Good point, although I don't think you can really separate these concerns in good writing. To add another one, I think that he might also have realized Sansa's potential for his thematic concerns (he's clearly interested in a nuanced examinations of all kinds of power, and Sansa represents a type of soft power a bit…

I don't know, I feel if we're really being honest here good old class barriers still make for a perfectly plausibe obstacle in a marriage plot. Parents forbidding their kids to date the poor? Maybe not, quite so explicitely. Frowning upon actually marrying the poor? You bet. A friend of mine had to give his parents…

I think Sansa was supposed to be a simple obstacle character in the original outline, intended to complicate things for the Starks and then killed off gruesomly midway through. But then Martin thought better of it - there has to be a point to his keeping her around longer than planned; clearly she has a larger plot…

Well, the basic conflict "love for Arya vs duty to the Nightwatch" is still there (considering certain developments in Dance), although the exact nature of this love is a lot more ambiguous in the books than in this outline and I do hope that Martin got all his incest-kink out of his system with the Lannisters and the…

When I was in highschool some of my friends had boyfriends who were in their early twenties. I didn't think anything of it, and from what I can tell my friends got away well enough, without any lasting trauma (apart from the usual pangs of first love gone sour). But thinking back on those guys now, it's really…

But that's the thing - I think the common idea is that with gay guys, it's more likely to stay "casual". It's the fucked-relationship dynamic that results in long time relationship from such power imbalances that makes things messy. If you're not even trying to make a longterm relationship out of it….

I think at this point he's become a bit of a shorthand for "attractive man" (vs "attractive boy", for instance), and you can still definitely see why, but I don't personally know anyone who's still checking for him in particular.

One where people watch a lot of German TV. So I guess it's a Christmas staple in Germany, to be more precise.

It's a Christmas staple in my country. I love it a lot. I can't remember if I ever found it particularly traumatizing, but if so, I must have found it worth the trauma, again and again.

I think that character's main plot function is to draw Dany's ire so that she can get the "fire-and-blood"-part of her heritage mostly out of her system before seriously interacting with any of the characters we actually care about. He's supposed to be a chew toy for Dany, is what I think. But I could imagine the show…

Fiictionality tends to be a frequent characteristic of stories… But clearly, unless something is 100% fact it couldn't possibly have anything to say about values and mentalities.

Could be it's a Meera and Jojen type deal where they're just introduced at a later point in the story. I think Arianna is sadly gone for good, but I'm still hedging my bets about at least one uncle and a certain other wildcard. (If they're indeed gone, they won't be missed by me, because they're not the most…

Goes to show that what someone puts into a book may be one thing and what someone else takes out of it quite another. I've always believed that the best students can learn something even from the worst teachers. Something or other clearly works in mysterious ways. (Yeah, I love my clichés too, so who am I to throw…

I haven't yet had any conversations with her about the book, although I'm also pretty sure she wouldn't hold my dislike of it against me. I think with this kind of thing you have to wait for a good moment - maybe sow a seed of doubt when the occasion presents itself , or praise something that runs completely counter…

One of my favourite people recently recommended the book to me (to be fair, I had been whining a lot about my lack of direction), with heartbreaking sincerity. I admire her a lot - she's one of these women I used to find vaguely intimidating at first (so tough, so … effective), who ended up one of my closest friends…

I going to assume that you will be more thoughtful in the future, and that's really all I wanted to hear.

But you don't actually believe it - you might believe that women are less likely to indulge that particular kink of yours, but you don't believe that women are born submissive, and that any behaviour deviant from that is unnatural. All I'm asking you is to be more careful about accidentially implying the second by…

I was talking about your nature-nurture conflation. Clearly there are observable patterns of behaviour based on gender roles, but whether you attribute them to nature or nurture makes _all_the_ difference. Again, this is not a quibble, this is the heart of the debate.

That brand of bullshit is insidious because of the subtle ways in which it can work on the minds of the listeners - it's the kind of poison you might drink without noticing . I already admited that you probably weren't thinking enough about it to be aware of that in the very same comment, so I don't quite get why you…

I used insidious not to describe your intentions, but the effect of the statement. Intentions are rarely of much interest to me.