People should stop with the “minimum requirements of not being terrible” thing. It just doesn’t make sense to point out that something is wrong, and then when people start taking the small steps necessary to correct that wrongness deriding those steps as “just the bare minimum of not being awful”. Small steps in the right direction are still small steps in the right direction.

Also the minimum requirements of not being a terrible corporation are, you know, not employing slave labor or driving your employees to suicide or selling guns with the slogan “Good for killing those pesky blacks!”. Hiring a (relatively) diverse set of corporate spokespeople is well above the “bare minimum of not being terrible”.

But if you can’t discuss a character’s choices and flaws, what’s the point of paying attention to serious fiction?

If everything can be dismissed with “oh, he just did what the drama demanded”, that seems to render something like The Wire totally pointless.

Sure, Romeo & Juliet would be boring if Romeo took a deep breath and talked to Fr. Lawrence. But talking about that flaw, about why he made that decision and what it says about the character, and so on, is what makes it a worthwhile play.

So the point here isn’t so much “Stringer should have done X, then he would have succeeded”; it’s to lay out what mistakes he made, and in doing so to better understand his character, and why he made those mistakes, and so forth.

Truth.

Come on, people. That’s from the bullshit alternate timeline from the TV series.

Everyone knows Skynet really went self-aware back in 1997.

Again, with the context: the brother is a (perhaps sexually) abusive monster, and they come from a family that traditionally married their own siblings (c.f., the Lannisters, who are currently incestuous, but are not traditionally so), so their relationship is…complex. So the leering was pretty much par for the course with him. The terrible, misogynistic grossness of the whole thing is kind of the point (c.f., “I would let 40,000 people fuck you if I get the throne back”)

Also with the ceremonial dances: the Dothraki are a barbarian hoard whose culture is basically built entirely around sex and death (life is short when you’re basically always at war, after all). It’s probably at least a bit racist to have the only colored people in the show be so wildly primitive and “other”, but again, the misogyny is sort of the point.

Also also, not to be spoilery, but Daenerys will…uh…grow substantially as a character, shall we say. So to a large extent, the twisted misogyny that she’s currently surrounded by is setting up her character’s development. One of those trials by fire sorts of things. Of course, whether or not it’s inherently misogynistic to use sexual abuse as a character-growth plot point is certainly up to debate, but it’s at least another factor to consider.

But yeah, I have a bit of an ongoing debate with some friends over the degree of misogyny in the books. There is a lot of it, and deciding how much is necessary to the story, and how much is just gross, is definitely up for debate. I will say, though, that while the treatment of women is absolutely terrible at some points, there are also a number of incredibly strong, complex female characters, which I think makes it harder to lay a blanket claim of misogyny on the entire series.

TL;DR: last night’s episode was pretty ok!

Don’t forget the healthy dose of “Young Stud teaches flailing Nerd how to be more Young and Studly, but then in the end the Nerd realizes that to be Truly Cool he should Just Be Himself and then also he drops some Wisdom Knowledge on the Young Stud after said Stud realizes how shallow and empty his narcissistic lifestyle really is.”

On a related note, has anyone ever noticed how all these romantic comedies have the same exact plot as Mighty Ducks?

Close Encounters of the Comfortable Kind