Sure, but it's not like the female gamer is some kind of mysterious cryptid like the Loch Ness monster.

economic niche that is predominantly men

Ooh, I'd forgotten about Anastasia and Lilo & Stitch, thanks. She's 4, so we've just started watching full-length films.

I'm not sure, actually. I do know that she stopped wanting to be Iron Man at about the same age that she started to notice genders (~3).

"view the 1980s as a kind of historical way station"

And watching Totoro now that I have a kid, I realized how well-observed the characters of the two sisters are, the way children swerve from joy to sadness and back; how an acorn or a leaf can be an object of fascination; and how the mundane and the fantastic co-exist on the same plane…

My biggest problem with Pacific Rim was the 20 minutes of exposition at the beginning. I get it already!

I don't see that. She did call Ewoks 1-dimensional tropes which was in comparison to Planet of the Apes. (But also I haven't see Age of Ultron. Marjorie Liu's Black Widow is pretty awesome…)

re (3) I think that some creators just take the default/lazy option, so the scientist is a guy, all the characters are white, etc etc, and I'd hope those creators are open to thinking about the artistic choices they make.

re representation: Today my daughter was watching "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" (ok, not really an animation classic, but she enjoyed it). And, it was great that Sam Sparks' backstory is explicitly about a geek girl who gets shit for being a geek girl.

The analogy is not Black Widow = Ewoks, the analogy is "criticizing some aspects of a film is not the same as hating the film."

Wait, Warren Ellis owns an island?

Ody-C is sitting on my queue, I picked it up for exactly the same reasons.

So far I've only had to hide my Objectivist friend and my 2d-Amendment-absolutist friend.

DC Bombshells - a really fun series so far, with great art.

Anyway, Ales Kot already made a "Fury" / "The Fury" joke in Secret Avengers.

It would have been funnier if the voice over didn't explain the joke.

It seemed life-changing to me when I read it as a 12-year-old boy. When I re-read it several decades later, I realized what an undependable narrator Caulfield is, and then it seemed more like just a fairly interesting novel. (At least, it didn't send me into paroxysms of rage like Rabbit, Run.)

I'm just impressed that Obama finds the time to write local city ordinances…

Those are great. The alphabet one is how my daughter learned her ABCs, and who Zatanna is.