Is it in the text?

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

 

I remain consistently amazed by people who read "A Song of Ice and Fire" and clearly misunderstand the text. How can you, for example, read the saga and come away with the idea that Tywin is a role-model in how to govern or rule a family? The proofs for the opposite conclusion are right there in the text, and I could quote you a host of scenes in which is made entirely clear, from Tywin's stinking corpse to hill clans dying for "The Ned's" daughter. But PoorQuentyn is doing such a consistently good job with this that I'll let him earn the laurels for it. 

Why biopics suck even on the moon

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

 

On the site "Birth Movies Death", there's an interesting review about the bioic "First Man", which covers Neill Armstrong's landing on the moon:

The other side of northern badassery

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look! 

There's a thought that come to me randomly thinking about the part of "A Dance with Dragons" in which the greybeards of several northern houses join up mainly (though not exclusively) with Stannis. In the text, we get the explanation that, with winter looming, they go on what essentially is a suicide mission to relieve their communities of useless mouths. Instead of doing it as literal suicide, as seems common in the North (disguised as "going hunting"), they use their death wish to "taste Bolton blood on my lips" (there's an image for you). 

The intricacies of expanded universes

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look! 

I thought about expanded universes a bit staring at a T-Shirt of my son's, featuring a tryptychon of a stormtrooper, Captain Phasma, Finn and Kylo Ren. Captain Phasma, I came to realize, is a bit of an oddity in the new canon. So, let's wind back a bit to 2015, where the only thing in existence was "The Force Awakens", just before additional material was released.