Mr. Bates is wildly overpowered.

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.

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!

“Written by Gay Hendricks.”

Duh.

Fort Circuit

There is an idea of battle-tested bayonets, bro; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real battle-tested bayonets: only a troll, something illusory. And though I can hide my cocaine, and you can shake my fists of fire and feel tiger blood pulsing within and maybe you think you sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… you simply are not winning.

I tried to warn you about that book, Gabe. This oughta teach ya.

http://videogum.com/268532/close-reading-the-vanity-fair-hollywood-issue-cover-photo/where-are-they-now/#comment-8302811

Without even thinking about it, I read this comment in Fozzie Bear’s voice. Needless to say, it was amazing.

Oh no, I didn’t find the book particularly dense. In fact, I didn’t have much of a problem with the prose at all, particularly since I read it in translation. Nope, it’s the characters and the plot that make the book terrible.

Sorry to rant about how fucking awful this book is, monsters. But I can’t talk about this IRL, because it seems like everyone has read this piece of garbage and liked it, and I don’t want to be That Guy who tears down something that people like. At least not in person. But this is a Safe Place, and I have to get it out somewhere.

Can I go ahead and preemptively nominate the Beach Read Tattoo Girl movie for the next Hunt? Because holy shit. That book is fucking terrible. And anything based on that book also has to be terrible, QED. Unless of course they change literally everything about every one of the characters, because they are all terrible monster-reflections of real characters, and also change basically the whole plot so it isn’t such an alternatingly miserable and mind-numbingly dull concoction of exploitative rape-fantasy and despair.

Seriously though, if it weren’t for Twilight, that fucking book would be The Worst.

Whoa. I’d never heard David Lynch’s voice before.

And now I’ve just realized that for some reason, I’d always assumed that David Lynch’s voice sounded exactly like Christopher Lee’s. I’m just going to pretend I never saw this video so I can maintain that assumption.