As excited as I am about the prospect of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie actually being a way to introduce Carol Danvers to The Avengers franchise as Captain Marvel, I’m starting to have concerns about some of the casting rumors swirling the movie. None of this is for certain, of course, but the latest buzz has Emily Blunt in talks to play the fighter-jock-turned-superheroine. I dearly love Ms. Blunt, who can do everything from sexy to hilariously, neurotically competitive. But the fact that she’s in the conversation at all raises an issue that I’ve noticed in the conversation about a female version of The Expendables, too: even as we improve the action roles available for women, Hollywood stays rather inflexible when it comes to what kind of female bodies are desirable and viable.

When word came the ensemble project was in production, the director of The Expendables 2 came up with his dream cast list, which included only one woman who is primarily an action actress. I made the point at the time that it would be nice if the movie went after actresses who specialized in action films, and had the fighting styles and physiques to match. And that’s what’s happened, starting with the additions of Gina Carano and Katee Sackhoff.

I don’t want to say that there should be strict body-type requirements for certain kinds of roles. But it’s striking that the kinds of shoulders and muscle development that are a prerequisite for male action stars don’t help women land the same kinds of roles. Good fight choreography can help suspend disbelief, which is why it was exciting and upsetting to see Scarlett Johansson face off against a ripped and sleeveless Jeremy Renner in The Avengers. But if the casting in that franchise and Angelina Jolie’s career or any indication, the ability to look great in an evening gown and to miraculously avoid sweating off your lipstick even in tense circumstances is at least as important as the ability to look physically intimidating or land a plausible punch. Blunt can do both of those things. But I’d rather see Sackhoff, who has played a tough fighter pilot before, as Carol Danvers, and to see Hollywood value a woman’s physical strength as much as her face and dress size.

I always enjoy reading Troy Patterson over at Slate, but his review of Nashville, ABC’s soapy drama about the rise of a great American city as told through the conflict between a rising country star, Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) and a falling one, Rayna James (Connie Britton), reminded me of a pet peeve: the tendency to frame conflicts between women as cat fights, rather than as expressions of legitimate divisions and substantive rivalries.

There’s no question that Juliette and Rayna don’t like each other much, and that they’re downright vicious to each other in a meeting arranged by their label. Rayna makes an effort to be nice to Juliette. But Juliette gives her what can only be described as the best modern cut direct I’ve ever seen, ignoring the attempt at a complement and an outstretched hand and turning instead to a legendary songwriter and radio host, telling him “It is such an honor to get a chance to sing for you tonight.” Even then, Rayna still tries, telling Juliette “You’re burning it up out there, girl.” But Juliette goes in for the kill, telling her: “My mama was one of your biggest fans. She said she’d listen to you while I was still in her belly.” Even if Rayna’s record sales are lagging behind Juliette’s, her fidelity to an old business model hasn’t dulled her ability to bring the burn. “Well, bless your little heart,” she tells Juliette. “That is a charming story. You probably got to go on soon. I’m sure you’re going to want to make sure you got those girls tucked in there real good.”

Taken in isolation, this would be an epic attack of cat-scratch fever. But the differences between Rayna and Juliette are real. Juliette needs pitch correction to make her recordings sound good, and her songs are poppier tunes, engineered to become earworms to listeners the same ages as Rayna’s pre-teen daughters. Those of us who mourn the homogenization of popular musical genres may sympathize with Rayna when she complains “Why do people listen to that adolescent crap? It sounds like feral cats to me. Why does everyone think she’s good?”

But on the other hand, she’s hustling in a way that Rayna’s not. Rayna may not like the new model for the music industry, but her nostalgia’s bread inflexibility. She doesn’t want to tour with Juliette, and she rejects the prospect of doing a tour in smaller venues that would both create artificial demand for tickets and help her reconnect with her most enthusiastic fans. She’s lazy about recording extra tracks for her album, and then irritated when other singers snap them up. It may be obnoxious of Juliette to go after Rayna’s bandleader and other collaborators, but she’s attuned to the careful balance between commercial success and Nashville credibility, and is making more efforts to shore up her weaknesses than Rayna is.

And if Juliette has mommy issues—hers is an addict who Juliette tries to avoid so she won’t let herself be talked into giving her mother money that would feed her drug use—that she works out by seducing any man who crosses her path, even making a play for a guy who bumps into her in a hallway, Rayna has whopping daddy issues. Hers is more present in her life than Juliette’s mother is in hers, and he’s played by Powers Boothe as a wheeling, dealing real estate tycoon. In denial about how much her father has helped her recording career and prickly about the possibility of coming under his influence, Rayna reflexively reacts against anything her father proposes or asks. I can understand why Rayna rejects her father’s machinations just as I can see why Juliette, who lacks the family and support that buoys Rayna, seeks out affirmation elsewhere.

Juliette and Rayna may go personal in their attacks on each other, but that doesn’t mean their differences aren’t substantive, whether they’re throwing down over aesthetics and authenticity, competing for talent, or charming crowds on stage at the Grand Ol’ Opry, where Rayna rules the stage with a queenly distance and Juliette reaches out to let her fans touch her. These are interesting, meaningful questions and jealousies rooted in actual economic pressures, rather than the result of irrational animosities. Juliette and Rayna may have perfectly-manicured claws and blown-out manes, but just because these lionesses are clashing doesn’t mean it’ a catfight.

A new Pokémon game is out and PETA, being who and what they are, have launched an inept parody campaign against it. In this case, it’s particularly grating, as the Pokémon series they’re talking about raises some legitimately troubling issues about the way culture handles those of us with staunch views about animal rights.

In the first Pokémon: Black And White (the new game is a sequel), one of the villains is a kid who, raised among abused pokémon, launches a campaign to end the captivity of the creatures and the practice of forcing them to participate in glorified dogfights. The mantra of his organization is “Pokémon liberation,” a pretty clear reference to the most famous modern text on animal rights. The player character, by contrast, spends the game convincing this character that “slavery is OK if we’re not bad masters.” Moreover, the movement gets hijacked by a self-interested subordinate, who reveals the idea of Pokémon liberation was a stalking horse for a plot to take over the world from the get-go.

In short, the animal rights movement is a sham; anyone who legitimately believes the way we treat animals is immoral is a dupe for powerful, nefarious interests. You can see why that might be troubling.

There’s a danger in taking this too seriously; Pokémon is a sorta brainless kids game (that I unconditionally loved at age 12). But at the same time, it’s part and parcel of a broader culture that makes the use and abuse of animals normative at a very young age. Thoroughgoing animal welfare supporters are a distinct minority in the United States; using veganism/vegetarianism rates as a proxy for a more broadly animal-friendly lifestyle, only about seven percent of the American population qualify. As a consequence, concern about animal welfare isn’t exactly well represented in American public life; quite the opposite. Politicians sneer at concern for animals; spectacles like dogfighting and cockfighting are sadly common despite being criminalized. Even some things that may seem like advancements, like the cancellation of horseracing drama Luck after the death of three stunt-horses, remind us of the underlying brutality in the extant, legal horseracing industry.

The pervasiveness of the use and abuse of animals for human pleasure creates a particularly tough environment for parents who want to raise their kids with similar values. Kids aren’t critical consumers; they’re apt to treat accept inhumane spectacles like dogracing or mass consumption of factory-farmed meat as normal. These elements of American culture are unproblematic for most and hence quite pervasive once you start looking for them. Teaching children to abhor these forms of animal cruelty is fraught in all the ways familiar to parents who want to instill pride in difference in the face of normalizing pressures.

So it’s grating when a popular kids title goes out of its way to marginalize animal welfare advocates. Is it the end of the world? Hardly. But Pokémon’s casually violent message isn’t something that should be dismissed as a consequence of a PETA stunt; it should be treated as indicative of the broader cultural difficulties that parents face in an animal-using world.