"After Shayera is stabbed, Commander Steel saves her by throwing a shield, just like another, more famous red-white-and-blue superhero over at Marvel Comics."
…

“Why don’t you just throw it into the sun?"
In 2004, Dwayne McDuffie was active on Usenet, and he responded to some fans complaining about the episode "Dark Heart":

Next you'll ask how Wonder Woman, whose homeland was settled by worshipers of the Greek gods and cut off from contact with the outside world before Rome was founded, is named after Artemis's Roman counterpart. (To be fair, George Perez's origin explained that, forty-plus years after the fact; I don't know if the New…

To be fair, no one ever said Beta-Ray Bill was Thor.

I'm curious what the takeaway was from Nineteen Eighty-Four in a modern context. When I read it, it was the first exposure to dystopia for a lot of students, the pervasive surveillance was probably the most noteworthy science fictional aspect, and continental-scale totalitarianism and permanent superpower conflict…

Though honestly, pulling that with a population selected for a combination of ruthlessness and aptitude for improvised killing strikes me as a formula for a lot of murder-suicides of the victims and their immediate exploiters, drugs and threats to the athletes' families notwithstanding.

Everything ever written is going to be colored by the author's beliefs and the society from which they sprung. I think kids are better off reading widely in time and space and (hopefully) learning over time about the ways in which the author's perspective and theirs disagree, rather than reading narrowly from…

Frequently the "we" in the context of "are we doing X wrong?" is "really you, or them, but I'm trying to avoid being accusatory here".

For what it's worth, I'd say the first book is (mostly) the base story of the rebel standing up against the machine (albeit with some subversive elements, like constructing the love story between her and Peeta for the cameras) and the sequels the deconstruction.

I hear you. I have the same problem with book cover illustrations that don't match the book. I've had the reason explained to me, and it makes perfect sense: book covers are primarily ads meant to catch the eye and draw interest— capturing specific details of the book is orthogonal to their reason for existence.

If I were a generation younger, when I was the age to which Harry Potter was marketed, I probably would have been way too superior about it to actually read it. (And if I had read it, it would probably have been to criticize its worldbuilding and explain how much better various other fantasy series were.) Probably…

It obviously works for them generally. But I've been surprised how little use Amazon is for directly finding books I'm interested in, given how much sales data they have from me to work with. 99% of the time, I find out about books from other places, rather than from their "you may also be interested in…"

I can see how it happens, though. Well, two ways— one is just laziness. (King=horror.) But the other is "who's likely to be interested in reading King on writing? King's fans. Where are they likely to be browsing the shelf for his work? The Horror section."

And between the 19th century and the 1950s were the heyday of the pulps, the dime novel, and magazines in general, which were subjected to every bit of condemnation for bad writing, coarsening tastes, and contributing to the degradation of the culture that every popular entertainment does.

Bookstores are also more able to have multiple copies shelved in different places if they choose. For non-bestsellers, libraries generally have to choose the one place they think a book's potential friends are most likely to be looking for it.

I read Twilight for pop cultural awareness, and because I try to be at least aware of what my nieces are into at any given time so I can talk to them about it. I didn't hate it as much as many people here (and neither did my wife, who tends to be a lot more sensitive to bad writing than I am). But neither of us were…

Sturgeon's Law. That's basically true for every genre, including litfic.

Neither of which characterizes CW Barry (son of a doctor, shy with women). So that's another count against "they're writing him as Wally".

As of 2015, it's not clear that anyone is able to figure out a sustainable model for any magazine, including those that can still attract more ad pages and stuff in more content than comics can.

It's not a question of "can". It's a question of "will they"? Disney and Time Warner aren't going to base those decisions on their total corporate bottom lines, but on why they should put any money at all into their DC or Marvel divisions (who combined gross about as much as one blockbuster movie) when they're…