The White Lotus, like the metalbending cops and the Dai Li, are probably very good… against most of the world. But we only see them going up against world-class opponents. (Or in the case of the Equalists, people with a new tech advantage that they hadn't trained to counter.) So they wind up as the Washington…

Though they never mention the super-strength Ray Palmer must have already had, to pick up a chunk of white dwarf material that size.

While it doesn't fit the films, it would make a sort of sense in a Silver Age milieu. That was a world in which every other week someone was getting turned into a giant turtle-man or getting a huge future brain or being granted powers for 24 hours. (And in which half the people she knew were engaged in elaborate…

Jordan Elliot. (Yes that's from memory. This is how I allocate my limited supply of perfectly good brain cells, folks.)

It's interesting that you see such a resemblance to Christopher Reeve, because that doesn't come through to me at all. Routh is a perfectly acceptable Superman, physically (too lean to be perfect, but it's hard to look like an idealized line drawing). But Christopher Reeve is the only actor who's ever really looked…

AD&D Elves had everything. But they also had some pretty stringent level caps for every class besides Thief.

Tolkien was given exactly one opportunity to reach back from beyond the grave and whack some sense into Jackson. I'm sure he looked sadly back at movie-Faramir and movie-Denethor and the dwarf-tossing jokes, and forward at the endless goblin and dragon chase scenes in The Hobbit.

I'm pretty sure most states give broad self-defense rights against someone who breaks into your home. Add the fact that the burglar is an escaped prisoner who's on record as obsessed with the householders and previously tried to use a car bomb to kill one of them? Even if the law was ambiguous, it's hard to imagine…

I don't think there were any Detroit-based heroes at the time. (IIRC, it was revealed that Vibe was active on the neighborhood level in that storyline— maybe Gypsy too?— but as I recall Aquaman didn't know that when he decided to locate there.) I think (it's been a while) they chose Detroit because Steel's…

That sort of highlights the tricky position of that kind of dark "more realistic (but not really)" pushing of the genre's boundaries. Because for that to work requires exactly the same level of contrivance that kept guys who could build time and dimension hopping machines robbing banks back in the Silver Age.

The overwhelming majority of them are US citizens and resident aliens. The station is almost certainly subject to "Special maritime and territorial jurisdiction" (as defined in 18 USC 7) several different ways (subsection 6 if the station is registered as American, which is likely, and subsection 7 because it's…

That's probably a big part of it, though I suspect that the continuation of overall societal trends also helped. Women were certainly more prominent in SF fandom in the 60s than they'd been in the 40s (as witness who the major players in the bid to save Star Trek were) and as far as I know were as predominant in…

Plus actual church people— religious groups, mainstream and otherwise, tend to be pretty active on most campuses. But presumably Elizabeth is hoping to have set Paige straight by then.

As an elf-child left in the place of a human infant, I'm sick and tired of shapeshifters appropriating our name.

Sure, but so is Iron Man. Booster has an interesting origin hook, an obvious character arc from selfish poseur to true hero, a a robot sidekick, and a built-in buddy comedy partner. He seems like a cinematic natural.

It's also a surprisingly sentimental choice. The pure power play would have been to let the marriage go forward and try to get a child out of it, and only kill Joffrey prematurely if it looked as if he were going to kill Margaery before she produced an heir and a spare.

Even Marx would say that Westeros is a couple of economic stages away from Communism being a practical option. Westeros doesn't have the communications or resources for most modern forms of government to work on a continental scale.

At least in the US, it doesn't require a high security clearance to be fingerprinted. In addition to the 70 million prints from the criminal justice system, they have 34 million from the civil service and the military, plus prints from foreigners who've passed through the US-VISIT program. I don't know if Canada is…

Anyone else still have the t-shirt?

Five words will solve both their problems: "By the power of Grayskull"