Because marketing thinks boys won't watch anything titled after a girl.

I think the reviewer's problem with the ending was not that he didn't "understand" it, it's that the ending fell flat, because the movie failed to build up minor characters sufficiently to get viewers emotionally invested in them. And that the elements of the story that got screentime instead - eg. the romantic…

Well, Bran's not exactly in a safe place, even while the Wall's still standing, but I guess becoming [SPOILER] might up his chances to further withstand constant Other attacks.

So you think the only original P.O.V's invovled in the endgame will be Dany, Arya and Tyrion?

Is that supposed to be a parody of feminism?

(For what it's worth Maria Theresa herself had a pretty guilty
conscience about that first partition of Poland (didn't stop her from
going for seconds though at the next best opportunity). She knew she was setting a bad precedent. And sure enough the Prussians would use the same kind of flimsy rationalizations to help…

For what it's worth I don't necessarily believe in that Blood Eagle business - at least not in a very literal sense - but I still think that it's pretty safe to assume that the Vikings were not particularly squeamish about torture either. Draconian punishments feature in their own sagas as well; it's probably not all…

Well, Poland has always had the most unfortunate borders, so that was probably a bigger factor than experimentation with democracy. But in as far as more democractic structures might often go with decentralization, I could absolutely see it being a liability under certain circumstances (eg. any geopolitical…

Nobody's claiming moral superiority for the Vikings; we just don't buy into the moral superiority of the Christians. Cruelty towards the "other"/dehumanization of your enemies is pretty much an anthropological constant.

Point is that, warrior culture or not, Christian colonists (eg. the Conquistadors) were just as nasty, brutish and merciless as the Vikings in the treatment of their victims, so the idea that Christians had a more "humane" approach to colonizing is patently ridiculous. The Vikings were a bit more honest in their…

Yep, the Christians did nice stuff, the Christians did some awful stuff (more peaceful in theory vs rank hypocrisy in practice). So did the Vikings (unabashed celebration of violence vs progressive divorce laws, proto-democratic communities, less hypocrisy). Someone might be able to present a compelling case that…

Thanks.

It does grow tiresome when people have so simplistic notions of good and evil that they will only focus on the evil of their opponents while crying persecution if someone brings up the evil of their own side.

Where on earth do you get your certainty that the consolation of the Christian faith helped the poor victims? Have you talked to them? Can you read their minds?

I would be totally up for Spanish Moor versus Viking alternative history! Or something about the Vikings who became mercenaries for the Byzantine empire. That must have been a fascinating clash of cultures as well.

I love Pratchett very much; I think he's one of the great humanists of our age. But I'm no completist and much as I enjoy certain Discworld novels, I have no amibition to read all of them. As others have said, they work pretty well as stand-alones.

And your facile glorification of Christian missonaries isn't?

Because Foxfire claims they are superior to Vikings in this regard.

Yep, the Christian missionaries followed the land grabbers and sanctioned the atrocities they commited or at the very least did very, very little to stop them. They did not prevent mass rape and massaces, they did not prevent enslavement, and whatever modern medicine they brought couldn't outweigh the threat of the…

With those currently fashionable longform TV shows with at least multiple-episode-arcs, if not season-long arcs in general, most viewers are probably invested enough in the characters to not switch the channel just because nothing explodes in the first couple of minutes. The in medias res gambit is especially annoying…