Rowling said it after the last book was published, but she told the HP film makers about it earlier when they suggested giving Dumbledore some sort of female romantic interest.

Reading between the lines of the last book, it’s not hard to pick up the gay subtext. It’s pretty much in the plotline.

Why? Why not discuss the “MENZZ”? Because I’ve seen the white woman racist topic a lot, but not the MENZZ?

Isn’t it because it’s easier to fight over scraps instead of looking at who’s really aggregating the power here?

Why do blue-collar white guys vote against their own self-interest? Because Trump isn’t working for…

But it IS both ways—that’s why there’s a 47/53 split—that tells you that a lot of white women didn’t vote for Trump along with a lot of white women who did.

And if you look at which white women voted for Trump—i.e. lower education levels—then it shouldn’t be that surprising that they “fail to generalize their…

Fair point, though the i09 science coverage had an interesting speculative/futuristic bent to it that I don’t see in Gizmodo.

Come to think of it—it’s the futuristic, speculative bent, which previously defined i09, that’s also missing along with the SFF lit coverage. Kind of all goes together—because we’re really…

I hate to harsh on one reviewer the way you have, but, yes, there’s a problem at i09—I used to come here a lot more—and it’s because a lot of what made i09 unique is no longer here. I see a lot of coverage of comic books and Marvel movies and other SFF franchises. I don’t see much on actual science (Annalee Newitz was…

But the issue here is that Lussier is disappointed with how the trilogy ends (after pumping it up) when it turns out that the ending follows the book’s ending. If you’re going to urge people to see something in one review because of its *potential* and change your mind in the second—not knowing how the books are…

Yeah, and her reviews of things like Doctor Who were informed by her depth of understanding and knowledge of SFF, in general. I know she’s gone on to full-time novel writing, but I wish i09 would hire/borrow some writers with some wider knowledge of SFF.

I think not reading the books has become an overall issue with i09—old i09 had some people who really knew science fiction literature—could write it and write about it. It’s gotten lightweight around here.

Yeah, it really is Creature from the Black Lagoon with a happy ending for the creature. Or, if you really want to stretch back, it’s a riff on Beauty and the Beast.

Publishing was really trying to make mermaids and mermen have a moment a few years ago, so, yeah, they’re around—anthologies of the stuff.

Which was a totally awesome low-budget movie. One of the great ones.

Yeah, that was one of the better zombie flix that way. And the people weren’t unbelievable idiots. Idiocy was why I gave up on The Walking Dead—I don’t like gore, but I can take it in service to a well-told story. People making endless bad decisions is not a good story.

Yeah, particularly post-apocalypse—there’s a real weird wish-fulfillment thing going on with that one. My suggestion to those people is that they spend some time in Sudan.

I appreciated the fact that the writer of WWZ admitted in the book that it was kind of not really possible that the zombies would survive the water pressure and show up on the beaches.

Yeah, there’s another good one—they’re always hungry, so why don’t they starve—particularly if there’s a bunch of them and they don’t have the intelligence for farming or managing global supply chains. Why aren’t they starved into inaction.

Largescale zombiedom just doesn’t work.

So, everyone has a locked room at night. Sorry, still not that hard.

Didn’t i09 once run a chart on the rising and ebbing of various monsters over time? Zombies replaced vampires, alien/mutants were big in the 50s. Ghosts have had a couple of moments.

Can’t stand zombies mostly because they don’t strike me as that scary—they’re dumber than you and can be killed. They don’t have…

Witty is good. :)

Well, the red skin and high cheekbones kind of give it away—I picked it up when I first read it as a kid. It did help that the original cover wasn’t whitewashed.

Also, there’s very much a Native American vibe to Ged—which makes sense given that LeGuin’s father wrote about Native Americans.

I will look her up.