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On Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive, fan-created trove of tales, there are nearly 5,000 stories tagged as belonging to A Song of Ice and Fire, and more than 2,600 tagged Game of Thrones. They span alternate universes from modern London to Romanov-era Russia; they envision the story post-"A Dance with Dragons"; they revel in character studies and beloved pairings. (Was Arya/Gendry ever so popular before viewers saw Joe Dempsie's abs?)

And, of course, they offer lots of inventive, carefully labeled smut. If you assume that all fanfic is of the Harry-and-Draco-get-it-on-on-the-Quidditch-field sort, you might be surprised (or disappointed). Plenty of "Thrones" fic stays on the straight side, exploring the moment Catelyn and Ned fell in love, or imagining a burgeoning relationship between Myrcella Baratheon and Robb Stark. Still, sometimes Margaery and Sansa make out; sometimes Theon and Robb get really, really close. There's something for everyone, provided you're willing to see George R.R. Martin's characters in ever more compromising positions.

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At first glance, the show might look like "Law & Order: SVU," or pretty much any murder series of the last decade. A man, a grief counselor, married with two adorable kids, cannot control his urges to hurt and control women. We don’t know much of his background, or his past crimes, but we come upon him in the beginning of a killing spree in which he stylizes the dead body. The police try to track him down with the help of a super-detective, one devoted solely to the job, so much so that she sleeps at work.

What makes this show uniquely feminist is the way it handles this seemingly familiar subject matter. It showcases the electric talent of a top-tier actor (Gillian Anderson) as a complex and brilliant detective solving gruesome crimes against women. It focuses on the explosive relationships between men and women, on misogyny, on the nature of violence, and it deeply cares about women, feminism and the ways in which men mistreat women, from petty judgments to torture, rape and murder.

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George R.R. Martin has always drawn deeply from history in A Song of Ice and Fire. From thinly veiled Mongol hordes, to Hadrian’s Wall carved of a few hundred feet of ice, to Greek Fire and the mighty harbor chains of medieval Constantinople. And he has admitted that the War of Roses in particular provided the germ of the story, the conflagration of Lancaster and York mapping onto Lannister and Stark. As such, it’s entirely appropriate to look to history to consider the direction that the overall story is moving towards.

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Following the trail of the coquettish Lillian Leitzel, the "World’s Most Marvelous Gymnast,” and her gravity-defying partner, Alfredo Codona, "Queen of the Air" is an irresistible romantic biography of the Brad and Angelina of the Big Top, writes Laura Miller.

Jensen knows how to tell this story, with just the right degree of old-timey melodrama. Here’s how he describes an argument during the long years when Codona drove himself to perfect the Triple: His father and brother “begged him to abandon his quest for the feat before it killed him or, worse, left him such a pathetic cripple that he would be belted into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Codona could not be persuaded.” In counterpoint, he pulls back the curtains concealing the brutality of the performer’s lot: celebrated and fawned over one year, forced by an accident to work as an auto mechanic the next. Leitzel was surrounded by admirers and showered with gifts, but before going to bed every night she injected caffeine into her shoulder socket to tame the “pulsating, and some nights, hammering pain.” Unlike even the most battered professional athletes, she performed twice a day, every day during the circus’ season, and on off-season gigs in Europe.

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A week into his tenure, Oliver is, if anything, doing too good a job. On Thursday, when regular guest Fareed Zakaria sat down for an interview he told Oliver he was “staging a brilliant slow-motion coup against Jon Stewart,” which is true not because there’s any chance Oliver won’t give the gig back in three months, but because his stint makes it clear that ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” would be more accurately called “The Daily Show with a Bunch of Very Talented and Clever Writers.” (I'm still in awe of this gun phone bit.) Oliver won’t end up with his name in the title, but it will be hard to forget that it’s the writers who are the power behind the “Daily Show” throne.

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Each season, “True Blood” picks up an allegory, tosses it around for a few episodes, and then tosses it aside. In the past, vampirism has been used to gesture at homophobia, racism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and addictions of all kind. This season, “True Blood” takes a desultory stab at the Holocaust -- and has a B-story that references the Freedom Rides for good measure.

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Huckabee spoke with Concerned Women for America head Penny Nance about his concerns on the radio on Monday, saying,

The very thing that many people and I know CWA was a part of this, saying, this is why the legalization of same-sex marriage is going to be a much bigger issue than just saying we let people love whoever they want to love, that’s not the issue. Will it force businesses -- of course everyone will say, oh no people still have their rights, but they don’t. And every fear that people had has in fact come true, that this is being forced in textbooks on how marriage is depicted, we’re now even seeing television commercials portraying same-sex couples, that’s something I guess I didn’t expect to see anytime soon.

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This season, the slow, slow saga of Bran making his way to the wall or Davos learning to read took place alongside much more kinetic arcs, like the loss of Jaime’s Lannister’s hand, his friendship with Brienne, or the fate of Robb Stark and his army. Arya has been in nearly every episode, but has been more or less moved by grown men with agendas from place to place, waiting for her own story to truly begin. This particular weave of slack and taut storylines gives “Game of Thrones” its all encompassing, larger-than-the-viewer feel. But it also means, looking back on the last 10 episodes, what stand out to me are not episodes or some mesh of story lines but specific moments: Catelyn begging for Robb’s life, Jaime’s stump in the mud, Daenerys walking through the unsullied asking them to follow her, Brienne in the bear pit, Margaery fingering that cross bow.

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How has it been to act without a hand?

It’s a little complicated, actually. I have three to four versions [of no hand]. The one in really wide shots, I can use my own hand. We can just hide that. That’s the easiest. But as soon as we get in closer, we can’t do that, so then they have a couple of fake arms that I put on just above my elbow. And then I have to hide my own arm down my pants, in my crack, and that’s a little uncomfortable. And then of course there was the scene we did in the bath, and that was a third version where I spent two hours having this arm attached, again above my elbow, but as a real second limb. And then a few times -- there’s a shot where I walk from the back and they have to use CGI to remove my real arm, so I was wearing this green glove.  I hope they come up with something smart for the next season.

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Rachel Kushner has simultaneously stunned and scared male critics with her "virtuosic" new novel about a young woman named Reno navigating the 1970s New York art scene. "The Flamethrowers" is a bold contender for the Great American Novel, writes Laura Miller:

But the boldness of this novel has more to do with its voice than its subject matter; you get a heaping serving of Kushner’s virtuosity in the opening chapters, which describe Reno’s journey back west by motorcycle, as part of a nebulous art project. I could present samples of her writing here, but better yet, just see James Wood’s nearly gobstruck review of “The Flamethrowers” in the New Yorker; he is the maestro of the representative quote, after all. He does a good job of what may be an impossible task. It is fiendishly hard to nail down and demonstrate the quality that most distinguishes the work of a remarkable author — that is, her authority. Kushner has authority in spades, seemingly without reaching for it, as if she were just born that way.

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Every time I look at the film listings lately my heart sinks. It's hard out here for a woman. If you're packing a pair of ovaries, might as well pack it in mama. There's very little here for you.

Let's take a look at the films currently playing at the Scotiabank Theatre -- Fast and Furious 6, Star Trek, Iron Man 3D and Oblivion. All of these films star men, were made by men, and are principally about men. Not only that, but when they're released in the theatre, they're critiqued mainly by even more men (91 per cent of critics writing for major entertainment magazines and/or websites are of the male persuasion). These critiques are then published in magazines and aired on TV and media outlets that are also owned by almost entirely by men (women make up more than 50 per cent of the population but they hold less than seven percent of all TV and radio station licenses in the U.S.).

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Here's a sample of what she has to say:

Asked about the response to the episode where Hannah lands a doctor played by Patrick Wilson for a two-day romp: "I get so tired of having to cry out "misogyny," but that's what's going on in this situation. People questioning the idea that a woman could sleep with a man who defied her lot in the looks bracket hews so closely to these really outdated ideas about what makes a woman worth spending time with. Really? Can you not imagine a world in which a girl who's sexually down for anything and oddly gregarious pulls a guy out of his shell for two days?

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“In the Flesh,” which starts strong and gets even stronger, is set in England after the zombie apocalypse. In its particular mythology, everyone who died in the year 2008 rose from the dead one day. They terrorized and ate people but could not multiply: Their bite had no bite. A cure was eventually found, and thanks to everyday shots, the former brain eaters have their brains back. They are “Partially Deceased Syndrome” sufferers, still in their janky bodies, but otherwise coherent, and they are slowly returning to the families and communities they once terrorized.

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