The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn’t mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union on its own terms. But given the pop culture trope of the sympathetic or victimize Confederate, I’m not actually surprised that a Civil War setting is one of the few ways we could get a movie about people who have been dramatically marginalized in our political conversations and even in civil society: war resisters.

Right now, I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his terrific history of resistance to World War I. One of the things that’s striking about the book, particularly the section on the suffrage movement, is the reminders it offers that the things we do to people who have been designated enemies of the state now, Western countries did to their own citizens a century ago. Horrified by the forced feedings of hunger strikers at Guantanamo? The British government force-fed suffragettes, many of who it imprisoned for extended periods of time for civil disobedience. Angered by the treatment of people who oppose war as if they’re mentally ill or radical? Bertrand Russell lost his job at Trinity College for his pacifism and served time in jail under the Defence of the Realm Act, which among other things, forbid people from publishing writing that could cause alarm or “disaffection” among the British populace, and pacifist socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist in France.

We’ve become very comfortable lionizing the risks soldiers take on the battlefield, in part because those celebrations feel like a way of paying back people who are willing to experience extreme danger and the trauma of killing other people on our behalf. But we’re still reluctant, apparently, to treat people who try and fail to keep us out of wars, or as was the case with many World War I activists, to point out the disparate impact of conscription along class lines, as if they’re reasonable, much less admirable. I’m not an absolute pacifist myself, but I do think that the courage to stand up against some conflicts is admirable, and the amount of it required is more considerable than we generally acknowledge, given the risk that you’ll be labeled treasonous or mentally ill. I just wish that instead of Copperhead, we were getting a biopic about Charlotte Despard, a wealthy British woman (and sister to British war leader John French) whose pacifism grew out of a range of social concerns, including her work on poverty and her suffragist activism–in other words, a movie that can put war resistance in its social context, rather than one that in its advertising is hiding the uncomfortable truth of the Copperheads’ acceptance of slavery.

Late yesterday, we finally got our first look at the long-awaited movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s novel about the child soldiers trained to fight in a war against alien invaders. The movie looks visually impressive, and there’s no denying the appeal of its cast, which includes Asa Butterfield as potential military genius Ender Wiggin, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, the administrator of the Battle School in which Ender is enrolled, Haileen Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian, one of Ender’s classmates, Viola Davis as Major Gwen Anderson, one of Graff’s colleagues, Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine, and Ben Kingsley as Ender’s teacher Mazer Rackham. But the trailer also leaves out five key elements of Card’s novel—and the decision to exclude them in favor of action sequences gives a sense of what kind of movie Summit Entertainment wants us to think Ender’s Game will be:

1. Peter Wiggin: Ender’s sadistic older brother, Peter was the first of three attempts to breed a perfect general from the Wiggin family. Because Peter was too aggressive, and Valentine too empathetic, Ender’s family was allowed to have him as a third child in defiance of the United States’ population laws. Peter viciously bullied Ender while the two of them were growing up, and after went to Battle School, enlisted Valentine in a scheme to gain political power through an early form of blogging. He’s a painful illustration of the price of greatness, and one of the key people through whom Ender’s Game explores international politics in the wake of alien attacks.

2. The Fantasy Game: We see the children in Battle School playing with powerful simulations on computers, but we don’t get a glimpse of one of the novel’s most interesting devices: a video game that’s personally tailored to each student’s experience, and that Battle School uses to monitor their mental health.

3. Alai and Bean: Two of Ender’s best friends at Battle School are Alai, a talented Muslim student, and Bean, a younger boy who comes under Ender’s command as he rises through the ranks of students. Alai, who begins as Ender’s equal, is a reminder of how the drive for excellence can alienate even your closest friends. And Bean is an illustration of how to bring out the excellence in someone else.

4. Bernard: And just as we’re missing Ender’s friends, the trailer doesn’t show us Ender’s greatest human enemy at Battle School, a French student named Bernard. There’s no question that the advertising for Ender’s Game has to outline the main conflict between humans and the Buggers, the pejorative name for the alien invaders. But it’s losing a lot of Card’s point if the movie forgets that the conflicts between humans are just as important as space opera.

5. The Net: Much of Ender’s Game is set at Battle School, but the story back on Earth, where Peter and Valentine become powerful political commentators on the Net, Card’s version of the Internet, is equally important. The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the countries aligned under the Warsaw Pact has an enormous influence on Battle School’s commanders and the way they push Ender and pace his training. And Peter and Valentine’s very different feelings about the influence they accrue offers an important contrast to Ender’s command of his troops far away in space.

Now, I assume most of these elements will appear in the finished film that we’re going to get in November. Peter, Alai, Bean, and Bernard all are in the cast list. Major Anderson is the character who oversees the Fantasy Game. But given that much of the power of Ender’s Game comes from the fact that the war on the Buggers takes a surprising turn, and the question of whether humanity wins or loses it becomes much less important than issues of psychology and ethics. I understand why Summit feels more confident selling audiences who aren’t familiar with Card’s work on a major space war than on a meditation on empathy. But I hope that the film itself stays true to the best, most penetrating aspects of Card’s work, and the trailers are as much of a bait and switch as the one Ender’s subjected to throughout the novel.

This post discusses plot points from the April 14 episode of Game of Thrones. As always, if you want to discuss events from the books in comments, please mark your posts as such.

This episode of Game of Thrones begins with Edmure Tully shooting flaming arrows at the boat that’s carrying his father’s body—and falling short, repeatedly. It’s an apt opening to an episode of the show that’s concerned with rituals and institutions, and that argues, often in dreadful ways, that Westeros’ best institutions and traditions are frequently doomed to failure or misinterpretation, while its worst are the ones to which people adhere most rigorously.

First, there’s the drive for individual glory, which leads Edmure to attack the Mountain rather than listening to Rob’s strategy, and recognizing that long-term goals sometimes involve short-term losses of face, and understanding how badly the King in the North needs to preserve his resources. “I wanted to draw the Mountain into the West, into our country where we could surround him and kill him,” Robb tells Edmure despairingly. “I wanted him to chase him, which he would have done because he is a mad dog without a strategic thought in his head. I could have had his head on a spike right now. Instead, I have a mill.”

South in King’s Landing, Tyrion Lannister is learning that his family has pursued another opportunity open to them to ruinous ends: the ability to finance their war to hold the kingdom together with debt, rather than through taxation or budget cuts. “For years I’ve herad that Littlefinger is a magician. Whenever the crown needs money, he rubs his hands together and poof! Mountains of gold,” Tyrion tells Bronn wearily. “He’s borrowing it…We can’t afford to pay it back, that’s what’s wrong with it. The crown owes millions to my father” Bronn tries to brush his concerns aside, telling the man he serves, “Seeing as it’s his grandson’s ass on the throne, I imagine he’ll forgive that debt,” an assessment that ignores the fact that the Lannisters have a tendency to collect on their debts as well as to pay them. And Tyrion points out a larger problem, explaining that unlike the United States, Westeros has gotten itself in hock to people who will more than gladly move against the regime. ” It isn’t my father I’m worried about,” he tells Bronn. ” It’s the Iron Bank of Braavos. We owe them tens of millions. If we fail to repay these loans, the bank will fund our enemies. One way or another, they always get their gold back.” If the Chinese government worked the same way, then we’d really have a problem.

Overseas and in the countryside, other characters are discovering the weaknesses of institutions and reputations they depended on. “I bet you feed that pig better than you feed us,” a ranger complains bitterly to Craster when the deeply depleted Night’s Watch patrol returns to his keep on their way back to the Wall. “That pig has value to me,” Craster tells him. Craster may never have been particularly deferential to the institutions of the civilized world, given the harem he’s built for himself beyond it, and the extent to which he’s able to enforce his will as law. But the venom of his contempt demonstrates the extent to which the stock of the Night’s Watch has deteriorated as the wildlings organize and as winter approaches. And so has the Greyjoy family’s brand. “I’ll make you a Lord of the Iron Islands for this,” Theon tells the mysterious man who is helping him escape. “We’re not in the Iron Islands,” the man warns him cryptically, though whether he regrets Theon’s lack of power to reward him or is only to happy to reinforce is left an open question by his tone.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 31 episode of Game of Thrones. If you want to discuss the events of A Storm of Swords or subsequent books in George R.R. Martin’s series, please label your posts as such.

As is necessary with a show like Game of Thrones, the first episode of this third season is concerned both with reiterating the larger forces advancing on Westeros—it begins beyond the Wall, where Samwell Tarly is pursued by the White Walkers and ends in Astapor, where Daenerys Targaryen is contemplating the moral implications of purchasing an army of slaves as a necessary corrective to the slow growth of her dragons—and dealing with the implications of the Battle of the Blackwater, which forged new alliances and left new scars. But it’s also preoccupied with another set of related themes. Where does power come from? And what are the paths to acquiring it, particularly for people born outside of birthright claims to influence?

Some men are made great, or at least elevated to positions from which they can achieve greatness, by circumstance. Mance Rayder, the former Brother of the Night’s Watch who’s united giants and gorgeous red-heads alike into a massive encampment beyond the Wall, brought them together through a shared threat. When Jon Snow, who’s turned his cloak at the behest of his Lord Commander, faces the difficult question of why he’s come to Mance, the answer he gives appears to be the ones that united the wildlings—the real deception is in suggesting that the wildlings and the Night’s Watch don’t share the same goal. “I saw Craster take his own baby boy and leave it in the woods. I saw what took it,” Jon tells Mance. “Because when I told the Lord Commander, he already knew. Thousands of years ago, the first men battled the white walkers and defeated them. I want to fight for the side that fights for the living. Did I come to the right place?”

Back in King’s Landing, another rather disreputable fellow’s found himself elevated by circumstance: Bronn the mercenary is become Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, a promotion related by the nervous Podrick Payne to two members of the Kingsguard who find themselves doubting his bona fides. But as Bronn finds out when he attempts to claim his title and the influence that would go with it is that titles don’t automatically carry power with them. Your claim has to be recognized—just as the wildlings had to grant authority to Mance for him to lead them, Bronn is finding that deference is not an automatic affair.

And power, once granted, can be taken away by circumstance or by a decision that strips you of legitimacy. Last season, Cat Stark made the decision to free Jamie Lannister to trade him for her sons, and now she’s reckoning with the status she forfeited for a chance to have her daughters back. “Find her a chamber that will serve as a cell,” her son Robb orders his men. When his wife, Talisa, protests that “She’s your mother,” Robb explains that Cat forfeited the legitimacy that would have entitled her to deference. “She freed Jamie Lannister. He robbed [Rickard Karstark] of his sons. She robbed him of his justice.”
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This review discusses minor plot points of the third season of Game of Thrones.

“The truth is always either terrible or boring,” Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) says in Game of Thrones‘ third season as she watches ships sail into and out of the port of King’s Landing. For two seasons now, Game of Thrones has laid out the terrible truths of Westeros, the fictional nation torn by war after the assassination of its king by his queen and initially created on the page by George R.R. Martin, and Essos, the continent across the sea where the woman who believes herself to be the exiled queen of Westeros is raising dragons and gathering supporters. While HBO’s fantasy series has always been an ambitious act of world-building and special effects work, Game of Thrones returns for its third season on Sunday as a more emotionally, intellectually, and visually audacious show than it was in the preceding two years. Whether Game of Thrones is expanding the roles of minor characters who previously were mostly on-screen as sex objects, articulating the growing threat posed by the White Walkers, long-lost zombie-like creatures who threaten Westeros’ human population, or staging a sword fight on a bridge that’s simultaneously playful and deadly, Game of Thrones is living up to the promise of its name, and staging a three-dimensional, and increasingly humane, chess match.

Three of Game of Thrones‘ preoccupations remain the same as they ever have: sex, violence, and sexual violence. But this season, they have a greater range, and an awareness of some of the show’s past failings, among them, the use of female nudity during scenes when characters are explaining ideas to each other. It’s a practice that’s handled with a healthy wink in the first episode of this season: when a sex workers asks Bronn (Jerome Flynn) “Don’t you want to leave something to the imagination?” he tells her “Trouble is, I’ve never had much imagination.”

Much of the first four episodes of the season, though, are concerned with longing and repressed desire, rather than consummated and displayed. While on the run through the Westeros countryside, Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to bait his captor, the female knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) with rumors that she harbored desires for Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony), the aspirant to the throne of Westeros, who was assassinated last season. “I did not fancy him,” Brienne insists stiffly. “Gods, you did. Did you ever tell him?” Jamie nudges her, before becoming sympathetic, remembering his own incestuous relationship with his sister Cersei (Lena Heady), far away from him in King’s Landing. ” I don’t blame you, either. We don’t get to choose who we love.” In King’s Landing, Jamie’s son with Cersei, Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), is sitting on Westeros’ throne and preparing to marry Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), the daughter of a wealthy family, who was previously married to Renly. Knowing that he has a violent streak, and suspecting a sexually violent one as well, Margaery tries to tease out her future husband’s sexual interests as a means of channeling them. “I imagine it must be so exciting to squeeze your finger here and watch something die over there,” Margaery tells Joffrey, examining his new crossbow. “Do you think you could? Kill something?” Joffrey asks her excitedly, hunting a proxy for sex. “I don’t know, Your Grace. Do you think I could?” Margaery asks him. “Would you like to watch me?”
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“There’s a beast in every man,” begins the new trailer for Game of Thrones, which returns to HBO on March 31. It’s a good warning for audiences, particularly those who haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s books, and who therefore aren’t necessarily prepared for how much darker the show is going to get, starting with this third season and the third novel:

I’ll probably always be willing to extend Game of Thrones some more credit than I grant to, say, The Following, because it’s about war, and, to a certain extent, the ways in which the differing standards for what is acceptable in time of war act as a demarcating line between nations and cultures. Given that brutality in war is both the show’s subject and an ongoing issue for us—if only it was true and defining of us that “America does not torture“—I’m willing to brace myself to watch acts that I might find stupidly revolting if they were airing as part of another show. But I am curious as to where audiences’ tolerances for some of the acts that I suspect will be part of this third season will land, and whether the conversation about the show will shift from its handling of female nudity and sexual violence to violence in war and violence as a sign of personal vice. Game of Thrones has its psychopaths, but the franchise is genuinely different from a show like Dexter in that it recognizes and demarcates them as such.

This post discusses plot points from the March 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

Before this Sunday, the Walking Dead had seemed to suggest the brewing war between the two factions was nearly as much a tragic systemic failure as it was a byproduct of deep-seated hatred created by a long history of violence.

After Rick and the Governor’s meeting this week, the answer is clear: hatred is the root cause, but not in the simple, “out for revenge” way one might have assumed. Sunday’s episode was a lesson in how history and memory become overlaid with moral meaning, shaping how we perceive the world and decide to act when faced with hard choices.

We like to think of history as something clinical: people look at the past, scientifically discern its lessons, and distill them down to principles that guide them going forward. Milton was the night’s avatar of clinical history, awkwardly asking Hershel if he could see his amputated stump because “it’s important data” for future generations studying the zombie apocalypse. Hershel’s partly creeped out (“I’m not showing you my leg”), partly amused (“at least buy me a drink first”) reaction captures this approach’s alienness. People don’t see themselves as data; writing a history isn’t the same as compiling social science data.
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Primrose Everdeen, sister of Hunger Games trilogy protagonist Katniss Everdeen, was killed using similar tactics to those employed in some U.S. drone missile strikes

Note: This post discusses plot points from the Hunger Games trilogy, Harry Potter, and Song of Ice and Fires series.

The death of Katniss’ sister Prim is the emotional climax of the Hunger Games trilogy: She dies a martyr, caught in a wave of explosives designed to target first-responders while working as a medic on the front lines of the final clash between the rebellion and the government in the Capital City. While there’s some dispute about who was behind her death, and whether it was necessary, there is no question left in most readers mind’s that the tactic used was monstrous. And yet outside the realm of young adult fiction, U.S. drone strikes uses a very similar tactic known as the “double tap,” against terror targets.

A joint report from Stanford/NYU on U.S. Drone policy released in September noted:

“There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike.

The same pattern emerged in @dronestream’s tweets of U.S. drone strikes from 2002-2012. So, while whether or not the double tap is official U.S. policy remains unclear due to the secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. drone policy, all of the evidence suggests the U.S. repeatedly employed a tactic that results in first-responder casualties. And it’s not just a questionable tactic: UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns calls the second strike in a double tap akin to a war crime. But while there are efforts to bring armed drone strikes “out of the shadows” for a larger conversation and widespread disapproval of U.S. strikes in the global community, there’s no sign of major changes to U.S. drone strike strategies on the horizon.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand why it’s easier to see the inhumanity of using tactics that hit first responders when the person in question is the protagonist of your favorite series’ sister (whose protection was the catalyst for the entire trilogy’s plot) than when those rescuers are people you’ve never heard of half a world away. By its very nature literature builds empathetic bonds between readers and sympathetic characters; we get to know them, care about them, and mourn for them if they’re lost. But literature can also explore our own humanity and help us have challenging discussions about the morality of the world we live in and the policies formalizing that morality.

And “double tap” is just one of many examples of the disconnect between the ideal morality we hold high (and try to teach our youth through young adult fiction) and the policies that define our culture. In the Harry Potter series using the torture curse, Cruciatus, carries one of the harshest penalties in the Wizarding world (though one that doesn’t appear to apply to our protagonist when he uses it in the name of good). But in our real world, the U.S. government used extraordinary rendition tactics a European Court recently said “amounted to torture” against a terror suspect and relied on “enhanced interrogation tactics,” the nasty euphemism for torture, throughout much of the war on terror.

Straying out of young adult fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane is a brutal character living in a brutal world, but one of his most well known atrocities is the murder of two royal children during the collapse of House Targaryen. Even in this context, the moral characters such as Ned Stark think of the murder of the children (and the rape of their mother) as an ugly stain on Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, even if they acknowledge it as politically expedient. In our real world, most people’s gut reaction is that there is no context when the wholesale slaughter of children can be justified. And yet there are rumblings that children are being considered legitimate targets by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a current military officer was quoted in a piece published in The Military Times titled “Some Afghan Children Aren’t Bystanders.”

There’s no question that these characters, and these bad acts, all provoke powerful moral reactions in readers. But it’s not clear yet whether these stories shape their fans’ opinions off the page as well as on it. As a generation of young adults grows up both on protracted American involvement in ugly conflicts abroad and fiction that tries to outline moral laws of war, it’ll be fascinating to see whether their moral imaginations stay fired after they close books and walk out of movie screenings.