When word first emerged that Kevin Keller, the first out gay character in the Archie comics universe, came from a military family, I assumed that the comics were just going to hint at “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rather than addressing the issue head-on. Turns out, my expectations weren’t ambitious enough. In his stand-alone comics, Kevin’s going to come out to his family and directly discuss with his father whether the fact that he’s gay means he should abandon plans to serve in the military.

There’s no question that decision is going to polarize, and it will lose the comic readers. But the Archie franchise has needed a major revitalization for a long time. It’s true the series has persisted for an amazingly long time, but it probably can’t go on as a cheerfully irrelevant product that sells decently but unspectacularly and is entirely absent from the national conversation. There are things that should happen just on the marketing end, for sure. The website for the company badly needs a face lift so it’ll load quickly and be more social-media friendly. The Josie and the Pussycats movie, with the exception of Adam Schlesinger’s soundtrack, was a disaster, but there’s no reason that someone couldn’t make a tween- and teen-friendly Archie movie that’s not unbearably stupid.

But really, the core content has needed a facelift to at least catch it up with more serious and sophisticated trends in young adult literature. This may be too polarizing to work, but it’s at least a way to have the characters thinking about their lives and careers beyond Riverdale. And more importantly, it makes the Archie comics look a bit more like the actual experiences of contemporary teenagers. It’s been great that Kevin’s experience in Riverdale has been so positive, but it’s really kind of wishful thinking, almost speculative fiction. I don’t really want to see Kevin get bashed or bullied for the sake of realism, but I do think that dealing with real problems will make him a more relatable, and thus more viable, long-term character.

In the wake of the announcement that Jill Abramson will become the first woman to hold the top editing slot at the New York Times, that paper’s crack culture critic Dave Itzkoff joked on Twitter: “Crazy #GameofThrones scene in NYT newsroom. The City Watch swept in and now Prince Joffrey is our new executive editor.” Aside from how bad the tar used to preserve severed heads would look dripped all over the nice facade of the New York Times’ building, it’s actually a really instructive point that the “Game of Thrones” universe appears not just to not have any public media, as Nick Sementelli mentioned to me, but not to have the printing press or a larger literate class. Spoilers to follow if you’ve only watched the episodes that have aired on HBO.

There’s quite a bit made of the fact that the common people don’t really care who’s king. Obviously, when things deteriorate to the point where folks can’t safely get a harvest or a fishing haul in, you end up with appeals to the sovereign—and even then it’s clear, as when the villagers mistake Ned for Robert—or local vigilante groups like the Brotherhood Without Banners. But it’s not particularly clear what information most people in Westeros and across the Narrow Sea have about what policy or management decisions contribute to the conditions that they live under. Certainly, the fact that there’s not more than one copy of the genealogy that leads Ned to figure out who the real father of Cersei’s children is helps her keep that secret for much longer. Similarly, the fact that there’s no way to authoritatively verify that dragons live again and to disseminate the news to a mass audience is a huge strategic advantage to Dany: she gets to become a legend without having people really mobilize en masse to take her down.

Obviously a Westeros that had reasonably widespread literacy and an established middle class in both the cities and the country wouldn’t be Westeros as we know it at all. But in a world where information asymmetry is a major theme, it’s interesting that the press doesn’t even factor into the story.