You said it yourself when you made the reference to Catholicism - it's about religion and mythology.

He's perfectly cast, although I was a little surprised when I first saw him, since in my head he'd been older, to be a contemporary of Mr Wednesday's.

It was a lot less obvious to book readers back in the day because it was prior to the Thor movies, and it didn't have that Viking interstitial, but still not that hard to guess.

Sure, I can do that - I guess I didn't actually think of that as being a spoiler, but no harm in playing it safe.

From a storytelling perspective, what I really liked about the opening Vikings scene was how it establishes that, while Mr Wednesday might be charismatic, even likable, Odin is not a "nice" god - he's, as they say in the show, a god of war. It's easy to forget that when Ian McShane is doing his thing.

I get what you're saying, but Rodney King doesn't get attention still because of Rodney King, but because the riots that occurred afterwards personally involved an entire city. JonBenet's case is much more isolated, but a lot of people act/are more emotionally invested in it than makes sense.

I watched a fair amount of that show, because, oddly enough, either my sister or I knew someone on each season, and I did think it was nice how they showed two groups that might fear and/or scorn each other being humanized and building familiarity. Of course, underneath all the standard reality tv bs.

Mostly agree, except that they show glimmers of the anti-trans guy and the anti-feminist being won over, and no hint of the opposite. The anti-trans guy calls the trans woman "a girl" when talking about them keeping in touch later, and the anti-feminist (jokingly, but still) says "down with the patriarchy".

I also love their goofy stuff, like Boris the Spider.

The whole concept of having a "speaker for the dead" is such an empathetic one, it makes the degree of cognitive dissonance at play there almost difficult to comprehend.

I used to love that book, but knowing what I know about him now really changes my view of it. He does have one book that I like still that doesn't touch topics too close to my issues with him as a person, so it comes out mostly unscathed - Enchantment.

This reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch where someone's pitching a movie to Jaden Smith, and keeps having to explain all the normal people concepts - eg, a "house" is "like a really small mansion". In the end, the idea of a character wanting two things, but not being able to have them both makes him reject it as…

Mostly hilarious, but some of the things she's suggesting are actually a bit dangerous, medically speaking. Not anywhere near the level of harm that anti-vaxxer celebrities do, but still…

I think of him and Tim Burton as being in similar categories, in that the visual style they were praised for ended up entirely taking over their work until it became self-parody. The only difference is that Burton was able to get some great movies out before the style over substance trend totally took over, whereas…

I don't think it's possible for them to be more kool-aid-y than Google (the Silicon Valley campus, anyways). Someone was talking wide-eyed about how you could sign up to attend a seminar on the history of Google, and how it was amazing, you've got to do it. That's ok, I remember when it was still google.stanford.edu.…

Or that one with Ryan Phillipe where it's all about Microsoft being the evil empire?

That's way worse - at the very least, you'd have to have a lot of sensitivity-focused beta readers, or else you'd risk being really offensive accidentally. An author should never brag about their ignorance regarding a minority group that they're trying to portray.

They don't generally offer the maximum allowable amount, even now, though - they'll still just say they're offering $500 or something, and then gradually raise the amount until they get some takers. Most people don't know that they could be holding out for more.

It does seem like the ultimate embodiment of that cliche about crimes against pretty, white, blond girls getting more attention than cases with minority victims. Not trying to imply that what happened to JonBenet wasn't a tragedy, but you've got to wonder why *this* tragedy is the one that everyone's still talking…

Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst might be an interesting one to look at, because the narrator has gaps in her memory that cause her to not understand the situation herself. So, the narration is still unreliable, but not because our protagonist is intentionally misleading anyone.