, as is trade. The only really impossible thing required there is a hyperdrive, but if we had one, that’s the kind of thing people would do with it.