Woah woah woah. Are we saying that Orphan Black is a bad show now?

I liked it well enough, but it had more than a few problems, especially a have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach to balancing humour with pathos.

Yeah, that's DisneyToon Studios' fault, not Pixar's.

Now available as Twilight Struggle!

…and all of this will happen again!

I've not seen the latter, but Brave is good and Cars, while weak by Pixar standards, is just okay.

I wouldn't describe Cars 2 as "numerous".

There's a huge, huge difference between saying "popular culture influences society" and "Mary Whitehouse was right". To be honest, it's pretty grating to try to have an adult conversation about gender and media only to be repeatedly hit with baseless accusations of censorship. No one here is talking about putting Luc…

What exactly do you think shapes our perceptions and understandings, if not the culture that we live in? Do you honestly think that what we watch, listen to and read has absolutely no impact on how we view things like gender, race and so on? We're certainly not getting taught about it adequately at school.

I believe if that's the worst accusation that can be levied against the 'idpol' bogeyman, I'm not going to be losing much sleep over it.

Slippery slope swing and a miss.

I shiver in my boots.

I don't see anything contradictory in asking for people to own their fantasies rather than imply that they're universally shared as an appeal to popularity.

The fact that you're prepared to unconditionally "throw in almost every female in the Marvel and DC universes" as examples of "incredibly strong women" suggests me that you have a somewhat literal understanding of that term as "women who are physically strong or super-powered", rather than "women who are…

This is really a cowardly excuse to avoid personal culpability. If your personal fantasies involve sexually mature but intellectually underdeveloped women wholly dependent on you to help them through the big bad world, more power to you - but don't project your fantasies on everyone else just so you can hide behind…

And so 'identity politics' continues its death-march towards being a meaningless catch-all term for 'people who believe in human decency'.

There's nothing "honest" in a fictionalised depiction that serves power fantasies which, by definition, do not exist in the 'real world'.

I don't follow your point. The internet is awash with discussion about Mary Sues, mostly for the obvious point that they tend to be antithetical to good storytelling as they drain tension and ambiguity from the plot. And perhaps, in certain instances, they do serve patriarchal whims - that's why it's good to have the…

The point about tropes is that they've been done so often that they've even been named and categorised. If anything, it helps the writing process to avoid obvious pitfalls and offer fresh and interesting characters and arcs.

Or their mothers, which is why most sci-fi women characters fall into "ditzy sexy ingenue" or "passive-aggressive scold".