Another need-to-get-it-off-my-chest-post. Feel free to skip if you dislike rants; it’s only very mildly constructive.

I’ve lost track of how many people have quoted this study to me as being a fun and telling way to characterise gendered languages. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a study by a Stanford professor which says that people “gender” nouns: that if a table is feminine you will give it feminine characteristics like elegance, beauty; and a masculine bridge will get described as sturdy and strong, which are masculine traits.

OK.

As someone who speaks two gendered languages (one of them as a native), one non-gendered language, and is starting to make inroads into a second non-gendered language… NPR is giving you a false idea of how gender in gendered languages work (I have no idea what the original actual research is; this being the NPR report version, which I suspect distorts the truth). And I’m not denying that language shapes thought, or that genders are completely neutral in gendered languages: for instance, most animal names are male, and I have a devil of a time thinking of a goat as other than female (it’s “la chèvre” in French, which is feminine).

But I do have several issues with that taking that article at face value, and particularly in generalising those results to every single word. The first one is that this concept of “gender characteristics” sounds very much like something that a long-standing Anglophone speaker would come up with: a lot of Anglophones I’ve met have been fascinated by the idea of giving gender to nouns, but in a very odd way. No, I don’t think of a table as female. I think of it as gramatically feminine, which is a different beast. There is a difference–yes, they’re not totally dissociated concepts, but there is one.
Also–I’ve had a chance to interact with US mainstream culture for a while, and it’s struck me that it puts a lot of accent on gender separation and gender proper roles, which is again, fairly compatible with this kind of ideas. We’ve also been discussing this elsewhere with J. Cheney and Chris Kastensmidt, but there’s a whole “anthropomorphising” complex at work in English: Anglophones (or at least USians, I don’t know about UK people) are actually more likely to anthropomorphise their vehicles, computers and cars–giving them names and genders; and referring to them by those names. By contrast, French (and, it looks like, Portuguese) will look at you very oddly if you keep referring to your nice masculine computer. The French language is grammatically gendered, sure; but to all intents and purposes, gender is a dead attribute when it comes to most everyday things.

The other issue I have is with the notion of “gender characteristics”–I’m sorry, but though there are common points between the way cultures view male vs. female, there are also a heck of a lot of differences. People’s perception of “idealised” gender characteristics strongly depends on the culture/language. Very simple example: in France (or in most of the West), a manly man is someone who is strong, and generally good at sports. This is emphatically not the case in traditional Chinese or Vietnamese culture, where a manly man is slender and thin, educated, has beautiful long nails, and can compose beautiful poetry. [1] Puts another spin on the “lone hero”, doesn’t it?

You don’t even have to move that far: where I live in France, it’s usually considered very feminine to be always touching and kissing (on the cheeks) and hugging. Go to Spain and watch a couple of guys from that perspective, and they’ll still seem like a bunch of sissies, because Southern Europe cultures are very tactile.

And another thing… some of the most intensely gender-separated cultures (China and Vietnam, sorry, using what I know, and my repertoire isn’t large, but it will suffice for this) have non-gendered languages, where only the pronouns are gendered. So the gender of people is not the gender of words, and vice-versa.

The study doesn’t mention who they picked as tests subjects, either, but considering that it took place in the US, it’s making me wonder if the German and Italian speakers were pure native speakers with no second language, or if everyone had been immersed in US language and US culture for a while (I strongly suspect the latter). Whatever the case, it certainly looks like the aforementioned speakers got their “perceived genders” classified according to an American perception of gender. So, hum… sceptical, to say the least?

So, please, please, pretty please… do not tell me about the feminine table or the masculine computer? Gendered languages don’t work the way NPR would have you think.

[1]A fun one is that long hair is usually considered a feminine and weak attribute today, at least in my social circles in France; but in Ancient China, wearing hair long wasn’t a particularly big deal–in fact, when the Vietnamese and Chinese first met, the Chinese thought the Vietnamese were Barbarians, because the men dared to cut their hair)

Hum, OK. Mostly I went to see this movie because friends dragged me, because it would normally be pretty low on my list of things to watch. I have to say, before we get into the snark, that the spirit of it (the ridiculous caper, casual adaptation of history to suit the plot and general sense of fun) would actually have pleased Dumas quite a bit, I think. Also, I didn’t expect to quite like Matthew Macfadyen quite that much in the role of Athos (way better than Kiefer Sutherland in the Disney 1993 version).

Now that the good is out of the way…

Well, it would have been nice if the movie hadn’t quite been so ridiculous, or quite so predictable–or, indeed, quite so creative with, you know, actual French history and geography? I don’t know where the French court is supposed to be, and clearly the movie is in a state of terminal hesitation as to whether it should be the Louvre or Versailles (the placement with regards to Paris sort of looks like a badly located Louvre, but the actual shots suggest Versailles). Which is interesting considering that Versailles was a nice hunting lodge in the middle of the woods at the time Louis XIII was on the throne.
Also, about those nice opening shots on dark green hills with huge, twisted trees that have seen many winters? All I have to say is: Gascony. As in, south of France. Sun-drenched, mild winters, wonderful light, all that is patently missing from said shots. (I think this was shot in Bavaria, and boy, does it show).
And finally, I do want to point out that “musketeers” means one definite thing that the scriptwriters chose to completely ignore: a “musketeer” is a guy with a musket. Someone who used the very first (and admittedly unreliable) firearms of French warfare. You do NOT get to present musketeers as some kind of nostalgic uber-swordsmen set aside by the march of progress. They’re not that. They were never that, and the original novel is indeed pretty clear on the fact that musketeers are called to the war front at La Rochelle, and that they must have their equipment, which includes the firearms.

Other than that… The movie was full of the usual Hollywood conceits that realism should be thrown out the window in the service of good storytelling (whatever that means): I’m sorry, but you cannot swim in the canals of Venice, and then fire crossbows in the minute that follows (your weapon mechanism is probably completely clogged by then). You do not plummet from admidst cloud-cover height into the sea and survive: at this altitude, the sea is going to hit you like a concrete block. For that matter, you do not swim in full court clothes (which would have included very cumbersome underwear in addition to all the frills).
I’ll skip over the usual casting of the Cardinal as the villain plotting to take over France, all the skimpy fan-service that the script parades in the person of Milady, because it’s only predictable from that kind of movie (if really sad); but I’ll admit some final puzzlement as to what the heck all the maps and little figurines were doing in the movie? They were grossly inaccurate in most cases (bonus points especially for the “presentation” of the European politics just after the title roll, which wins a prize for getting absolutely nothing right of the 1625-1633 geopolitics), and they made the movie look like it was made by a really clueless Warhammer adddict.

But that’s not the worst thing. No, the worst thing is the last five minutes or so of the movie, which promise a sequel.

Excuse me while I go tear my hair out, and start a search of a decent movie adaptation of the novel… (any recs welcome, btw. I could use good movies)

And a thematic news roundup of publishing in non-Western-Anglo countries:

-Charles Tan on “How Publishing Favours the West”. All very true, sadly, and once again a case of the US (and associated UK/Canada/Aus/NZ, who benefit by virtue of language and cultural proximity, even if they’re not the same) oozing into the local markets, feeding tremendous demand but not adapt local prices to said demand (said it before, will say it again: $8.00 does NOT buy you the same thing abroad. In Vietnam, it’s one-fifth of the average monthly salary). And how Amazon and Apple are pretty much doing the same with ebooks. [1]

-K.S. Augustin on her experience with Kindle publishing in a non-Amazon country. It’s horrendous, in case you had doubts: Amazon encourages local publishers to use Kindle, but won’t even grant them access to the software for formatting books and checking out what they look like (I think preventing the publisher from checking out a preview of their own Kindle book has got to be a new low…)

-And apparently, the hot topic of the Frankfurt Book Fair is publishers parcelling out digital English rights in non-Western-Anglophone countries and selling them one by one, presumably to local publishers. That’s right: if all goes according to plan, and you want an English-language ebook in France/Spain/Vietnam, you’ll have to wait for a French/Spanish/Vietnamese editor to buy the English-language rights in France/Spain/Vietnam (yes, I know. Who in their right mind is going to pay more than a pittance for this, especially for books that aren’t bestsellers). Ain’t that awesome.

This is a particular flavour of insane (and I still think ebooks should be sold by language, not territory. Yeah, sure, authors and publishers are going to be losing out a bit, but it’s a fairer deal, and it doesn’t leave us in non-Anglo countries feeling like second-class citizens).

Also, this is all leaving me very puzzled, because I think any media business strategy today has got to be weighed against the cost of the piracy option, whether it’s for ebooks or for movies. We can argue all we want about how morally incorrect piracy is, but the fact remains: it’s available, and it’s relatively easy, and its only drawbacks are non-guaranteed quality, and possible legal prosecution (which means downloading a pirate ebook or movie is not quite free: there’s an equivalent cost, defined as the sales value when a given buyer will prefer a legit option to downloading the pirate copy).

But if you have a model in which you keep feeding demand (as Hollywood does, by exporting movies everywhere and making them the baseline of cinema; as the Big Six publishers do in a lesser measure) but not making stuff available at reasonable prices, or not making stuff available at all, you’re basically encouraging people to turn to piracy (and sure, you can say you’ll stomp on pirates, but let’s face it: stopping all piracy dead in its tracks is far from easy). And you can complain pirates are taking away all your business, but for me you’re bearing a share of responsibility because of the demand, prices and availability policy you set (not all the responsibility, to be sure, but still…).
What I’m seeing of the situation so far sounds like another music industry train wreck waiting to happen. It seems to me that we’re going to need a new legal model and new copyright laws to deal with the digital age; but so far this hasn’t exactly been happening.

An addendum on book and DVD prices: I can’t remember where the stat comes from (it was a scholarly report on piracy in various countries, but I can’t find the link for the life of me), but a DVD in India is sold for an equivalent value of $700, if we bring the price in rupees back to US-cost-of-living dollars. Imagine that you kept seeing ads and trailers for the new Batman movie, that people kept talking about it at work, kept insisting that if you hadn’t seen it, you were really behind the times and totally uncool; but that the act of seeing it cost you $700. No wonder there’s a whole generation in Asia growing up not knowing what a legit DVD or book is… [2][3]

Why, yes, I’m feeling cheerful and optimistic about the future of the ebook market today…

(and I suspect not everyone will agree with me RE copyright laws, piracy and ebooks. Feel free to comment/argue/refute in the comments. This is very much something I would love to hear discussion on).

[1] I know, it’s a complicated problem from a business point of view, especially with the permeability of boundaries: it was fine to set prices in the US for the US; and then to deal almost on a case-by-case basis on export problems, but today the market and the demand have gone global (and there are people taking advantage of this–see arbitrage in financial markets).
[2] There are pirate physical books, too. If you’ve ever gone to Asia (well, at least India and Vietnam. I haven’t tried elsewhere), you’ll find itinerant book peddlers selling bound books basically made of photocopies. It’s a sobering experience when you dwell on why they’re here at all.
[3] And yes, I agree that it’s not legal, and probably not ethical either. But the rise of piracy has all too clearly demonstrated that people do not have a natural moral fiber.

I have to say, any book which describes Paris’s 13e arrondissement as the Mecca for Chinese products, and sends you to minuscule grocery shops to find “typically” Vietnamese supplies is… not that well informed?
(you can find Chinese products in the 13e arrondissement, but the vast majority of things on the shelves is Vietnamese or Thai, and there are loads of Vietnamese doing their shopping in the big 13e arrondissement supermarkets. If it’s Chinese and not particularly used in Southeast Asian cusine–unlike, say, oyster sauce or hoisin sauce–you’re going to have a heck of a time looking for it in most of the food shops. Case in point, fermented bean paste).

So… probably not a good idea to believe the book when it tackles Lebanese food or Mexican stuff in Paris, then.

Current mood: vastly sarcastic and/or disappointed. Not sure yet.

la_marquise_de_ has a wonderful post about what history is for (short answer: nothing, it just is), and she finishes it by stating that expecting something to be “obviously and economically useful” is a very Western (and unhealthy) assumption. This, in turn, set me to digging up a couple thoughts about SF I had at the bottom of the drawer.

See, I’ve heard those thoughts before about useful things. The “utilitarian” approach (ie, it can’t exist unless it’s good for something) is also very strongly present in genre, and I hadn’t realised how much.

For instance, there’s a lot of advice about keeping things as short as possible, about making scenes do double duty, about avoiding bulky infodumps. There’s advice about keeping a clear and readable style, not getting into the reader’s way, and so forth. In other words: do not waste words. Do not waste the reader’s time. Do not be fanciful. Always be useful and give bang for the buck. If the book is thick, it had damned well be because every word counts.

There’s also a lot of advice about writing an SF story that boils down to being economical: for instance, the school of thought of the Novum (the idea that a true SF story should be about one technology/piece of technology, and following its resonance into society, ie most minor modification you can think of) definitely fits this. And how many times have you heard that a novel should be easily summarised and boiled down to an elevator pitch–and that, if you can’t, it has to be because there is a problem in the structure of the novel itself?

There is also this pernicious idea that stories have to depend on the technology or they’re not true SF: I say “pernicious” because on the one hand, I understand where we’re coming from in trying to define genre, to separate it from mainstream (though I’m not entirely sure I approve, but that’s another story)–but on the other, if you think about it, this basically amounts to saying “this setting/detail had better be useful” (sort of like Novum to the Nth power). This also comes in flavours of “this plot had better be useful” (aka, it has to have a point, an arc, a theme or whathaveyou), and in “this character had better be useful” (aka, the characters who are not essential to the plot shouldn’t be there [1])–and my favourite, the special alternate history bonus: an alternate history setting has to explicitly tell us something about our own world, or it might as well not exist.

And I find this… troubling.

We can see the results of this approach everywhere, I think (and to some extent, this goes beyond literature); and I don’t think we’ve necessarily gone good places with this. The “utilitarian” approach does have good sides (I’m not advocating we should let authors ramble on and on without firm editing), but it comes with strong dangers: it encourages simple stories with a to-the-point-backdrop and plot. It creates stories that are deliberately simplistic, with pre-catalogued plots, a cast of characters as thin as paper, and a world that can be summed up in one or two key concepts. It thins out the author’s voice (and authorial intervention), and ends up arbitrarily restricting what one can and can’t do with a story.
It prevents novels from being filled with random worldbuilding, with random acts and facts–whereas life itself is full of random things, of details that don’t fit in with each other–of plots that cut off and don’t necessarily make sense by the end.

And, most serious from where I stand, it plays on our already-exacerbated Western tendencies to tie everything into neat narratives, and also ends up reinforcing those tendencies–because, if you keep reading novels that have a point, you’ll soon expect all novels to have a point.
Similarly, the hunger for simple narrative has gone beyond fiction: there’s a general drive towards wanting simple accounts for a phenomenon, and single-factor explanations.
And that’s just not how things work in life.
Case in point (and brief digression): the Rio-Paris Air France crash. Nearly all media stressed one possible explanation (the pilots are to blame, for instance, which seems the majority vote). The truth is, like most accidents, this was a combination of improbable and serious events that led to the plane plunging downwards, and it’s impossible to pinpoint which incident “crashed” the plane. They all did: had even one circumstance gone differently, the plane would still be there. But people prefer the single-factor explanation. It’s simple. It makes sense. Why look for more?
Except, of course, that the single-factor explanation is bunk.

Stories didn’t use to be that simple. Les Misérables doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can argue that it’s a book about the redemption of Jean Valjean–but that completely fails to tell us about the book. You can argue it’s about poverty and the life of the destitute–and sure, it is that too. But the book is much more complex than that; it has a multitude of facets–a multitude of minor characters who all have their own lives (and if you only kept those necessary to the plot, it would be a much poorer book)–and this makes it breathe. This makes it real. This makes full; and fulfilling.

I’m not saying you won’t take anything away from Les Misérables or Dream of Red Mansions (that last being pretty much the epitome of “plotless” for me, but utterly wonderful nevertheless). Of course you will. Of course you’ll find your own lessons, and your own interpretations.
But to want novels and/or worldbuilding to be as simple as possible feels wrong to me–like we’re cutting off our own limbs because, after all, they’re not really necessary/economical… It reminds me of Karl Marx’s “religion is the opium of the people”. By this, he meant that religion gave people what they wanted–the illusion of stability and purpose–and kept them from realising they were exploited; we seemed to have moved to “fiction is our opium”–into a world where fiction satisfies our cravings for simplicity, and prevents us from realising how complex and difficult the real world can be.

So, anyway, that’s what I see. I’d never realised before how much it worried me, or how many of those things came together in a solid (and utterly wrong, at least from my POV) vision of the world according to fiction [2].

What do you think? Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments (specifically, if you want to disagree, do go ahead. I could use some reassurance here… [3])

[1] Wanting few characters in a novel didn’t apply in Ancient China, for instance: the list of Romance of the Three Kingdoms characters fills out half a thick volume; and the Chinese wouldn’t have considered the story realistic unless it listed tons of minor and major characters.

[2] I’m mostly thinking of popular fiction here (genre), and particularly of US fiction, but I do see it elsewhere.

[3]I’m aware we do have a counter-culture to this: we do have people seeking to make novels complex and organic; but I’m getting the strong feeling they’re the minority vote…

OK, so apparently, this is how you can tell that Torchwood has become a joint US-UK production:

While the previous jackets of Torchwood featured the entire team in varied/neutral postures (the boxset of seasons 1-
3, the DVD of Children of Earth), or even a stylised abstract (the boxsets of season 1 & season 2), this one has everyone carrying guns (and a mean-looking guy in a suit who could advertise for Hollywood FBI). And, as a bonus, Eve Myler in a highly sexualised aggressive posture (the two guns pointed downwards, the leather jacket, the tight-fitting pants. She could be any number of pseudo bad-ass heroines).

*bangs head against wall*

[1] Not that I particularly liked Torchwood, but I just happened on this while browsing Amazon.
ETA: mind you, the US jacket for Children of Earth isn’t half-bad in the bad-ass babe department, either…

So, by now everyone’s seen Niall Harrison’s article about the (mis)representation of women in reviewing. Not everyone might have seen the followups: Juliet McKenna, Kari Sperring (who has started an awesome list of women to read), and Sherwood Smith, who has a great reflexion on which viewpoints are considered the norm (and great comments, too).

One sentence in what Sherwood wrote struck me:
The sense that men write about Important Things and women write about Domestic or Sentimental Things still appears to be pervasive.

And it did make me want to elaborate, on something I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t so far. Sherwood touches on it a bit, I think–mostly in the context of literature–but I kind of wanted to take it a step further.

See, the one thing I hate most about gender perceptions? That Important Things cannot be Domestic or Sentimental: the pervasive notion that the things men do are Important; and the things women do are not (I’m using “the things men do” in a sense of traditional gender roles–which, thankfully, have evolved quite a bit since the 19th Century). That somehow, it’s still more Important to talk about war and fighting as a soldier, still more Important to talk about science and inventing things–than it is to talk about taking care of a household, about raising children, all the myriad things that are the traditional prerogative of women. It’s sort of like saying, “as a woman, you cannot have worth until you do the things of men-essentially until you become a male surrogate.” And it saddens me, because it dismisses so-called “feminine” activities as unworthy: it’s just another way of putting men first. [1][2]

Not sure how clear this is? I’m struggling to articulate it into words.

[1]Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important that women who want to have a career be able to have one; that as a woman, you can be a soldier or a scientist or any occupation that catches your fancy. But I do think that as a man or as a woman, you should be allowed to stay home and take care of the kids, and be a good homecook–and not be ridiculed. That being a feminine boy should have as much worth as being a tomboy–which is so not the case today.
[2]Which is why we need more books that aren’t about traditional male activities such as saving the world and getting the girl; books like Jo Walton’s Lifelode, and Cao Xuequin’s Dream of Red Mansions (which, pretty impressively, was actually written by a man).

It occurred to me I did this kind of post for Ancient China, but never got around to it for the Aztecs…

–The jungle. Ok, if I had a cookie every time the romantic and torrid jungle atmosphere was mentioned in connection with the Aztecs, my kitchen would be overflowing. The Aztecs were a people of Central Mexico, with NO jungles whatsoever in a radius of several dozen kilometers. Their country was wet marshes; and after the wet marshes, high mountains with dry and cold weather. To get the jungle, you had to go down to the south–a week’s march or more, beyond the boundaries of the empire for most of its existence–, and enter the bits that are now the South of Mexico and Guatemala. Those are Maya lands (see below for Aztecs, Mayas and Incas). There is a lot of jungle-based imagery in Aztec mythology (jaguars and quetzals, for instace), precisely because those jungles were far-off lands the Aztecs didn’t see every day and thus acquired an aura of magic and preciousness, a bit like the Orient in the 19th Century became this glamorous place where everything was larger than life.
And Apocalypto is a terrible movie about Mesoamerican people, incidentally (it depicts life among the Maya, but does a terrible job of it).

–Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, it’s all the same, isn’t it? Er, yeah, sure. Just as the Finns, the Spanish and the Ancient Greek are secretly all one people. The Aztecs, as said above, occupied the centre of Mexico from the 14th to the 16th Century; the Mayas held the South of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc., for a longer time than this (the last Maya city fell in the 17th or 18th Century, and the Mayas had been around for a while, even though their culture had changed a lot by then). The Incas were in Peru, which is more than three thousand kilometers from any of the aforementioned countries.

–The Empire: or lack thereof. You often find references to the “Aztec Empire”, which immediately evokes a political structure akin to the Roman Empire, ie a unified territory under the rule of a centralised administration. Truth is, the Aztecs were nowhere as organised. The word “hegemony” would be a better description of how they ruled: strictly speaking, they had under political control only a very small bit (the centre around their capital Tenochtitlan). When they conquered a new city-state, they didn’t integrate it by modifying the power structure: they tended to keep the ruling family in place, and force them to pay tribute to Tenochtitlan. And that was pretty much it. There was no attempt at political, territorial or even cultural homogenisation: the Aztecs spread by extending their tribute area, and you didn’t have an empire so much as a collection of loose city states owing a very loose form of allegiance to Tenochtitlan. (the Incas, on the other hand, were very good at the Empire business, sometimes relocating entire populations in order to make sure the political cohesion was preserved). It’s part of the reason the Aztecs fell so quickly: their hold was so tenuous (but still grudgingly felt, considering their demands for exorbitant tribute), that the Spanish had no trouble convincing the rulers of the neighbouring city-states to support them instead of the Aztecs.

–All bloodthirsty savages, I tell you: not going to linger on that one because I’ve harped on it enough, but of course not true. Human sacrifice is a bit of an arresting custom, which means that any other achievements tend to get lost under the weight of disapproval. The Aztecs were awesome astronomers, pretty good physicians for a medieval time period, and they also had a pretty equalitarian society (again, for the time period), with possibilities for commoners to reach pretty high on the social ladder, and a fair amount of women’s rights (right to divorce and inherit, for instance) that most medieval societies tended to forget altogether.

–We’re very well informed about what the Aztecs were like: ha. Mostly, not that much. The conquistadores did a terrific job of destroying the Aztec culture as they found it: there are Aztec descendants, and a handful of codices, but the evidence of how the Aztecs lived is terribly thin. As far as monuments go, again, there are very few Aztec monuments left: the shiny pyramids everyone thinks of when the Aztecs are mentioned tend to be those of Teotihuacan (which predates the Aztecs by 5 centuries or more), and of course Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, which means very few remains of the Aztec capital.

There has been a lot of debate on the internet about the ethics of ebook piracy, a lot of which boiled down to “piracy is stealing”. I’m not saying I disagree with that, but…

Well, you should check out this links roundup from troisroyaumes over on dreamwidth, which is a little more measured. Specifically, it focuses on problematic issues with intellectual property rights seen the Western way. The part that especially resonates with me, book-wise (but there’s more here than that), was people discussing the availability of books (whether physical or electronic) in developing countries, and their price–which is a not-insignificant part of the problem. I’ve always thought that asking people to pay US prices for books or DVDs was ridiculous: take Vietnam, where the average salary is 50$. With that, if you’re lucky, you can buy maybe two English hardbacks? (and I’m being nice here, because I’m assuming said hardbacks aren’t subject to import duties). As qian points out, in Malaysia, an imported English book can cost 7-8 times the price of a meal, and getting it is a terrible hassle. I can see why it would give her the unpleasant feeling that “in almost every case, the author is not even contemplating that somebody like you will be reading it. You quite simply do not exist in their world.”

I’m already getting that impression of being ignored from all those ebook piracy posts–and I live in a developed country with high salaries, reasonable access to English-language books (amazon, book depository, few or no import taxes). I can imagine how much freaking worse it would be for people in developing countries.

ETA: fantasyecho has a further links roundup–some overlaps, but there are a few not in the original DW post. Like the earlier one–don’t agree with anything, but a lot of points are definitely worth taking into account.

Also, one of those linked posts has a very valid point, which is that “illegal” is not a synonym for “immoral”. A lot of those blog posts about piracy don’t make a clear distinction between those two words. “illegal” is what the state thinks is bad. “immoral” is what you think is bad according to personal ethics–and if it’s exactly the same as “illegal” for you, no more, no less, you’re demonstrating a scary amount of trust in your government…

If you’re going to design armour for characters, can I point out that the primary use of armour is to protect your vitals–and by vitals, we’re including things like “organs within the torso”, but also more sneaky things like arteries? Aka, the brachial artery, which is pretty close to the skin in both upper arms, and the femoral artery, which is also pretty close to the skin in the upper part of the thigh?

Which why armour like this, which fails to protect either upper arms or thighs, is, er, pretty much useless? (it’s a bit blurry, but if you want to check it into all its glory, go to the full trailer here and flash forward to around 3:00)

(I’m not a big fan of sexy armours for female characters, for obvious reasons, but if they absolutely have to be sexy, can they pretend to be useful as well?)
(and yes, I’m aware lightsabers cauterise wounds almost instantly, making it unlikely the Sith is going to burst her artery. Please don’t get me started on the (lack of) worth of lightsabers as weapons)