As someone who imagined this all ending in democracy, in that moment I felt personally and directly ridiculed by the writers, in the best way. I had a genuine belly laugh. Because it rang completely true; popular soverignty is hundreds of years away, at least: what was I thinking? But, I also felt it quite likely that…

LOL, the MCU scenario is incredible, and all the better for the fact that it almost frigging makes total sense. Wasn’t Jon Snow dead for three days? How long will it take Drogon to cross the narrow sea? I honestly wish you were on to something. ...Although, that does give me pause to wonder whether I... watch too much…

As someone who had a many-starred comment on last week’s post in which I basically accused D&D of being vultures who panicked and failed to deliver on something they should never have signed up to do, I would just like to say:

This was a great episode, and I feel much, much more positively about the series as a whole…

You forgot San Francisco Rush and mismarked The Simpsons at #1 when it is but the first runner-up to San Francisco Rush

I will say, a day later, I do feel a little bad for calling these dudes out just because they let me down with a highly commercialized piece of mass art, a medium they mostly elevated for much of the show’s run. I imagine they’re let down by how critical folks have suddenly become, and I’m flashing forward to reading…

*white* *people* *are* *not* *the* *same* *type* *of* *category* *as* *other* *racial* *groups*. What would be racist when talking about a group of people who experience racial oppression is not going to be racist, *ever*, when applied to the group of people who exist to *do* racial oppression. Get some literacy about…

Word. I mean again I do think it would have been ridiculous for them to take him at his word there given the exponential trendline for how long he’s spent on each successive book, and how bad he had been at estimating each of their writing times. Like you’d think they’d have at least treated it as a possibility, and…

Can you help me understand how you’re reading it that way? Personally I guffawed, but maybe I’m an idiot.

They had plenty to adapt. They just chose not to do so. They could have written 4 more episodes in each of the last two seasons no problem, if only they’d been able to think up some stuff to write. They could have told a story about Dany and Jon that actually worked; they could have examined Arya’s choice about…

Well, some fact checks, for starters: A Dance with Dragons was published in July 2011, at which point GRRM said he expected Winds of Winter 3 years later.

So no, it was never supposed to be done in 2012.

Furthermore, ADWD took 6 years to write. When D&D took this on in 2011, instead of in, say, 2015, they knew they…

I’ve decided that the best explanation is that when they surpassed George’s books, they realized they had no idea how to build out his world, and completely panicked. That’s why everything is rushed — they’re making desperate leaps from one bullet point to the next, struggling to understand how any of it makes any…

Yeah but also he should have died at the moment he got his intestines liquified by a twisting blade. It’s nonsense on top of nonsense with these frauds. I’ve been Tyrion this whole time with this show like “let’s hope this works out even though it looks like it’s going badly”, and now I am feeling very Dracarys

Here, Bethesda, let me give you five dollars so that I don’t have to do a chore that I only have to do in the first place because of your choice to bulk up your game with punishingly bad design rather than expensive stuff like, you know, stories and characters, or maybe a new mechanic that you haven’t already used in…

I get what you mean (though of course this doesn’t reverse canon. The comics canon is what it always was, for whatever that’s actually worth in terms of comic book consistency).

Maybe the idea that there’s a “relentlessly evil race” isn’t actually a good one though. This type of essentialism rarely holds up in any medium. Star Trek has the same problem in a big way. It’s not cool or interesting to invent whole races whose defining trait is one tiny fragment of human complexity IMO. The Kree…

Your last anecdote strikes me as particularly insightful, because it underscores that this bigotry really isn’t about religious sectarianism but about race. A Christian Chaldean and a Muslim Somalian are both not white. We need to deal with whiteness without relent until it is no longer the defining force that it has…

I think this is really important and true and I thank you for saying it. I think it’s important not to mistake socialism for state control of society. A lot of socialists like a state as a means of emerging a society that is owned and operated by workers, but that’s a starkly different thing from government-operated…

Dear Russia, if you’re watching, you could tell this person The Game Anthropologist anything and tell them you’re a Sanders supporter and they’ll believe you and go post about it. Because they hate the base of their party. Have fun

I hear you, friendo, and I don’t think your read is completely wrong or anything, but I play lots of games too — I’ve been playing games since about 1989 — and while it’s great that you can overlook the hate speech that gets casually thrown around, I would suggest considering two things:

a) not everyone is in a place…

I completely appreciate that games are an important safe space for people, but not all kinds of safety are created equal. Safety from information or knowledge you might not want to be confronted with about someone else’s struggles or injuries is not the same as safety from actual struggle or injury. When one person’s…