Hodor?

Now that the mystery of Hodor's limited vocabulary has been solved, there's much depend about his free will. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go watched GoT or pick another entry because Holy SPOILERS Batman!

In Days of Future Past, they had to send Wolverine's mind back in time to his old body because he was the only one who could handle the mental trauma. I think something similar happened to Wylis/Hodor. When Bram warged into past Hodor to get present Hodor moving, it created a strange time loop Wylis's mind wasn't meant to endure. It broke him.

His fundamental personality of being warm and kind remained and he could make very small decisions but he couldn't calculate. When he was being tormented by the Night's Watch Wildling Party, he couldn't think enough to strike back. He knew to run away but not to fight back.

He knows who treats him well and, therefore, who he cares about. He wanted to protect Bram so he chose to hold the door. Had Bram not made Hodor move, Hodor would have likely been wight chow. Rather than run scared (a valid option), Hodor chose to stay and protect his friend.

The actor who played Hodor said that aside from the initial push, everything else was Hodor's choice. You can even see it in his eyes. I firmly believe that when the end came, Hodor made the difficult and brave choice to die for his friends. Now we just have to find out whether the writers will torment us by making him a wight or not.

Why Are the Dead Still Walking?

I watched an episode of The Walking Dead with BF last night. I did my best not to be an askhole and follow along but there was one thing that always bugged me. Why are the zombies a continuing problem?

If they follow the basic rules of decomposition, the decaying flesh would eventually lose functionality to the point of rendering the zombie immobile. Soft tissue would be the first thing to go like the eyes and brain. Eyes are self-cleaning organs so with cells regenerating or doing anything helpful, most zombies would be blind in a matter of days.

Even if Walker #3 has glasses, he lacks the instinct to swat away the flies who want to lay maggots in that nice soft tissue. Territorial stray dogs might attack them and even some birds might figure out the blind ones are easy pickings.

There’s also the vast amounts of bacteria living in our bodies. The idea of vampires rising like started from the swell and release of fluids by unembalmed dead. If you’re in a hot and humid enough location, zombies are going to pop like rancid balloons from hell. If you’re guts have blown, the zombie will be knocked to the ground and possibly immobile since a lot of what keeps our joints moving and together is soft tissue.

Other environments are just as bad for walking necrotic flesh. Deserts would dry out and slowly mummify the tissue. It also poses the possibility of cooking what’s left of the brain. Freezing temperatures would freeze whatever water remained in the tissue making them rigid and slow.

Even if I focus on the poppable zombies of TWD, Georgia has animals. They’re not exactly stomping around Atlanta for most of the show so why aren’t bears, cougars, and aggressive stray dogs picking these bastards off? Where are the bugs going after the soft tissue?

Even if they are wandering around Atlanta, it’s still freaking Georgia. The streets make for nice corrals to light ‘em up, either with guns or Molotov cocktails. The fire should destroy the tissue at least rendering them immobile and cooking up what’s left of the brain at best. We’ve established they’re not smart enough to stop, drop, and roll.

Also, how did this even become a thing? Most developed nations are pretty on their shit about rare diseases. Even if the zombie virus started in rural Africa, it’s not going to spread to the entire world. How many Americans who never left the continent got Ebola? 0.

All zombie viruses in the mythos start as blood borne. Even if it turns airborne, it doesn’t turn people until after their dead. Even if it’s an air born virus that turns people upon infection, most countries haven’t forgotten what quarantine is. If someone is visibly sick coming in to a foreign country, they don’t get to stroll around the airport. Customs is going to have some questions.

Even if the zombie virus started in the U.S. (and Fear the Walking Dead makes me think otherwise), there are cops, multiple branches of the military, a freaking government agency dedicated to disease, and how many universities and hospitals available to work on this shit? At least some of those people have to be competent when a national emergency is declared. Can we please write a script where someone, anyone, has seen a zombie movie and has common sense? Sure it might only be 90 minutes but it’d be an interesting, realistic 90 minutes.

Does GoT need to G-O for What Happened to Sansa?

The internet is abuzz with the recent episode of Game of Thrones. Much like everyone else, I have my own opinion on the matter

SPOILER ALERT

I completely agree that the writers of this show use rape as a plot device and it needs to stop. It perpetuates rape culture and normalizes the behavior to the general audience. I’ve considered more than once walking away from the show because of it. A variety of fans, bloggers, and the like have publically walked away from the show because of Sansa’s rape at the hands of Ramsey. I completely respect and support their decision.

That said, the writers had to do some major character condensation to keep the storylines flowing. There are already so many side narratives and characters that they don’t all fit in one episode anymore. According to multiple sources, Jeyne Poole (the condensed character) gets it much worse in the book than Sansa did on the show.

The Washington Post has an excellent piece that says the show fully acknowledged this was a rape and did as tasteful a job presenting it as possible. We know Ramsey is a monster and knew he’d torment his bride. I respect the show for not victimizing the character with how the scene was treated.

The show is on thin ice with me personally but this is not what will break it. The writers were trying to do as accurate a job as possible while condensing characters. That is not easy.

If we’re going to attack anyone about this incident, let’s go after Martin for creating such a monstrous character. I’ve read enough of the books to suspect that Martin writes with the male gaze even when it’s a female point of view character.

If we’re really going to attack the writers, let’s attack them for making all of the kidnapping slavers black. We finally get more than a few token characters of color and they’re all bad guys? Really GoT? Really?

A Lack of Color

I have a celebrity crush on Nonso Anozie. I watched Ender's Game and tweeted that he was just as cute in that as he was Game of Thrones. He favorited it and I did a fangirl squee.

Who is he? He's the black guy in GoT, Dracula (the series), Ender's Game, and The Grey.

I never truly appreciated how white washed my media was until I had to explain who he is but I was definitely starting to see it in Ender's Game. One of the characters was known for being Spanish and an incredibly beautiful young boy. In the book it is very clear this character has tan skin and black hair. While Moises Arias is mixed and fluent in Spanish, he looked as Anglo as anyone in that movie.

Arias did a very good job in the role but they didn't do much to make him look the part. It makes me wonder if the auditioned anyone who did. Something similar happened on The Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence did an amazing job but I don't think the casting should have been a call for Aryan breeding.

Looking at GoT, almost everyone is white. There are 2 black characters, the pirate and the richest man in Qarth. Even the background characters have little diversity. I'm against colorblind casting in a period piece but this is a fantasy where characters' hair colors aren't restricted to the norms. Why is the skin color?

Why can't there be any background Wildlings that look like Eskimos? Why can't some of the average citizens in King's Landing have some diversity? Why was the BFF in Warm Bodies a white girl when she's a one-armed black chick in the book?

I have a friend from India who has a roommate named Igor. His group house is like a mini-UN with all the places of origins in that house. The group of people I socialize with includes a variety of faiths, races, genders, and professions. (This includes a Chinese doctor and very WASP-y lawyer. Make your own jokes.)

Why can't Hollywood reflect my reality? If the level of whitewashing in Hollywood is starting to grate on white people, you know it's time to change.

Music: City of Angels by Thirty Seconds to Mars

Love Me, Love My Media

I found a great article about how one woman refuses to date any man from the internet who doesn't admit to watching or reading something by women.

I posted this article on FB and had two major disagreements in any hour. The stand out quotes were:

"I read and watch what I like to read and watch. The gender, ethnicity, and religion of the creator don't matter to me."

"The quote "If that’s how you want this to go, that’s your call, but I’ll be over here flirting with the guy who wants to talk about how Pulp Fiction paved the way for Inglorious Basterds" would be (justifiably) ridiculed if it was said by a man."

Of course the Tarantino comparison should be ridiculed. Male directors making violent movies with almost exclusively male casts isn't anything new and the article says as much. The only thing The L Word and OITNB have in common is the lesbian relationships, hour long format, and women dominating the story. There is limited overlap in subject matter, locations, actors, broadcast format, etc. Male characters are the supporting cast and that's the rarity.

"It severely warps our sense of humanity when all the stories we absorb are ones in which men are people and women are background decoration." Of course we all primarily consume media we like but what you like is a valid factor when selecting who to have coffee with from the internet. 

But if you only like books, TV shows, and movies starring, directed by, and written by white men, you're only hearing the stories of (mostly white) men. And I say from experience, not all men can capture a female voice. We are not as conscious of our boobs as some male writers like to think we are.

If you never hear stories by people of color, people of faith (or atheism if you're religious), women or some intersection of the above, you're only hearing part of the story. An Asian immigrant woman is going to have a different point of view than a lesbian from Brooklyn or a gay man from the Bible Belt.

What bothered me was that my friends dismissed the article without really seeing the point. It's about the dominance of male voices and how that's completely normal. 

Female directors, female writers, and female lead movies are grossly underrepresented. Only one female has won an Academy Award for Best Director ever. What was the last female lead movie you saw? Can you name a movie with a female lead that realistically deals with issues women face?

Geeks have been begging for a Wonder Woman movie since The Avengers came out but the studios kept offering BS reasons why it wasn't happening. Like how men wouldn't see a female lead action movie (Lara Croft) or there'd be a lack of audience (millions of forum posts on the internet disagree). 

Fans shouldn't have to fight for media that's both wanted and needed. Batman got a reboot, Thor and Captain America got 2 movies, Iron Man got 3, Arrow and The Flash got live action TV shows before Wonder Woman gets her day in the sun. Also, can we get a little more Black Widow please?

I wouldn't call either of these guys sexist but I don't know if I'd call them feminists either. What seems fairly obvious to me clearly isn't to them. The world is doing a much better job of telling their story so it may be harder for them to see.

The big lessons to take away are:

1) Don't list too many of anything on your internet dating profile. 

Keep your list of media to 5 or 6, 10 at the absolute max. Give a sampling. When it comes to dating profiles, too much is never a good idea.

2) Be open minded. 

If a guy only lists a handful of media and they're all by men, he may deserve a chance. Maybe he just needs some help to find the right female driven show/book. And men, find some female centered media. Learning more about our lives and our voices can only be good for you.

Music: Wonder by The Doubleclicks

A Few of My Favorite Things: Fandom Shows

Star Trek, Warehouse 13, Battlestar Galatica, Firefly, Supernatural, Fringe, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a variety of others have such a devout following that they’ve created their own communities on-line. 

Fandoms provide such a level of unity among people who might otherwise be strangers. It creates a common ground and gives you something to be excited about. And let’s face it, fighting over the fate of the world as you know is way more interesting than which scandal is seeking revenge on a desperate housewife or cougar.

A Few of My Favorite Things: Face Off

This may be the most interesting and positive reality program on television but it’s not getting the traction it deserves because it’s ‘genre.’ It’s a special effects make-up reality competition where a variety of artists compete for money, a car, and a huge professional opportunity.

One of my favorite things about this show is that it lacks 2 major elements from reality television: schadenfreude and backstabbing.

Contestants on Face Off will rise or fall based on the strength of their concept and execution. Hurting someone else does not guarantee them a win or prevent elimination. They also have to deal with each other once the show is over. Their profession isn’t that big and paths will likely cross. What’s the point in generating bad blood when it gets you nothing?

There’s also no schadenfreude. Most talent shows include a few contestants who have no right to be there. They have no skill and no shot at advancing. They exist solely for the audience to laugh at. Face Off doesn’t do that. Every contestant has a right to be there, everyone has the skills. It’s one of my favorite shows for a reason.

A Few of My Favorite Things: Doctor Who

It’s sci-fi and adventure with a dash of history and science and physics thrown in. It started in 1963 paused in the 1980’s and picked up running in the 2000’s. It’s a show that has touched millions, created communities, broken hearts, and brought joy.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Doctor Who has literally changed my life. Hanging around Whovians has lead me to some great friends and The Boy. My life has shifted in a big way because I’ve added wonderful people to my life. Much like hockey, Doctor Who has brought joy, excitement, and some disappointment into my world but I wouldn’t change it for anything.

Stupid Is as Stupid Watches

I saw a pre-release of About Time with my friend Lizzie. We ended up in a conversation with the woman next to us about Girls and Sex and the City. It wasn’t a positive conversation.

For the record, I tried really hard to like Girls. Despite Lena Dunham’s talent sa a writer I hate every character on that show. They are all incredibly self-involved, self-destructive, whiney, and idiotic. No person I know is acquainted with anyone like them so to people outside of Brooklyn, they’re not that believable either.

I thought SATC was overrated as well. These women were doing things in their 30s I know better than to do in my 20s. Samantha would have all kinds of STDs and major emotional intimacy issues. I’ve only known one person my adult life that rivals Charlotte for unrealistic ideas about love and marriage. Carrie spends so much money on designer items and time in emotionally unavailable men that if she were your friend, you’d want to smack her.

The woman next to us said “It’s like they’re glorifying stupidity.” I agree totally.

SATC reinforces the same stupid stereotypes I wish women would get away from. Carrie spends so much money on designer shoes and clothes that she can’t afford her apartment. Years are wasted pining after Mr. Big who was emotionally unavailable. IRL, neither of these situations would have ended well but where’s the fun in reality? Better to teach women you can make a man fall in love with you and designer clothes are more important than rent.

Charlotte firmly believes in the Park Avenue fairytale and once she thinks she has it, she stops working for anything else. When that falls apart, she doesn’t have much left. Despite these major mistakes, she learns nothing. In the second movie she becomes overwhelmed by her family despite not working and having a nanny. The lesson here is that you can have unrealistic ideas about love and marriage and you’ll end up being Mrs. X from The Nanny Diaries.

Girls teaches that you can be a useless, selfish, and lazy but there aren’t any consequences. When Hannah gets an ebook deal and is faced with real work and possible success, she self-sabotages. I found her pathetic but the popularity of the show will reinforce the behavior.

Emotional stability and plotlines based in reality must not make compelling television because these stories keep repeating. In About Time, a woman makes similar mistakes but doesn’t get off so easily. It broke your heart to watch but I loved that she had bona fide consequences.

Maybe that’s why I said About Time was quiet. Every person in the movie was realistic and didn’t act like idiots. We need more of that on TV. I’m going to back to my genre fiction where women don’t take crap and kick butt. Let me know when muggle writers start writing better women.

Music: Suffragette by Nina Gordon