When Sloane Stephens and Serena Williams met in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open this January, the tennis media rushed to compare the two — one a 20-year-old budding star, the other perhaps the most dominant player the game has ever seen — and develop the idea that they had a relationship in which Williams was mentoring Stephens to follow in the 15-time Grand Slam champion’s footsteps.

Before the match, in which Stephens became the first American woman younger than Williams to defeat her, espnW said the two “quickly became friends” upon meeting the summer before, while Britain’s Daily Mail said they “get along well off of the court” because of their “obvious similarities.” The media quickly built up the mentor-protege storyline, even though Williams dismissed it, telling a reporter who asked about it directly that “it’s hard to be a real mentor when you’re still in competition.”

The idea of a special relationship between the two players blew up today, when it became clear that it “wasn’t the fairy tale the media made it out to be.” Stephens, it turns out, doesn’t consider the most dominant player of this generation a friend or a mentor, and she isn’t particularly interested in the “next Serena” label that has been tacked on her back in the weeks since her victory in Melbourne, as Marin Cogan detailed in her excellent piece examining the expectations facing the young tennis star in ESPN The Magazine’s upcoming issue:

“For the first 16 years of my life, she said one word to me and was never involved in my tennis whatsoever,” says Stephens. “I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal that she’s not involved now. If you mentor someone, that means you speak to them, that means you help them, that means you know about their life, that means you care about them. Are any of those things true at this moment? No, so therefore … ”

I offer: “They want the next great American player.”

Stephens says: “They want another Serena.”

That the two don’t have the fairy tale relationship has now become a story itself, with outlets proclaiming that Stephens “ripped” Williams in the interview. But none of that answers why it was so important that such a relationship exist, or why such a relationship was expected. Williams, after all, doesn’t seem the mentoring type: she eschewed the tennis academy culture favored by many young players to be coached by her father — a fact that has earned both resentment and skepticism in the tennis world — leaving her without many of the traditional structures that surrounds other players. And in a game that is inherently individualistic, perhaps no recent player has displayed such a singular focus on dominating her opponents as Williams. The idea, then, that she would set that aside to aid a player who is coming after the very mantle she has set seems absurd on its face. The idea that Stephens, who matriculated through academies, never considered Williams her favorite player, and has a coach who was a former pro himself, would need such a mentor seems nearly as hard to believe.

So why did the myth of that relationship persist? It grew, as Cogan notes, in part because the players allowed it to, even as Williams downplayed it. But did it also endure because the semblances between Williams and Stephens — they are both African-Americans, they are both women, they both play somewhat similar styles of tennis — made for an interesting storyline in a tennis world that, frankly, needs them? The same media accounts that outlined the mentor-protege relationship referred to “obvious similarities” between the two, the fact that it would be a “a mirror image in some ways” when they stared across the net at each other, and that Serena originally was fond of seeing “another black girl” in the lockerroom.

Williams, though, has never been considered a mentor to other young Americans, like Melanie Oudin, who arose as Next Big Things during her career, and we’ve never expected male athletes, like Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, who shared her focus and drive to mentor younger players who followed them. Did we need the sport’s biggest African-American star to mentor the first major African-American player to come after her? Do we expect that a young woman in a sport where so many Next Big Things failed before needed a big sister on the court to succeed? Do we hold our top women to a separate standard, asking them to ease their desires to beat each other so that they can be friends too? We never asked Federer to mentor a young Rafael Nadal; we’ve never questioned why Tiger Woods wasn’t helping someone else win The Masters.

Of course it’s desirable for the two players to get along and treat each other with respect. But the expectation that Williams should be a mentor to Stephens, and that Stephens needed Williams to mentor her, is unfair to both of them. Why should we expect Williams to welcome a competitor and set aside the quality we’ve admired most about her — her ability to focus on her goal of dominating opponents the way no one has before? And why should Stephens want to be “another Serena” instead of just “the next great American player,” a role she could define for herself? And instead of enjoying their greatness, why do we need them to be friends, too?

Anyone who feels like there’s nothing new at the box office week after week will be dismayed to read this profile of Vinny Bruzzese, a script consultant and former statistics professor, who’s built a business telling Hollywood studios and writers what’s commercially viable—or at least, what past experience suggests would be commercially viable.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that the movie business is, in fact, precisely that. But it’s also worth asking whether every single movie needs to be a massive success. And even in the context of the business, we can have a conversation whether the movie business, which claims a special status based on its artistic achievements and cultural capital, can balance out the massive profits of its biggest hits with commitments to movies that push the boundaries of the medium, and explore ideas and narrative forms that are important precisely because they aren’t easy to digest, or because they don’t already have massive support. Bruzzese can help with the commercial half of the equation, but if the movie business wants to be seen as something other than a widgets factory, it would be nice if some sort of counterweight emerged to help studios and distributors decide which risks they can afford to take, too.

Beyond the question of whether this by-the-numbers approach to making decisions about which films to greenlight is bad for movies themselves, driving them towards extreme homogeneity, is whether it could lead studios to miss profitable and creatively strong outliers, and how far its categories are actually useful. “Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script,” the story reports. Except for The Big Lebowski, of course, which made $46 million worldwide against a budget of $15 million, and has had an exceptionally long shelf-life as a cult hit and the basis of a dandy little merchandising empire. “‘A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,’ one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added,” except how do you categorize them? Is Tony Stark, the industrialist-turned-superhero who is the main character of Iron Man 3, which opened last weekend to $175.3 million at the domestic box office, a cursed superhero, given the shrapnel in his chest the forced him to develop his super suit? Or is he a guardian, despite his generalized selfishness and disdain for the kind of do-gooderism embodied by Captain America (a subject Linda Holmes discusses at length in this excellent essay about Tony’s arc)?

And analyzing what’s been successful in the past doesn’t predict when audiences will suddenly tire of something they liked in the past, as they did with the Scary Movie parodies, turning what had been a profit center into a box office cliff. Nor can it predict what kinds of movies will succeed precisely because they give something new and exciting to audiences. Bruzzese’s data-crunching might be able to tell studios how to replicate a new phenomenon when it emerges. But if he discourages studios from taking chances in favor of continuing to trod well-worn paths, the hot new thing might emerge at all. And that’s bad for Hollywood, bad for audiences—and ultimately bad for Bruzzese. If studios are going to keep doing the same things over and over again, at some point, they, and the writers who work for them, will know Bruzzese’s playbook cold, and they won’t need him any more. But trying to figure out how to vary successful themes could give Bruzzese more numbers to crunch, writers more leeway to play, and audiences franchises and tropes that grow over time, rather than staying paralyzed by past successes.

By Tony Palumbi

“Can’t change the past? Why, of course you can!”-Jay Gatsby

“What if you woke up and realized you didn’t like what you chose?” – Booker DeWitt

Bioshock Infinite starts and ends with water—the player pushed and held under water in two starkly different baptisms. One is a symbolic birth and the other a fairly literal death, but they bracket this phenomenal game with what I see as its overriding theme: changing the past. Whether we’re talking about fact or fiction, there’s nothing more distinctly American than a troubled relationship with your own history. Infinite is one of the most-discussed titles in years, but I’ve yet to see anyone tackle its approach to hagiography and classic American fiction.

Every culture paves over some terrible events, but the United States occupies a privileged position. We’re the land of second chances, our own immigrant history so close and personal we can’t help but embellish it. Ta-Nehisi Coates (among others) has written great pieces about our relationship to the Civil War: the convenience of believing that there were Black Confederates, or that the Confederacy was defending democratic principles rather than fighting to keep slaves. Believing in America’s fundamental goodness requires that we find a way around the always-messy Present. So we create a golden, perfect Past that’s always just past the western horizon, whether before Lincoln’s tyranny or before a pill divorced pregnancy from sex.

So when Bioshock Infinite’s protagonist is introduced in the year 1912 with a box inscribed “Booker DeWitt, 7th Cavalry, Wounded Knee,” we associate him first with one of America’s great crimes. Within minutes he’s rocketing into the air and being “reborn” in baptism as a condition to enter the sky-city of Columbia. He emerges from the water into a chapel garden built to honor Columbia’s religious idols: Jefferson, Franklin and Washington. Columbia isn’t so much a living city as a museum through which Booker makes his way, taking time out between effervescent gunfights to admire distant statuary through public coin-op binoculars. There’s even a lengthy sequence in a history museum, where Booker is fed “revised” accounts of Wounded Knee along with the Boxer Rebellion.
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I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.