This post discusses plot points from the May 5 episode of Game of Thrones.

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention,” the man who’s been torturing Theon Greyjoy tells his screaming victim as he prepares to flay his finger. George R. R. Martin’s project as an author has always been to mount a critique of chivalric ideals, piercing the purity that armors knights along with their plate, and revealing that behind marriages branded as love lie horrific acts of marital rape. That this episode of Game of Thrones ends with a moment of piercing happiness, as Jon and Ygritte stand on the wall together and she gets to see not just the world she’s known, but the much bigger one South of it, is particularly painful. We’re torn between wanting to believe in the happy ending, in Jon’s joy, in Ygritte’s delight that he not only was true to her, but able to gratify her heart’s desire, and knowing what Game of Thrones has taught us over three years. Believing is a sure road to agony.

This episode is full of people who want to believe, and will take extraordinary risks to pursue their dreams. “It’s a long way up and a long way down. But I’ve waited my whole life to see the world from up there,” Ygritte tells Jon as they begin what appears to be a suicide mission of climbing the Wall. “You didn’t stop being a Crow the day you walked into Mance Rayder’s tent. But I’m your woman right now. You’re going to be loyal to your woman. The Night’s Watch don’t care if you live or die. Mance Rayder don’t care if I live or die. we’re just soldiers in their armies and there’s plenty more to carry on if we go down. With you and me. It matters to me and you. Don’t ever betray me.” Samwell Tarly, whose father was a monster to him, can still sit in the forest with Gilly and her child and sing to them “The father’s face is still and strong / He sits and judges right and wrong.” Edmure Tully sticks by his belief in true love, or at least true lust. “At least I should be able to have the same choice you had,” he tells Robb. “The laws of Gods and Men are very clear. No man can compel another man to marry.” And Robb believes that he can be fair to his uncle in some way. “You’re paying for my sins,” he says. “It’s not fair or right. I’ll remember it.” Sansa is blindly excited by the prospect of her upcoming wedding to Loras, and Loras, though he isn’t sexually attracted to her, seems to be trying to convince himself that everything will be all right. “I’ve dreamed of a large wedding since I was quite young,” he tells Sansa. “The guests, the food, the tournaments. And the bride of course. The most beautiful bride in the world, in a gown of gold and green with fringed sleeves.”

But those dreams start to come apart almost as soon as they’re articulated. Gendry, who told Arya in the previous episode that he planned to join the Brotherhood in part because he’s attracted by their egalitarian governance structure, finds himself sold by them, and neither his appeals to the Brotherhood’s core values, nor Arya’s can save him. “You told me this was a Brotherhood. You told me I could be one of you,” Gendry begs Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of Myr. “You are more than they can ever be,” Melisandre tells him, whether he wants to be or not. “They are just footsoldiers in the great war.” “He wants to be one of you,” Arya screams at her captors. “He wants to join the Brotherhood. Stop them!” “We serve the Lord of Light. the Lord of Light needs him,” Beric tells her, revealing a mix of pragmatism and dogmatism that Arya failed to see before. “Did he tell you that? Or did she?” Arya asks a man she’s come to admire, before turning on Melisandre, telling her “You’re a witch. You don’t hurt him.” But Melisandre has a response that puts Arya back on her heels with a promise of Arya’s own unhappy ending: “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me. Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.”
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Disney is introducing Sofia, who is supposed to be its first Latina princess, in a television special, Sofia the First: Once Upon a Princess, that will air November 18 on the Disney Channel. The problem—or depending on how you see it, upside of the character—though, is that the only indication that we have that Sofia is Hispanic is that Disney is telling us that she is:

Now, certainly it’s possible to be Latina or Hispanic and be light-skinned and have fair hair as people like half-Cuban Cameron Diaz are a constant reminder. And I can see an argument that it’s good for Disney to remind viewers that Latino is a label that encompasses people of many different origins and who look many different ways.

And so it strikes me as less of a problem that Sofia looks the way she looks and more that Disney was dull enough to set another princess story in the European fairy tale tradition. When Disney’s put stories about women who aren’t white on the big screen, it’s often done so in ways that draw drama and detail from their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that expand the definition of princess to cover all kinds of brave, enterprising young women. Aladdin was one of the first Disney movies to juxtapose the horrors of arranged marriages with the appeal of a love match, rather than pretending that its characters were simply free to marry who they chose. In Mulan, the titular character has to cope with the intersection of gender expectations and Confucian values to carve out a place for herself and her aspirations in ancient China. Pocahontas got to save a man, rather than the other way around, in a break from Disney’s generally traditional past, and to do so as an advocate for cross-cultural understanding. And in The Princess and the Frog, Tiana is an entrepreneur driven by her love of New Orleans cuisine.

Sofia, by contrast, gets absorbed into a blended royal family, goes to school where she’s taught by the tree good fairies from Sleeping Beauty and gets an amulet that puts her in communion with Disney princesses past. The whole project looks less like an original story and much more like an opportunity for marketing. Disney may have denied some little girls an opportunity to see a princess who looks like them on screen. But it’s also punted on giving viewers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds an innovative, engaging story about a young woman’s adventures.

Pixar movies are, in so many ways, what I hope for movies to become: visually stunning, narratively inventive, and often about issues like aging, masculinity, fatherhood, and responsibility, but with a confidence that the audience will derive those themes from an excellent original story, rather than needing them clearly articulated. Marlin’s search for Nemo is about the recovery of his own bravery and sense of adventure, a chance to overcome the worry-wart tendencies that have plagued him since his wife’s death, as much as it is the recovery of his son. Carl Frederickson’s adventures in Up are about rectifying what he sees as his two failures as a husband, his diminished dreams of adventure and his inability to become a father. Wall-E is about the power of love, from a young robot’s perspective rather than a young man’s. These men’s emotional experiences are specific to them and influenced by their gender, but their adventures are not particularly male or female experiences: there is nothing gendered about surfing with sea turtles, hanging out with talking dogs, or running around a space ship. And so it does feel like Pixar’s denied us something in giving its first female protagonist a uniquely gendered catalyst for her adventure—in other words, by making her a fairy tale princess—by not making her the subject of a more truly universal story, and in doing so asserted that the default in such settings need not always be male.

But it would be a shame to dismiss Brave on those grounds. Pixar isn’t the only standard for greatness. Brave plants a flag in much-derided territory and makes something visually gorgeous and emotionally rich out of the familiar rhythms of fairy tales. And while the wars between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons may be fought on different ground, Brave should stand as a reminder that those battles can be equally lacerating, and equally resonant, no matter the gender of the participants.

Brave begins with a tiny, flame-haired Scottish princess at peace with both of her parents, Elinor (Emma Thompson), the mother who plays hide and seek with her, and Fergus (Billy Connolly), the father who gives her a bow of her own for her birthday and patiently teaches her how to shoot. Their peace is shattered when a bear breaks up their family gathering, scattering Merida (Kelly Macdonald) and Elinor, and costing Fergus his leg.

As Merida gets older, the tensions between her and her mother grow, too. Elinor (Emma Thompson) isn’t a bad mother, but the tension between them is inevitable. Some of the training Elinor gives Merida hints at a greater role for her—”A princess must be knowledgeable about her kingdom”—and some of it carries tinges of the kind of innate cruelty of mothering. “Hungry, are you?” Elinor asks Merida when she brings a plate of desserts to the dinner table. “You’ll get dreadful collywobbles.” Some of the power of Brave is the way it gives depth and power to those ordinary motherly slights. Elinor’s comments come after Merida’s spent a day ranging through the woods with her horse Angus in one of the more powerful sequences I’ve seen of a girl enjoying her body’s capacities and the pleasure of being very, very good at something. Elinor’s words undermine Merida’s pleasure in her strength and exercise, aimed at making her physically and emotionally fit the corset she’s stuffed into for the Highland Games.
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This post contains spoilers through the second season of Game of Thrones.

“The King won’t give you any honors, the histories won’t mention you, but we will not forget,” Varys, the Master of Whispers, tells Tyrion Lannister halfway through the finale of the second season of Game of Thrones. Tyrion knows he’s been scarred, he’s been stripped of his role as Hand of the King, he’s worried he’ll lose his lover, and worst of all, he’s been insulted by a suddenly-resurgent Grand Maester Pycelle, who’s transfigured Tyrion’s kind gesture to Daisy earlier in the season into a profound insult, flipping a coin at him “For your trouble.” Varys has introduced another possible misery to Tyrion, and articulated what’s powerful about Game of Thrones for those of us watching from aeons away: this is the secret history of Westeros, the filth and blood that will be smoothed away into the official record, expunging dwarves, and bastards, and little girls along the way.

In an episode that ends with the rise of the unbelievable, it’s fitting that two pivotal characters spend their appearances in the episode fretting over belief in the same God, and their ability to follow Him. Stannis Baratheon is devastated by his defeat on the Blackwater, a calamity that has him feeling retrospective guilt. “I murdered my brother,” he confesses to Melisandre, author of his will in that matter, refusing to share the blame that eats at him. And at the first sign of Melisandre’s failed prophecy, he questions her to the point of asphyxiation, attempting to choke an alternate truth out of her. “You promise these things, but you don’t know,” he despairs. “None of us know.” But Melisandre, despite letting slip that she sees only glimpses of the future, seizes the opportunity to turn Stannis into a true believer, helping him look into the flames. It’s the first time his grimace has relaxed—even when impregnating Melisandre (no other word really seems to capture the grimness of it), he’s been locked in his own misery. Now, she’s given him not just a promise for the future, but a sense of wonder.

Arya wants to believe more badly than Stannis does, but finds she’s unable to, at least not yet. She has an unexpected chance to say goodbye to Jaqen after she finds him waiting on the road after her escape from Harrenhal, though he won’t quite explain to her how he know she would be there. And he has a future to offer her. “To be a dancing master is a special thing. But to be a faceless man, that is something else entirely,” Jaqen promises her. “The girl has many names on her lips…Names to offer up to the Red God. She could offer them one by one.” It’s a tantalizing future for a girl with so much blood to spill, but Arya has other obligations, telling him “I want to. But I can’t. I need to find my brother and mother. And my sister. I need to find her, too.” But Jaqen is playing a longer game than Melisandre is, giving her a coin, but warning Arya “It is not meant for the buying of horses.” “Then what good is it?” asks the girl who has lived because she is so much more than she seems, but has yet to recognize that quality in others.

There’s something heartbreaking about Arya’s insistence that she has to find her family, even Sansa, who she believes betrayed them, when Sansa, offered the opportunity to escape by Petyr Baelish, tells him “King’s Landing is my home now.” It’s not necessarily that I believe that she’s given up on her family, but living in what counts for luxury in Westeros, Sansa has so many fewer resources than her little sister, and the one asset she had is about to become a tool to wound her, to render her unable to use it again to her own advantage. “We’re all liars here, and every one of us is better than you,” Baelish tells her, after warning her of what her immediate future holds after Joffrey puts her aside in favor of the vastly more politically convenient Margeary Tyrell, a woman who knows enough of womanly wiles and men’s appetites to tell the boy king that “those tales [of his courage] have taken root deep inside of me.” “‘He’ll still enjoy beating you, and now that you’re a woman, he’ll be able to enjoy you in other ways as well,” Petyr warns her. “Joffrey’s not the sort of boy who gives away his toys.”
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Once upon a time, there was a critic with a particular fondness for fairy-tale stories and for awesome action choreography involving winning. This critic was particularly excited for a movie called Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart as Snow White, a young princess who is imprisoned after her stepmother, a sorceress named Ravenna (Charlize Theron) murders her father and begins scouring the countryside for young women whose youth and beauty she can cannibalize to preserve her own youth. The movie looked to be a sophisticated take on an old story, putting the princess in armor and at the head of an invading army. But Snow White and the Huntsman behaves more like an old tradition anxious about the rise of a new one than the coronation of a new moment for action heroines.

By far the best parts of Snow White and the Huntsman are those that hint at the source of Ravenna’s pathology, and at the damaging power of beauty myths. “I was ruined by a king like you, my Lord,” she tells Snow White’s father on their wedding night, her seduction turning to poison. “Men use women.” Meeting the Huntsman, Ravenna muses “There was a time when I would have lost my heart to a face like yours. And you, no doubt, would have broken it.” Later, we learn that some sort of trauma inspired an older woman in a young Ravenna’s life to turn her beauty into something more than normal human loveliness. “Your beauty is all that can save you, Ravenna. This spell will make your beauty your power and your protection.” Watching the natural lines on Ravenna’s face vanish after she sucks the life out of another young girl is Hollywood airbrushing rendered visible, an act of humanity-erasing magic with consequences both on-screen and off it. “You don’t even know how lucky you are never to know what it is to grow old,” she tells a woman whose life she’s stolen. Both Ravenna’s selfishness and Hollywood’s obsession with youth are pursuits of immortality without any sense of what life is good for.

But much like Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Red Riding Hood, which was advertised with a suggestion that Red herself might turn out to be the wolf (a concept adopted well by Once Upon a Time) before revealing itself to be conventional, Snow White and the Huntsman is less interested in its promising concepts than in visual spectacle and hitting traditional fairy-tale beats that could have been jettisoned. When Snow tears through the dark forest, the insects that erupt from the ground and the mists that swirl around her are repeated so often they lose their power. When she makes it to a sacred sanctuary, the movie spends loving time on rich natural wonders, like a turtle who is a walking garden, that are visually stunning, but that prove to have no relevance to the plot and little metaphorical significance. And as much fun as it is to see Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Nick Frost and others kitted up and shrunk down to size as a gang of prophesying dwarves, their main plot function is to open a drawbridge at a crucial moment. They’re there, taking up precious minutes seemingly because the movie doesn’t believe that audiences will buy Snow White without a group of small men to adore her, even if they get a Huntsman as compensation.

It doesn’t help that when the plot does get moving, it’s burdened with some deeply puzzling writing and bad casting. Snow White’s been locked in a tower for a decade and has no evident battle skills or organized base of support, but we’re supposed to believe she can rally the support of a kingdom with an incoherent rallying speech about how people have iron twisted up inside them. Ravenna, for no other reason than to increase the sense that she’s deviant, is burdened with a brother, Sam Spruell in an epically terrible wig, with whom she’s overly familiar: in their scenes together, they come across as a pair of low-budget Lannisters.

But the movie’s real failure is to develop Snow White’s character enough to make rooting for her against Ravenna feel organically exciting. As a child, her mother tells her “you possess rare beauty, my love. In here. Never lose it. It will serve you well when you become queen.” We see her play with William, her childhood friend, speak kindly to a fellow prisoner in Ravenna’s tower, and play with a child from the marsh, but these are gestures of common humanity, not of extraordinary empathy and insight. The dwarves follow her because of a prophecy, rather than on evidence, and the blessing she receives from a white hart with a magnificent rack of antlers that supposedly confirms the prophecy gives her no powers and is in recognition of no deeds—it’s just another opportunity to state, rather than demonstrate, Snow White’s goodness. “But how will I inspire?” Snow White worries at one point. “How will I lead men?” Snow White and the Huntsman would have been a better movie had its events given her, and us, confident answers to those questions rather than handing Stewart one of the most poorly-written inspirational speeches to make it into a Hollywood movie in a long time.

It’s a group of women Snow White and the Huntsman encounter living in a marsh at the edge of the dark forest who feel like a truer alternative to Ravenna than Snow White, who beats Ravenna but essentially preserves the game. These women ritually scar tear tracks into their cheeks because “without beauty, we are worthless to the Queen. It’s a sacrifice we make so we can raise our children.” But it’s only by Hollywood’s rules that these beautiful, independent women are less than lovely. Snow White and the Huntsman is on the edge of important ideas about beauty, just as it’s on the edge of a good story. But like Ravenna, it looks into the mirror for confirmation of old Hollywood standards and old stories, rather than for the truth.

Every summer, Fandango polls consumers about the blockbusters they’re most excited for. And it turns out that the movie women reported being most excited to see is Snow White and the Huntsman, followed by The Avengers, Men in Black III, The Dark Knight, and Dark Shadows. Now, there are a lot of dedicated female fantasy and science fiction fans out there—I should know because I talk to all of you on a constant basis. But I don’t know that we represent 22 percent of the female moviegoing population, the percentage of women who named Snow White and the Huntsmen as their top ticket-buying priority.

And I think that gets at an important point: women, even outside the core fan community, will be interested in fantasy and science fiction if work in those genres have anything to say to them. Snow White and the Huntsman is being explicitly sold not just as a story with two female leads—Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart—but as a story about the connection between beauty and power, about competition between women, and about styles of rule and command. From the outside, the women in the movie don’t look like women acting like men. They appear to be women acting like women but with the force of armies and heroes available to play out the issues that they’re grappling with personally.

Women watch Game of Thrones not for the incest and other sexual skulduggery, as the New York Times suggested in its utterly bizarre review when the show premiered, but for the variety of women we see on-screen the way they exercise power. We watch to see Cersei Lannister wonder what it’s like to be a man, and to struggle between the imperatives of command and family. We watch for that moment when Brienne of Tarth beats the Knight of Flowers, and reveals herself for what she is (and I watch The Return of the King for the moment when Eowyn spits out the declaration of her gender at the Witch-King of Angmar). We watch for Sansa’s bitter, brittle bravery, and Arya’s nourishing hatred.

The dudes who make much of our science fiction and fantasy are rightly confident that they’ll get my, and other women’s money, even if they don’t speak to us. We’re going to Men in Black III and The Dark Knight, after all, and we’ll turn out for The Avengers even if we’re supposed to accept Black Widow and Maria Hill as our representatives. But from a purely mercenary perspective, you could always get more of our money once in a while by catering to us as women first, and counting on dudes to come along for the swords and dragons as a secondary market.

The bridge is yours.

-A great meditation on the importance of Adrienne Rich.

-Professional wrestling’s past and future.

-A bad proposal for video game labeling.

-More evidence for my fairy tale anti-heroine theory.

-The best of the Very Special Episodes:

There’s been a lot of debate recently about how to define the Golden Age of television, whether it’s through Vulture’s Drama Derby, which set up a March Madness contest between great shows of the last quarter-century, or conversations between critics like NPR’s Linda Holmes, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman, and Time’s James Poniewozik on Twitter. But wherever the conversations are taking place, they keep coming back to a central question. When we’re picking the pool of shows, why does the critical consensus tend to come up with a list that’s, well, awfully dudely?

The best answer anyone seems to have come up with is that there are more male characters of a particular variety that we’ve come to hold up as a gold standard: the middle-aged anti-hero. There are a number of answers as to why that’s the case: the number of middle-aged men who have been given the opportunities to make their dream shows; the fact that female characters are still under pressure to be perfect in every area of their lives, much less downright evil or morally depraved in one of them; or the fact that women, even as Christopher Hitchens said we aren’t funny, have found a great deal of creative life in comedy rather than in drama. Addressing all of these elements are important, and I’ll have some thoughts on them in weeks to come.

But if middle-aged anti-heroes are what we’ve decided give us an opportunity for moral sophistication as viewers and for complex, intriguing storytelling, where would we start in creating these kinds of women? It’s possible that one answer lies in a rising boom: fairy tale villainesses. Fairy tales are full of older women who are trying to hold onto the kinds of things about which great dramas about men are made: their power within their professional setting, their sense of sexual desirability, their status within their personal communities. In the trailers for Snow White and the Huntsman, we’re clearly meant to side with Kristen Stewart’s insurgent Snow White. But I’m intrigued by Charlize Theron’s evil Queen, who speaks of giving her fallen world the ruler it deserves, who commands armies and welcomes challenges.

And as production ramps up on the Maleficent movie, Angelina Jolie told People Magazine that she felt some ambivalence about defending her character (the movie will be told from the perspective of Sleeping Beauty’s rival for the throne): “It sounds really crazy to say that there will be something that’s good for young girls in this, because it sounds like you’re saying they should be a villain. [Maleficent] is actually a great person. But she’s not perfect. She’s far from perfect.” But why should we be so squeamish about suggesting that we should sympathize with female villains? Especially in settings where women have to be unusually tough to hold on to power and authority (which, let’s be honest, is not so different from the tightrope women have to walk today)?

If boys can grow up to sympathize with Tony Soprano, why shouldn’t women get a world where it’s permissible to sympathize with the stepmothers, crones, sorceresses and evil queens we taught were lying in our paths growing up? Reclaiming fairy tale villainesses wouldn’t just give us a crop of powerful female anti-heroines—it would help break a cycle of storytelling that valorizes younger and prettier women overthrowing older ones. Sisterhood is weird, and complex, and powerful.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library, which is highly recommended for the semi-macabre young person in your life. They’re particularly a good reminder of what our fairy tales really are, and how sanitized Disney in particular and Hollywood in general have made them for mass consumption. But I wonder if we’re at a moment when fairy tales might be having not merely a resurgence, but recovering some of their original, horrific power.

First, there was Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. The movie was a huge disappointment, failing to fulfill its promise to do something novel with the identity of the wolf, and full of cheap-looking foam sets and MTV-styled hair. But it at least had the right impulse: Hardwicke wanted to restore the sense that the night is dark and full of terrors, particularly when you’re surrounded by the big woods. And she was wise to suggest that order can bring fear with it, too, though the message gets watered down a bit when it comes in the form of Gary Oldman in doofy facial hair and wielding the power of a Torture Elephant:

A short film called Red (thanks to io9) does a better job of getting at those ideas. It’s bloody and it’s heartbreaking: if you have to cut your way out of the belly of an animal that’s devoured you and drag the broken body of your grandmother out with you, even if you win, you’re likely to end up fairly traumatized. Becoming a warrior is not always a particularly delightful experience. And having to kill to survive is exhausting:

Snow White and the Huntsman, which arrives in theaters in June, appears to be going the same route, albeit with a bigger special effects budget. The Queen’s evil isn’t implied, she’s not killing her victims with anything as quaint as a poisonous apple. She’s sucking the life force out of them, stabbing them in bed, ravening for their hearts. The forest may be more full of wonders than terrors, but said wonders aren’t of the adorably singing woodland creatures variety. And becoming a hero means going to the front lines in a medieval siege, an enterprise that carries as much risk of grisly death as it does potential for glamour:

By contrast, the dreadful-looking Mirror, Mirror looks like an anachronism precisely because it’s so pristine. These aren’t dark woods so much as they’re a Hollywood set, or an incomplete CGI rendering. It’s hard to be terrified of a world where people’s teeth literally sparkle, and curses turn people into adorable simulacra of puppy dogs. These people are plastic: even if you cut them to the quick, there’d be no blood or guts to spill into that snow.

Once Upon a Time has a bit of that shininess problem, though conceptually, it’s gone darker. There’s a girl who turns into a wolf, and an actual heart in a box that’s been identified as belonging to a character we’ve gotten to know. That’s upsetting, even if we don’t see the organ itself. Grimm, which recently got a second-season pickup, and has improved by focusing on the core relationship between the detective and the werewolf, has been horrific from the beginning: we’ve got stolen organs, fights to the death, and incredibly ugly acts of murder all of them. The premise of the show itself is deeply unnerving—that there’s something else hiding under the skin many of us present to the world.

And Once Upon a Time and Grimm are nodding at a question it’ll be important for fairy tale storytellers to consider if this trend is to continue. In the absence of the dark woods, the arbitrary nature of feudal lords, the horror of high infant mortality rates (at least in the developing world), the wolves that steal the sheep, what are our terrors? And which stories are the best matches for telling them? The persistence of crime dramas would suggest that the big city has replaced the big woods, that serial killers are our ravening beasts. But I’m not sure we have myths to embody the new fears generated by a world that’s much larger than the village, or the disembodied terrors of the digital age.

So, um, this is the origin story for the Beast in one of the two, count ‘em, two, Beauty and the Beast shows in development:

Vincent worked as a doctor at the New York University hospital – and was working On September 11, 2001 when the towers came down. Long story short, a wounded Vincent ends up in a medical clinic where he’s injected with a DNA-changing drug. The drug turns him into an unstoppable soldier type that is used in Afghanistan. Think ‘Captain America’ or a ‘Universal Soldier’. Unfortunately, the strength and stamina comes with a price…it also changes Vincent’s look — in particular, hair sprouts hair everywhere. When he returned from Afghanistan, looking like he is, he hid himself away.

That’s a way of integrating fairy tales into our self-mythology of our actions after September 11, I guess? There are certainly real side effects of the way we treat our veterans, including a dramatic overprescription of really powerful painkillers that are more serious than a lot of body hair. But I have to say that I think Sherlock has done a better job of linking an old story to a new Afghan war.

And I’m actually more interested in the way in which Beauty and the Beast narratives intersect with our schlub-gets-the-girl trope popularized by Judd Apatow’s movies. There have already been some feints in mashing up those movies with superhero or secret identity narratives, most notably Kick Ass. But it’s one thing to take a guy who’s always been a schlub and putting him in the path of a gorgeous, talented woman, and another to take a guy who’s been popular and attractive, strip him of his physical assets, and then put him in the path of the kind of woman he’d be able to conquer easily were he his old handsome self. That whole breaking a main character down before he can be built back up thing sounds suspiciously like what we so often do to female characters.