Gormongous

To jump into this conversation at its least useful point, I think that the power of not having an aging filmmaker whose principal desire is to make films his kids would like cannot be underestimated for the vitality of a franchise. Whatever their other many evils, corporations are ageless and never have the kind of crisis that Lucas clearly had throughout all of the prequel Star Wars movies.

I'd really like to see the socioeconomic breakdown for people who are fans of Family Guy. I strongly suspect it's middle-class and white, but it'd be really interesting to see how or even if it fit into the viewing habits of a working-class or people-of-color family. What about Game of Thrones was making you think about this sort of gate-keeping? I've mostly just noticed general excitement, but I'm sure there's something I'm missing.

That's a fair point. I keep sounding like I'm preaching some egalitarian future of cultural references, which is super gross anyway, but I'm fully aware that there is a definite cutoff if you don't have a TV and you only access the internet from your local library. There's the ability to fill in the context through Wikipedia, but it's an inferior ability and one that those "in the know" take great pleasure in ferreting out, which is culture policing as brutal as Catullus' mockery of Suffenus. It's still just so different to me from medieval reference culture, where monks specially trained to read and write a dead language were packing their chronicles full of references to works of which there were only two hundred copies in the entire world, all only available to other monks or their secular patrons. Even up to the nineteenth century, extreme wealth and leisure were the prerequisites for participating in reference culture, so it's a big enough change for me to note, I feel. Yeah! Some of the best dissertations and monographs of the last forty years have been written about previously reviled historians of yore who once or twice accidentally said something incredibly illuminating or just plain useful. I'd give a whole lot to travel forward five hundred years and see what the history of the twentieth-first century looks like, compared to our history of five hundred years ago.

But reference culture isn't really predicated on socioeconomic status anymore, which is the point I really failed to make. It's a subculture elitism rather than a mainstream elitism. In fact, mainstream elitism has responded by taking pride in a refusal to recognize (and therefore legitimize) the "new" reference culture. There still exists the ability to shut everyone else down by bringing up a specific footnote from Infinite Jest, but much more common is to have a show flatter your encyclopedic knowledge of 80s television, the possession of which is something almost antithetical to the wealth and social status upon which reference culture used to depend. Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that hyper-referential media is the wave of the future. It's just a cultural force that's been around a long time and will probably be more prevalent as the years go on with the internet being more and more of a thing. Family Guy and its ilk are really just growing pains in the popularization of reference culture, which I don't doubt will become less common as jokes like "Hey, I know a thing that you know" become less of a pleasant surprise for audiences.

This is exactly the post I've been thinking about making for a couple days now. "Reference culture", if we can just call it that, is thousands of years old and in many cases is the only way we know about many classical and pre-classical works, though some uninspired historian like Eutropius who could only reference better authors he'd read once upon a time. The difference, like Tycho says, is that mass media and now the internet gives us the ability to recognize these references regardless of our education, making reference culture a popular rather than elite phenomenon for the first time. My instinct, as an over-educated academic, is to call this a bad thing, but I'm not so sure. Having works that are all about crosstalk and interconnectivity has to be positive, when all is said and done, no matter how obnoxious they are as a thing right now. I can easily imagine, after the Great Internet Collapse of 2072, some twenty second-century historian revering Family Guy as the Rosetta Stone of twentieth-century Western culture, since it references so many memes and shows how they were thought to relate to each other, although I feel a little sick when I do imagine it. Is this how the readers of Fredegar felt in 643?

I could have sworn there was a thread for general site feedback, but I'll put it here and get yelled at instead. I would give a lot for a "random episode" button at the top of each podcast's archive page. Sometimes I just want to listen to the Thumbs talk while I grade and it's a lot of extra clicks just to find some random episode that I didn't just hear. Thoughts!

I am avid fan of Shinbo and Shaft, thanks to his pitch-perfect adaptation of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei and his ability to make me understand maid moe with Soredemo I Can't Remember the Full Title, Sorry Tegan, but I lost the faith after Bakemonogatari. I was watching it like I watched SZS, pausing for every interstitial text slide and mentally comparing scenes for visual matches, but while that was there in Bakemonogatari, it was all fluff that meant nothing. The show was really about... I don't know what the show was really about. That's probably why I finished the season, including the silly and confusing "bonus" episodes, and put down the series to pick up again sometime in 2125. With all that said, it's really nice for you to say all that about Monogatari Second Season. It sounds like Shinbo's finding where he wants to take the show, even if he hasn't taken it there yet. I might pick it up again sometime this century now, although I'm still leery of Nisemonogatari, about which not even Shaft devotees have much nice to say.

Actually, we can blame Danielle, because she actually says, "There's now a satirical game review site that does that." Is it wrong that my main reason for dismissing this post is the use of two consecutive "-ly" adverbs? What style guide is that, man?

The Thumbs said it on the latest podcast, so I guess everyone knows now.

I'm four episodes into Princess Tutu and loving it. Thanks, Codicier and Tegan, for bringing it up one last time to push me over the edge. The metafictional and allegorical touches are what I'm sure I'll remember, but right now my favorite thing is a marriage-obsessed ballet-teaching cat. Neko-sensei is already one of my favorite running jokes in any anime ever, except maybe the "You were there?" "Yes, always" and the "Don't call me normal!" bits from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (which is trying to be a comedy, unlike Princess Tutu, so they don't count).

I know several women who don't want anything to do with any men ever again, which they sometimes articulate as "I hate/want to kill all men" because they're frustrated that men are everywhere and always expect to be accepted into any group or any conversation. It hurts me, because I don't want to think I'm hated for who I am, but I know that's the experience of so many women, queers, and minorities, so I'm learning to deal with the discomfort from my position of privilege and authority.

I don't think it's someone sock-puppeting or hot-linking, if that's what you're saying. Almost everyone involved has been around for months and posted good stuff in unrelated threads. The last thing I'd want to do is discount the opinion of someone with whom I disagree because they're not as active on a forum as I am. I'm more inclined to say that the split between regulars and newbies is happenstance here, at worst a miscommunication of forum culture and tone.

Ugh, I understand and agree with some of what you're saying, but you don't need to lapse into a fallacy of relative privation and the oppression olympics. There's no reason we can't talk about both topics here, on an internet forum of friends.

Hey Swedes!

One of the biggest problems with the Borg is that they magnify a weakness of Star Trek's writing in general. The Borg are infinitely more knowledgeable and powerful than any other race in the galaxy, so they always have to be defeated through something unquantifiable, most often "human ingenuity". This kind of defeat is interesting and effective once, but it's happened over and over now. "You didn't account for love and friendship, my queen!" Barf. Yeah, I love the Borg in theory, but outside of TNG and very few VOY episodes they're terrible.

That's a good point. I admit, I've missed having a journalist Thumb on the podcast. They play more games and games they don't like, which adds spice to the conversation.

Great post, but I assume you mean the movie? The series is immaculate and has held up to almost yearly viewings.

Hmm, I see. But we're not talking about reclaiming the word "rape", which is a negative word about a negative thing. We're talking about reclaiming words like "faggot", which is a negative word describing a positive thing. If the referent is positive, then changing the connotation of the referrer to reflect it is good and useful. EDIT: Dammit, Twig!

I love this post. I agree completely, the power of slurs is history, which allows them to be understood universally as slurs. If the connotation of a former slur is interpreted as something positive, the slur is useless to the original party, because it no longer causes distress. Sure, they might make up a new slur, but its history has to start from scratch to get the same understanding. I can't just start calling people "feebleweebles" and have them break down in tears. It takes years and years, in the meantime "faggot" and "gay" and "dyke" have lost a lot of their bite and are becoming tools for building LGBTQ community. Words are all about history. Take that away and they become meaningless. That makes reclaiming them so powerful, if done right. I get what you're saying, but is there any example of a word being used "devoid of subjectivity"? This sounds like a fairly extreme hypothetical to me.

I admit, I don't understand. So if I spend all day imagining mutilating children and then having sex with their corpses, I'm not committing an immoral act? I don't want to suggest thought crimes here, but there are definitely things in my head that transgress my sense of morality. Not the "dead children" one, though.

I actually agree with a lot of what you say, although you mischaracterize the position of the Thumbs and this forum in the process. No one wants to ban South Park, but its influence is not wholly positive. I think the real danger is creating fictional characters that serve as ideation for their audience. South Park didn't create racists, but it did make a lot of kids I knew when it first got popular think it was okay to act as racist as I guess they must have felt deep down. Sometimes the fact that it's satire doesn't matter when it comes to giving someone a figure to which they can attach their beliefs as legitimate. I think very strongly that we should have Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos in fiction, but I don't pretend we're not playing with fire. I see a lot of Heisenberg shirts around campus and I saw a lot of cheering on the internet when Walt went off on his misogynistic rant against Skyler. These people aren't idiots without the ability to understand a work. They just have a worldview that enables them to take away a different message than the author probably intended, which is on the author, as Badfinger says.

So just a more specific example of Poe's Law, then? Interesting. I'm actually finding a lot of the same rewatching The Sopranos. Tony is obviously a tragically flawed figure, with his violence and stubbornness causing all his problems, but he's also portrayed as clever, respected, and bighearted. Reading a lot of the (by now decade-old) criticism on the web, many people saw him as a fundamentally good person they were supposed to like, rather than a lovable sociopath they weren't supposed to like, which makes me wonder where all the misogyny, bigotry, and overall brutality goes for them.

On local politics, I think a lot of my adolescence was discovering that people are really interesting, and a lot of my adulthood is discovering that politics (really, people interacting with other people) is really interesting. I'm not really abreast with St. Louis politics, mostly because they're depressing, but the university where I work has undergone the most hilarious power struggle with its president over the last few years. Indulge me a little thick description? He tried to implement a tenure "review board" through one of his vice presidents, presumably so that he wouldn't have to take the fall if there were backlash, but then he stood by his pawn when the backlash did happen, maybe just out of spite. Since he'd been hated for years by everybody for his autocracy and cronyism, both faculty and students demanded that he step down. Instead, over the course of an entire year during which he received three unanimous votes of no confidence, he conducted this hilarious "voice of the resistance" campaign: sending out paranoid and long-winded "all is well" emails to the entire campus, convincing the board of trustees that the no-confidence votes were fraudulent, and even organizing a week-long Novena of Grace for an entire week to "heal our divisions and promote peaceful coexistence". For a little while, it actually seemed like he'd won at least the privilege of living out the rest of his term as a lame duck, but then in the middle of the banquet for his twenty-fifth anniversary as president, he rose and announced apropos of nothing that he was stepping down in order to minister to starving African children, literally. He then vacated the presidency as fast as possible, probably to leave the university in as much chaos as possible. It didn't work, but man... I feel really lucky to have kept tabs on the whole thing. I basically got to see the fall of a mid-century banana republic dictator, but without the civil war or death squads. Great episode, guys!

Yeah, I just got and downloaded it, couldn't be happier to have a little egg on my face.

It's interesting, I feel like a lot of superhero comic books take place (or want to take place) in a post-racial world where our biggest problems are supervillains and not poverty or starvation. Only recently has the same (ultimately nominal) effort been made for them to take place (or try to take place) in a post-sexist world where women get to be one of the boys, to be facile about it. It ties back to the most recent "political games" thread, really. How do you go about designing an apolitical setting, knowing that it's impossible