Oh man, I was just thinking about how effectively they made things even worse by having Catelyn killing a teenager… and then I realized, GODDAMN YOU FUCKERS, that's not just any teenager, it's the poor kid that Catelyn was introduced to, and had to listen politely to Walder making lewd jokes about, back in season one.…

@avclub-6e3b2cb658a36cff9d66c3371c46c4a6:disqus Just to raise the nerd bar: in your last scenario where Robb has a daughter, you'd be right if it were just about the inheritance of Winterfell; but if it were for the Iron Throne, then Bran would get to cut ahead of Robb's daughter. At least that's how it would be on…

Well, it's funny in that Duck is a character who's unable to express a sincere regret. He's always refused to learn from his mistakes, and has managed to avoid the total disaster he deserves by just chugging along protected by an invincible unjustified faith in himself; when Pete brings up his alcoholism he basically…

I also realized that, due to the relentlessly peppy quality of the '80s version, I had literally never paid enough attention to the lyrics to understand that it's not a happy song.

Q. What did the city of New York do with King Kong?

@avclub-c156902f5b20b572848be18c11634dfb:disqus It's extremely different. The story is way too dark for '80s TV of course, but also, like most of Martin's science fiction, it takes place not on present-day Earth but in some unspecified decadent future on a random planet with a rather Gothic atmosphere. So rather than…

I guess it depends on how you define obscure. It's pretty famous to the subset of people who have read any WW2-era science fiction— it's in a couple of huge best-of anthologies. Certainly not unlikely that some Simpsons writers would know about it. Whether they would expect viewers to get the reference— probably not,…

I guess it's more likely that the Simpsons episode, "The Genesis Tub," was a take-off on "The Little People", since they did so many TZ homages… but having never seen that episode of TZ, I always thought TGT was a riff on the great 1941 short story "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon. The story resembles TGT more…

I liked that show a lot, but its strengths were definitely about atmosphere and Greenwood rather than the story. However, to be fair, the secret wasn't anything as unsurprising as "some kind of Central American death squad," it was a (pretty implausible) conspiracy involving the murder of U.S. politicians.

It's very very very creepy, much more of a horror story than "The Little People" (it sounds like; I haven't seen the episode). The main character is on a somewhat similar power trip, but the creatures are not something you can identify with— they're very alien, and it's unclear whether they have motivations of their…

@avclub-84ca205fe6bc691c41c3bfe5a2820a15:disqus If you mean Aunt Dan and Lemon, that's a brilliant play and it's disturbing as shit. The Kissinger sex fantasy part is just a brief and relatively comic bit, though ("Few formalities would need to be observed— he didn't have the time, and I knew that very well")— most of…

Chester Brown is one of those artists who, when they're telling stories about people and depicting human behavior, can show great insight and move me to tears… and then as soon as they try to make a literal factual statement about human nature or society, it strikes me as egregious bullshit and makes me wonder how the…

@avclub-01f78be6f7cad02658508fe4616098a9:disqus I've only seen a few of the TV ones, but I particularly liked Four Days in July— a story about political/religious divisions in Northern Ireland in which almost no one does or says anything political or religious, and the only violent thing that happens is childbirth.…

The Van came later and was based on a Roddy Doyle book. The only way they're related is that someone has a food truck.

High Hopes is a personal favorite.

@avclub-7adb6a50e7687b45a00b35796f18f17d:disqus With all due respect to your husband, that's not quite true. Like most angel-related mythology, Metatron shows up only in apocryphal writings, Talmudic commentary, and various medieval theo-fanfic. Some of those sources give him an origin story in which he used to be the…

There's a really excellent graphic novel by one of Dahmer's high-school classmates, about Dahmer hanging out with the gang, getting drunk and being creepy. They all called him Jeff.

@Kumagoro:disqus It'd be "teasing" if they didn't know each other pretty well, but they do. They're both very smart people and it's fairly obvious that they have feelings for each other; she's not really giving him new information. She's saying in effect, "Look, if you want to be so super-open and direct about…

And apparently mediocrity forces you to use the most clichéd mind-reading attack ever: ____ wants to be serious, and I know this because other people think he's serious and I don't like him. Damn that guy for his pretentious desires that I imagined!

@avclub-8583cd7c50cc85d47a8db2dae972cd72:disqus I don't remember, I just know that that's what I thought had happened when I first saw the movie, and I hadn't read the book yet. It's certainly possible that it wasn't really explained well in the movie and my imagination just filled it in, but I at least imagine I…