Russos: “This wasn’t part of our deal!”
Feige: “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.
...
...we also have the comics rights to that now, too!”

It can kind of go either way.
On one side of the coin you have things like Thank You For Smoking and Up in the Air.
On the other, you have something like Labor Day.

They say when Jason Reitman gets a movie contract, the gods flip a coin.

Bigger, easily.
Trump is bad, but he’s not a cause for a lot of the problems we have now as much as a very pronounced symptom.
He owes a great deal to the efforts of people like Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, the Kochs, the Mercers, Roger Ailes, etc...I could keep going.

That’s the really grim part about all of this.…

I’ve been joking about it for years now, but it’s become more pronounced of late - he bears an unsettling resemblance to Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger, which is a match far more fitting of him than turtles.

The scary part is, many of them aren’t hoodwinked. They know he’s not one of them and while some maintain the delusion they can change that, many know that won’t change.
But they don’t care. So long as he keeps giving them what they want, they’ll continue to throw their support behind him as a useful heathen.
It’s a…

WE DIDN’T START THIS ONE, THE RIGHT DID!
THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD!

...jokes aside though, you’re probably right. They’ve taken playing the victim and elevated it to an art.

I recall an old sketch from Comedy Central’s short lived TV Funhouse series that proposed something like this.
Was something called ‘Porn for Kids’ that was purported to be ‘Hardcore fun for everyone’

Cue an old style porno’s first minute or so and then jumping ahead to the final 10 seconds.
Roll credits.

Days like this make me really, really, REALLY hate Poe’s Law.
I just went through your old posts to verify my suspicion that this was sarcasm. Nothing personal on you, but even before this, I’d already seen people try and argue the series was anti-Soviet/anti-Communist propaganda in all seriousness before, so I was…

“when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you”
--That’s a generous interpretation you have there.

Which still feels strange, given how many other things they didn’t mind playing fast and loose with getting there.
GRRM gave them the ending in part cause he figured they were going to stick to the whole thing. From the sound of things, he wasn’t counting on them looking at books 4 and 5 and pulling the ‘Bart Simpson…

Gotta say, I have seen some wild takes about GoT over the years, but there’s still few that surprise me quite as much as people arguing there’s a fair exchange between Cersei’s walk of shame and her having Septa Unella raped to death by zombie Gregor Clegane.

I hear ‘Netflix’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ and my brain is deciding which is the more likely outcome -
1) like GoT the showrunners get bored and stomp on the gas to speed the show across the finish line after a point
or
2) It passes the famous ‘3 seasons’ barrier, and unless it’s a runaway hit, Netflix quietly takes it out…

On the one hand, I appreciate this joke.
On the other, I remember when more about that came out and all I can think now is how we all just sort of let Cameron Crowe off the hook for talking her into that one.

Re: Archer - while not as prominent as Ray, I have to admit, Ramon Limon was one of the first names that came to mind on this topic for me.

Assuming, as others have, you mean averting the ‘butch’ stereotype, Margot Verger from the TV series version of Hannibal comes to mind (especially when one considers how the character was first written by Harris...THAT did not age well.)

To that end, Alanna Bloom is arguably on the better end of how bisexual characters…

Don’t forget the forced druggings.
...God, we live in Hell.

Gun nothing, that’s a classic Homer Simpson “WHY YOU LITTLE...!”

I kind of figured the knife was supposed to be a sacred relic sort of deal, a la the dagger from the first two Evil Dead movies.

‘almost all of the commandments’ - That IS the one thing I do have to give Trump. Based on his general behavior, it’s safe to say he hasn’t killed anyone yet, or he’d have told on himself LONG ago.

The hyper religious zealots part of that is easy to explain - the Christian Right is Machiavellian as fuck. They don’t care that Donald Trump is basically the poster boy for all seven deadly sins, so long as he continues to normalize them, stuff the courts with judges that are friendly to their causes and just keep…