“Look, I’m not saying that ‘having an affair with some dude’ is morally equivalent to ‘conspiring with foreign powers to rig the 2020 election’, all I’m saying is that it’s really suspicious that you’re talking about one and not the other.”

Look, he can’t turn himself into a gorilla of hair plugs and afford to keep the lava moat running. Won’t someone think of the poor beleagured billionaires?

Yeah, all those people wanting to eat... food, and stuff! That’s why I don’t eat or breathe or consume liquids! That’ll teach the MAN!

“...now is there some way we can restrict this to white people?”

Rey and X-23 teaming up to explore the galaxy is the fanfiction I never knew I needed until now. :)

Okay. I think that any retcon would be a total disaster, but if she’s actually Dash Rendar’s kid, I am 100% there for it. It even fits the“Your father was a drunken nobody” clue!

I want to be excited, but I just can’t help feeling like JJ is going to go full on ass-over-head nostalgia diving for this one. The best thing about ‘The Last Jedi’ was the way that it felt like it was genuinely clearing the decks to do something new and original and different, and this feels like it is looking 100%…

Excuse me while I laugh extremely hard at your attempt to pass off your inattention to a movie’s themes as some kind of cold-eyed realism about the intentions of the filmmaker.

Captain Marvel. It is 100% a scathing critique of American imperialism dressed up in patriotic colors to get past the unofficial censors of dangerous ideas, and it’s wonderful.

I really don’t understand how someone could watch ‘Thor: Ragnarok’, which is basically a thin veil of comedy over a deep well of social commentary about the blood-soaked roots of imperialism and its toxic effect on the cultures it impacts, and say, “Eh. Pretty hollow.” Seriously, look past the dayglo junkshop…

And I believe that we should still listen to old-timey radio dramas instead of watching the moving pictures. Surprisingly, that doesn’t make cinema “despicable”.

Absolutely! They’re so fucking EMPTY! Like that movie they made earlier this year about the good soldier for an imperialist power who begins to question the constant stream of propaganda telling her that she’s a hero defending the way of life for the people of her homeland, and finds out that the enemy she was taught…

Oh, yeah. I mean, ‘Black Panther’, ‘Thor: Ragnarok’, ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’... I so frequently can’t even tell which of those I’m watching, they’re so similar!

For that matter, why don’t they wear leather jackets? Their enemy has nothing sharper than teeth and fingernails. I can’t believe it’s been ten fucking years since the start of the zombie apocalypse and nobody’s thought to armor up even a little.

I think they showed some cannibals?

Thank you for demonstrating perfectly my current theory, which is that American audiences are so emotionally invested in a universe that presents them as uncritical good guys that any story with a message that late-stage Western cultural and military dominance is in some way wrong becomes simply invisible to them, and…

Yep, that’s sure how I remember the end of ‘Empire’. Vader kills the Emperor and takes over. Definitely nothing new under the sun.

Of course we’re still doing this. We will always be doing this. Time on the Internet is a flat circle and there are still people arguing about whether or not William Hartnell is the First Doctor. If you ever want to understand fandom, imagine a boot, stamping on Jar Jar Binks’ face, forever.

It’s almost like what they needed was a big, tentpole franchise movie that subverted all those old stereotypes and killed the past, both symbolically and literally, while showing that the dream of a Jedi hero coming along and single-handedly defeating all the evils in the galaxy was nothing more than an illusion...

Katie-Beth Shrike is in this issue????