I wouldn't exactly consider 25th Hour subtle character work or plotting either.

An acquaintance of mine owns A Comic Shop in Orlando. He's mentioned to some of the writers and creative types at Marvel before that they should emulate the Hawkeye model. What he meant at the time was giving artists a lot of freedom to make specific book they want with minimal concern for the bigger continuity which…

Since my schedule doesn't really allow me to go to the shop weekly, I tend to have a bunch of stuff pulled, then grab it all in one swoop when I get the chance. That means even though I like these conversations here, I usually don't partake because I'm way, way behind. But whatever, I like having a space to chat about…

Don't be ridiculous. People will hate a movie with a woman in charge as much as they hate summer action blockbusters featuring a woman as the lead.

Manimals?

See also: Suicide Squad

I like the surprise appearance of Jurassic Park's T-rex at the end of the trailer.

The twist is that it's actually Hank Henshaw in his DC cinematic debut.

It actually would be a pretty great poster if they just put the JL logo in a larger font, dead center, and moved the clutter of that sentence to a smaller font in the bottom. But outside of Wonder Woman, the DC movies' thing has been all about overstuffing them with pointless clutter, so maybe they're just keeping…

Not a totally unfair counter point, but one thing we should remember is that Game of Thrones very clearly started out as "European fantasy world, but there's no magic (generally) and no dragons but lots of scheming and character development," which was enough to hook me into the first book. I was actually kind of…

That's a fair point. The alt history crowd in the US evidently loves thinking about how things would have been different if the Confederacy had successfully seceded, but I could see that not really resonating as much overseas since it's more of a defining moment for US history specifically. It's one of the reasons I'm…

Right, because it doesn't matter until it has a TV show (for what it's worth, there have been episodes in other sci-fi shows such as the Time Tunnel that explicitly explored this particular variety of alt-hist, making it less prominent than "what if the Nazis won" but more prominent than "what if literally every other…

The fact that their jonesing for an alternative history timeline immediately led them to one of the two most trite alternative history possibilities demonstrates how hacky they can really get.

In fairness, I don't think people saw Capaldi as having that Doctor-ness quality based on his prior performances, and (to me at least) he easily knocked it out of the park.

True. My thinking was more in reference to her plotting prior to the battle where she essentially said Jon had to become a Stark to rally the North (because they weren't going to rally for her)

I remember not so much hating it when I saw but just being generally disappointed by it. I did hate how much everyone else gushed about it, however, and how that made me the asshole for calling it out as a middling-to-poor movie.

Putin has demonstrated a malicious and selfish desire to destabilize entire political structures to bolster his power and material wealth. The Iron Bank doesn't really care about maintaining or bringing down any political system. In fact, they'd rather maintain the status quo so that they can keep the money flowing.…

If the foreign-ness is the key feature, then wouldn't a better analog be the Saudi monarchy?

Littlefinger is Putin in that both are more interested in disrupting the flow of things and making everyone question their allegiances and the order of things for no other reason than his own personal gain. He'll make friends with the Lannisters (the Republican Party) when it's convenient, then trade it for another…

I don't know if I'd say Littlefinger loves her in a purely romantic way just because he said he does. I'm sure, on some level, the interest is there, but his life is so deep in machinations that he probably loves even more the possibility of placing her in a position to lead the north, then marrying her to become…