Micaëla was also a character in the opera Carmen who had a lot of good songs, for what it's worth. She's kind of a passive "good girl" character, but her songs are so beautiful it's hard (for me at least) to get too irritated at her.

No. Joanna DOES NOT COUNT. Seriously, the hell? If my name was Marie, would everyone come and say, "well, hey, sucks about Marie, but there's all these famous Marias? That's close enough, right? Huh?" I don't care. My name is Joanne, not bloody Joanna.

Same here. My name's Joanne, and most Joannes I knew are twenty/thirty years older than me.

"glares at anyone who dares to call me Joanna*

No, JOANNA doesn't count. :P

Really? Huh. I never watched Lost and it was never mentioned to me, so go figure…

Are there *any* famous Joannes? Growing up in the '80s, all I knew was Joanne Woodward, but she was hardly a household name by that point. To me, it was always an old lady name my parents had inexplicably saddled me with.

So, great K, is the Leftovers worth watching? I've never seen Lost, btw. But I did like Prometheus (albeit it was mightily dumb in many places). I am therefore on the fence about Lindelof. Do you have a rec one way or the other?

How about experiencing The Wire?

I personally am hoping for Skynet cyborg assassins sent from the future.

Better plotting?

Holy schnickes! I thought I was the only one…

I think you all are possibly remembering this book through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. I was an old lady of 36 when I read The Giver for the first time, and I found it a pretty dull and simplistic allegory.

Indeed, as the whole book is a thinly disguised fap fantasy for that character.

This is an except from what I believe was an earlier draft of the pilot script.

I would agree that some YA books are really well written, but I don't think The Hunger Games is one of them. (I thought it was derivative schlock with crappy world-building, and the first-person present tense voice was grating.) I wasn't too impressed by The Giver either, which I only read recently. I found it flat…

He is also the Azor Ahai, so listen up!

I was born in '75, and I always felt X'ers were people who graduated from high school in the 1980s. I was very much a '90s kid— I was addicted to Disney Afternoon, I hated grunge and I got into the whole techno craze fairly early on (one of my greatest memories was seeing Underworld in '98). I'm not sure what that…

The actual prose, while not great, didn't bother me. I truly loathed the plot and characters though. The "standing stones time travel plot device" was such arbitrary magical bullshit… I kept wondering why it didn't (to paraphrase King Missile) turn her into a toilet bowl or a tree. Because seriously why the hell not.

Outlander is schlock. I was okay with it at first, but I found it, as I continued, became increasingly dopey and offensive. I stopped reading it when the desire to set the book on fire became too strong. The plotting is so goddamned stupid. I have no idea why people think it's "feminist" or even "intelligent" when…