You know, one thing Joffrey is aware of — it shows in Season 1, I think — is that the system of armies raised by local lords is not tenable. He explicitly says to his mother that Westeros needs a national army, one loyal to the king, and his mother shoots him down. Her reasoning isn't terrible, and she's aware of the…

Is this from JM Barrie's original? I haven't ever actually read it, just seen the Disney version, and a few plays (It's weird, I know, but I am of a generation that saw Sandy Duncan as Peter Pan a lot). The passages you have here are pretty dark…

The funny thing to me about Robert Baratheon is that he is a great military leader, but crappy king. I got the sense he might have been a decent father, too, but Cersei kind of got in the way of that because of her own obsessions.

Understand the reason why people get irritated is that there's a feeling we all have to have the institutionalized racism 101 conversation every goddamned time. Yes, things are better than they were in 1960. But what you're doing is often termed "whitesplaining."

And you're ignoring the structural racism problem. Yes, as Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But it doesn't have to be 99.99 percent for PoC.

I saw some of the Sci-Fi channel's effort, and the thing that got me was that it looked too… I dunno, glossy? Maybe that's the word, too light. It might have also been hampered by its budget, which large as it was for a TV show at the time — I mean, here you have people in the desert for days that look like they are…

I think the Lynch version is weird and crazy, and an interesting mess. :-) I actually sort of dug the film when I saw it as a teenager, when it came out. But I have to say, seeing it now, I feel like 30 editors got together and had a coke- and hooker-fueled blowout before stepping into the cutting room.

Maybe someone has brought it up already in the comments, but I wanted to ask. Does anyone else think the hand-wave about Martha's race a bit too easy?

Thanks @avclub-d46f38cdea5dccad4c1a781bcdf3f526:disqus @avclub-b97da3de4557055c12fdc708c08d179d:disqus @LurkyMcLurkerson:disqus @disqus_DIRQM5WcY7:disqus —

I don't know if anyone has said so in the comments yet, as it's already thousands deep, but Carrie Raisler's is one that has bugged me for decades, and even 20 years ago people were talking about it. The miscarriage thing was always a staple of soaps, and it was precisely so nobody would have to have an abortion. In…

Speaking as a member of the fourth estate, often editors have words they don't want us to use, depending on the publication. Scientific American will have different criteria from the local paper. I even worked at one place that had you run the Fleisch score algorithm on stories to keep them at 8th grade level. (The…

That may well be it — the collaboration required some give-back from Lucas, and that helped tame his wost excesses.

I wasn't thinking like plagiarism or whatnot; just a way of differentiating so's that people would see them as very different— Kliban's cats were a little, for lack of a better word, "darker" and more surrealist… Garfield was doing something rather different, so were I Davis I could see wanting to distance myself from…

Following on the discussion of whether Star Wars has "aged well:"

Maybe it's in the comments already but I have a question about Jim Davis' art.

I have to say I agree that The State was one of those that reached "almost but not quite funny" a lot of the time. It came out when I was in the target demographic, too.

Apropos, I remember watching the BBC show and I loved the animated segments, which do hold up remarkably well (I thought the design was neat, even now, and the animators clearly figured out how to keep it from getting dated too fast). The movie wasn't so good, but some of that was the story beats the writers chose —…

Actually it isn't IP violation. Look up doctrine of First Sale. If you buy a book, (or a record/ CD) you own it, and can give it away or resell it as you please. The reason why booksellers never bothered about it is because it's just one copy and they made their money off it already when you bought it.

I guess I was thinking in terms of sheer numbers— that is, the stuff that seems to weigh down the paperback shelves. I see a lot of authors I haven't heard of before, usually doing some (admittedly cliche-ridden) fantasy or SF.

Did this collection address genre fiction? Seems to me a big, honking omission if not.