The messiness of that world is one aspect to be illuminated. All those things strewn all over the place. Telling of them is its own goal. So… rather than a lazy grab bag randomly thrown together, such art actually has it own own form; it is a clear illumination of the messiness itself, highlighting the details within…

It is the opposite though. The reason it works is because each element, which seems unrelated, hold together as a whole. A mess which has all sort of ideas together with other. Sort of like life. Or feelings. Or the world. Things which happen, that seem to not make sense, but nevertheless do, which are in a whole…

They aren't superficial differences. Tori's stuff is awkward and lumbering, when compared to Kate's, precisely because of those differences.

Sort of… the objectivity of art is not separate from our response to it. When people like a work of art, they do so because it reflects something they care about, which the think is important. When someone says they like something, it is the beginning of the inquiry in to the work, not the end. Since a work of art is…

I think that notion is a red-herring. No-one is arguing representation should served before the story. They are arguing for representation in effective stories.

You did that.

The problem, as I see it, is the attacks on the article here, by and large, aren't doing that. Instead of proposing why, on its own terms, the show should be otherwise, they are just mauling the article for daring to suggest a property should represent minorities to an extent.

Well… the thing is…

Ehh… I have to say a response like this makes me rather uncomfortable. It supposes the story, with the supposed changes, simply would not work, as if the function of the story was necessarily dependent on the details which would be changed. Would the plot really be compromised, for example, if Peggy had a female ally…

But it is, for you are complaining about their decision to make the discintion between cis and trans, as if it was some crime to do so. So what if they didn't need to mention they were cis to be understood to be cis?

Yeah… this is not good. You are actively calling for the erasure of trans people here. You are suggesting the are so rare we don't even need to bother with them (i.e. respect them), that we should always assumes someone is cisgender.

I think much discussion on this issue is sort of missing the point. What is really at stake how the media is promoting a value or political interest. This is not merely restricted to "biased" editorials. Instances of the merely reporting the facts have impacts in the context.

"He isn't going to hurt you to give you a thrill, like you two just road a roller coaster ride together, he is going to hurt you because he likes to hurt you."

Oh, my bad. I misread you: I thought you were saying he wouldn't have liked Cloud Atlas.

He actually thought the exact opposite:

It's not really a tangent, with respect to the whole piece. She is making a point about how we learn from the culture around us, from the ideas we encounter, from the experiences we learn about. It's actually one critical to her argument.

Well… the difficulty here sexism and homophobia are inseparable from harsh attacks against this column, given the person who writes them and the issues she writes about.

The problem isn't that people get offended. It is that use of stereotypes and pejorative terms affect how others understand minority groups. These effects are a problem regardless of whether of whether someone intends them.

Go for the eyes of course. Always.

I, more or less, agree. To me Game Of Thrones, and a Song Of Ice and Fire , don't have characters which are all that deep and its story isn't really saying anything profound. Much of what people read as "deep" is more a question of surprise at unexpected events than the substance of the plot or characters ( Jamie…