In the years I’ve been working as a professional critic, I’ve never been as excited for a follow-up to a directorial debut as I have been for whatever Niell Blomkamp decided to do after District 9, his story of a South Africa in which white and black citizens have united to enforce apartheid on a group of stranded aliens they’ve herded into townships, which for my money was both the smartest alien invasion movie and one of the most shattering love stories in years. I’d heard rumbles that his subsequent feature, Elysium, would follow up on some of the same themes, and according to the first reported plot summary, it sounds like that’s the case:

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard the government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

In between this and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim (In Time did this too, but less well) I’m very, very excited for the fact that a new crop of sci-fi movies that recognize that mobility is something that gets more valuable as society gets more stratified. Immigration reform gets treated like a poor people’s cause, in some limited cases, like it’s a gay cause—lack of mobility from one country to the next becomes a magnifying factor of the joblesseness and violence people face in Mexico, or the second-class treatment by the federal government of marriages between same-sex couples. But the ability to move across borders, and to do so free from harassment isn’t something we should take for granted. I’ve always loved fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which recognizes that restricting mobility and immigration is a way of reinforcing inequality. I’m choosing to believe that two big-budget science fiction movies on one of my favorite themes is my reward for fighting sexism.

Mother Jones’ campaign ads from Game of Thrones are pretty genius, all the way down to quotes pulled from WesterosNetDaily—and present a genius case against Daenerys Targaryen:

They’re also a reminder of an interesting and underdiscussed factor, I think, in A Song of Ice and Fire: the fact that only few people have access to a very limited set of accurate information. There aren’t town criers or rudimentary publications. The public forums we see are largely organized by religious factions: rumor is spread as part of prophecy and preaching, rather than presented as news. Elites who can send and receive ravens are among the few people who get reasonably timely reports about events, and news is expected to trickle down from there. When Stannis Baratheon challenges Joffrey’s legitimacy, he sends ravens to noble families, and assume that’s what needs doing—there’s no thought of or means to spread the news publicly and to the masses.

Nathan Rabin’s series “Hip-Hop and You Do Stop” is fantastic, both for its musical and emotional musings on the music that helped define his youth, and for his sociological archaeology. I hadn’t, for example, known that Will Smith pulled out some ugly homophobic lyrics and AIDS-bashing earlier in his career. But I wanted to highlight his latest meditation on N.W.A. and the Fresh Prince not just for that, but for this brilliant breakdown of some of hip-hop’s ugliest gender politics, which applies equally well to some of our conversations about misogynistic nerd culture and sexual entitlement:

There’s a wonderful line from the musician-narrator of Stew’s musical Passing Strange about the sublime absurdity of spending your adulthood living out the consequences of decisions you made as a stoned teenager. In the same respect, it’s absurd—and not in a sublime way at all—that gangsta rap still largely hews reverently to the poisonous gender politics expressed by primary N.W.A. lyricists MC Ren and Ice Cube while they were still angry teenagers.

There are few things in the world more terrifying to teenaged boys than the power of teenaged girls. On the Straight Outta Compton Ice Cube spotlight track “I Ain’t Tha 1,” the rapper attempts to negate that terrifying power by fundamentally denying the humanity and agency of women, reducing the complicated, messy, and crazy-making dance of sex and romance to a simple formula: Men want sex, women want money. And it’s every real man’s solemn duty to get the sex he craves without sacrificing any of his hard-earned scratch.

When men are taught that sex is the commons (hell, that sex is a commodity), and women are taught that it’s an emotional experience, you’re not going to end up with a functional market or a set of norms for establishing relationships. Instead, you have a recipe for anger and entitlement.

The bridge is yours.

-Cloud Atlas will come out on October 26.

-Inside Zero Dark Thirty.

-Alan Sepinwall is also not fond of The Newsroom.

-In praise of cyberpunk.

-Monsters University:

I’ve mentioned Friend of the Blog Leigh Bardugo’s YA debut, Shadow and Bone, a fantasy set in a world with some similarities to Tsarist Russia in these pages before. We sat down for a long interview to mark the book’s release earlier this month—it’s now up at The Atlantic. Hearing her talk about her world-building is fascinating: she’d been interested in that period of Russian history as a child, but chose it for the novel less because she wanted to emulate the style and politics, but because her research suggested that was an era full of a combination of factors she wanted to explore. I particularly wanted to pull this excerpt where Leigh explains how she designed the magic characters in Shadow and Bone work:

The idea for the Small Science came from my interest in what happens physically when you mutter a curse or wave a wand. What are we actually seeing? This sort of opaqueness occurs with most magic. That was sort of the first straw. I decided also that I wanted a magic that was highly constrained, because I wanted the advent of modern warfare to play a part in the story. What happens when you bring a gun to a magic fight?…If the magic is constrained, if the magic is bound by rules in a very specific system, things can get really interesting. The Grisha age is ending. Yes, they are more advanced, but they are wholly reliant on these particular skills. While the rest of the world is industrializing and creating things like repeating rifles, Ravka is falling behind…

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the US. They’re these very talented people that were drawn from all over the world and cast out of places, persecuted, put to death, put in camps. So they all ended up in this one place, and for better or for worse—I think for better—they developed weapons and became a kind of brainy fighting force for the Allied Powers. And that is not is something that is strongly referenced in the book but that was sort of always in my mind in the way that Grisha had been treated. That said, in books two and three, we’re going to encounter some Grisha who had no interest in serving the Grisha or the Darkling and kind of went their own way.

A little thoughtful world design goes a long way. Designing rules your characters have to live by and that governs how the world works is a useful constraint, the kind of thing that results in consistency and clear character motivation. It’s a lesson more experienced pros who get handed hundreds of millions of dollars ::coughPrometheus:: could put to good use.

The second season of Awkward Black Girl is here:

Watching, I was struck by something I hadn’t quite put together before: unlike most other sitcoms, the show is really wholly dependent on whether you can get inside J’s head. The show is clear on the fact that she’s an unreliable narrator, and that the interactions we see are presented to us as J sees them, which makes them less naturalistic and warm, and more cartoonish and brittle (this at times also seems like a reasonable workaround for the supporting cast’s limitations). In a way, it’s a much more directly challenging show than Girls to which it’s regularly compared: unlike Lena Dunham’s sitcom, Awkward Black Girl doesn’t really give you a break from J’s head, and doesn’t regularly call out J’s anti-heroic tendencies, her prickliness, her slackerdom, her self-absorption, with the same force as the other characters on Girls do.

There’s something fascinating at work in the way these shows challenge you to like characters who are, flaws and all, essentially reasonably likable people. They’re both doing the thing that Hannah tells Marnie that she does in their big dust-up: “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone is going to think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour.”Girls and Awkward Black Girl put their characters’ worst sides front and center constantly, and then if folks make it through that hurdle and insist they’re still interested in knowing J and Hannah, get access to their kindness, humor, and smarts. It’s the exact opposite of the slacker dude meme, where Judd Apatow and company present the most charming bits of their manchildren before showing the damage they can do, and forcing them to change when they face the consequences of that damage.

Note: The author of this post emailed me last week to talk about his decision to make sure no one would ever be able to assume he’d be okay with misogyny or sexist hate-speech again. He elaborates his thoughts here.

By Ryan Steiner

Last week must have a roller coaster for Anita Sarkeesian. On the one hand, her Kickstarter project (a video series exploring the portrayal of women in video games) raised $158,917 of $6,000 goal. On the other hand, in the same week she was cursed at, threatened and insulted by appallingly hateful trolls.

I don’t want to address the trolls today, though I do not excuse their behavior. Far from it. The death threats, the obscene insults and the rape insinuations are more than I can stomach. There is no way to justify this response to Sarkeesian. I can’t relate to these people, so I doubt I will be able to say anything to change their minds. I can’t talk to the trolls, but I can talk to other men like me who have watched this mess unfold without knowing exactly how to respond.

The instinct is to say, “Well, what did she expect? This is a male-dominated industry, of course she’s going to get that response. Sure, what those guys said was awful, but come on!”
I’ve seen this happen before. I’ve played games where a woman has decided to reveal her gender and waited to see the inappropriate comments come spilling out. I’ve seen the comments left by readers on gaming blogs that skittishly ask whether or not video games generally portray women in an unhealthy way. I’m not at all surprised that this happened.
And, I would not be surprised if Anita Sarkeesian didn’t expect this to some degree, but I don’t know. Whether she did or not, my final response to the hatred directed toward Sarkeesian can’t be “it’s too bad, but you had it coming.” Instead I have to make a point of saying “what these people said is not OK.” Because the bottom line is that there is no excuse.

It doesn’t matter if the men making threats against Sarkeesian are teenagers, white trash, terrorists, bullies, men with mother issues, or irredeemable deviants. My response to these men has to be “this is not OK” because when I say that Sarkeesian should expect hatred from the trolls, I give the trolls an excuse to go ahead and do what they do best. I have to say “this is not OK” because it moves the responsibility away from Sarkeesian (the victim) and puts it onto the trolls (the aggressors. This may sound incredibly simple, but I’ve been amazed by how often the ‘what-do-you-expect’ comment has come up.

While writing this, I have asked repeatedly myself “so what? The trolls will be trolls no matter what I say.” And that may be the case. But, by actively calling out terrible behavior and not allowing excuses, I can start to change the expectations. If trolls know that they are not going to be excused for their behavior, maybe some of the more timid ones will think twice about what they say. Either way, we won’t know until we make an honest effort at condemning this hatred without exception or equivocation.

I encourage the gamer population at large to pay attention to stories like this. The Internet is filled with places to make your voice heard, and many of us participate in forums, Twitter,Facebook or other gaming communities. Instead of letting the trolls have the run of the show, make some noise. Let everyone know that the sexism and vitriol is not OK. Don’t let the trolls off the hook. And certainly, don’t make it easy for them to keep trolling.

Of course there is always a place for discourse and debate. Disagreement is fine and healthy. If you would like to debate Sarkeesian on the merits her ideas like an adult, please do. There’s always a place for healthy discussion. If you disagree, however, and respond with threats or insults keep it to yourself.

Ryan Steiner lives and writes in Seattle. You can read more on his blog, Somehow Doomed.