Well put. And I guess there wouldn't need to be a whole category of feminist fantasy if that *were* the default setting.

You're so right. And you know what I just realized? I adore Pratchett, and I kind of just mentally exempted him from being a fantasy author, because I just think of him as an "author." And there's a crapload of feminist fantasy out there. What in the hell was I talking about?

I've had a number of people recommend Ender's Game to me, and I kind of wish I'd gotten around to it before I found out about Card's vicious homophobic lunacy, because now I just don't think I can read it. And I really, really, really can't get it up to see the movie version, either. It's kind of not even about…

"Nanny could find an innuendo in 'good morning.' She could certainly find one in 'innuendo.'"

Based on my adolescent reading of Piers Anthony and on the plethora of giant, heaving cleavage on a lot of the fantasy paperback covers I've encountered, I've always just assumed that misogyny and female objectification were just intrinsic features of the fantasy genre. Is that not the case?

He might want to be sitting down for the episode that wraps up Stringer Bell's storyline, is all.

Yeah, if you click on the "incredibly flowery" link in the article, it takes you to Vulture's roundup of the best quotes out of the book. They are truly exquisite.

From the section of the book in which he describes his birth:

Oops — didn't see your comment and essentially just said what you said. Although I went the extra-creepier route of assuming the baby was a girl, which … WAIT. Does the episode tell us the sex of the baby? Because if it was a boy, that would also go a long way toward explaining the infanticide — they need another…

Well, since I hadn't seen this episode since 1996, I immediately went and re-watched it. Turns out that I will be sleeping with the lights on tonight, just as I did when this first aired, and I might wait a bit before I next call my mom.