All Thoughts Being Equal

Can't remember how I came across this post— We Are Not Things: Mad Max versus Game of Thrones —but I think it's worth talking about at some length, if not a full post length. Two portrayals of a world where women hold dubious power and are seen as “things.” One of these is roundly criticized for it. One of them is roundly celebrated for it. Game of Thrones catches hell for its portrayal of women and this subject. Mad Max is wreathed in a garland of bike chains and hubcabs for it. What, then, is the difference? Here we go. I'll just come out and say that I think the article misunderstands how the themes of Mad Max and Game of Thrones are different: Max Max is about liberation , while Game of Thrones is about the nature and abuse of power. The article focuses on frequency and point-of-view as two points of contrast between MM and GoT . I'm not sure of the author believes that sexual assault should never be depicted, or if depicted, only once? Frequ...

Too late for that plea , apparently, but here’s why basically any video game based on A Song of Ice and Fire,* George R. R. Martin’s gloriously grimdark Take That to the heroic fantasy genre and real-life medieval romanticism, is doomed to failure. The issue comes with the psychology of video games themselves. A video game is meant to be beaten , to at least give some sense of accomplishment for putting time and (rarely more than minimal thumb-twirling) effort into it, whether five minutes beating the next level of Peggle or fifteen bajillion hours grinding towards Blizzard’s latest glass ceiling in World of Warcraft . Even when a game is fundamentally depressing (rarely) or at least a big mind screw you can at least say “well, even if the ending was shit/confusing/nonexistant I still figured out Puzzle X” (*ahem* Braid and Limbo, otherwise quite excellent games). No specific spoilers, but A Song of Ice and Fire is far and away not conducive to that kind of narrative. It becomes...