Mockingjay 2: Tossing Out the Blockbuster Rulebook

From the moment I finished reading the Hunger Games novels back in 2011, as the first Hunger Games movie was already starting production, I worried about Mockingjay.  It's hard enough to make a PG-13 movie series about kids being thrown into an arena and forced to kill each other, and to expect general audiences to want to watch said series.  But to follow the story through to its fairly bitter and sobering end, and expect people to keep sticking with it, was beyond what I could imagine.  I was 34 when I read these books, and as I closed Mockingjay after finishing its final page, all I could think of was, I am a fully-functioning adult, and I feel like I need therapy right now.  How in the name of all that is holy could a 12 year-old read this and be o.k.??

At that point, all I hoped for from the the movie adaptations was for them to be decent, and to get enough of an audience that they could make all 3 movies (well, 4 - it's basically a given these days that studios will split the last book into 2 films for the extra cash-grab).  And then The Hunger Games was released in March 2012.  And it became the 11th highest-grossing (domestic) film of all time.  And then Catching Fire was released in November 2013, and it made even more money.  It was the highest-grossing film of 2013 (domestic), and surpassed the Hunger Games to become the 10th highest-grossing movie of all time.  Not only that, but The Hunger Games was a pretty damn good movie, and Catching Fire was flat-out fantastic.  All of this was about a billion miles past what I could have ever hoped for from this series.

'The 100' Analysis #2: Rubicon

If you missed my 100 analysis #1, you can catch that here.  By the way, I'm still in the phase where I call it "the one-hundred" instead of "the hundred" and I just can't seem to get out of it.  I need to convince some of my real-life people to watch so I can say it out loud more often, lol.  Anyway.

Just to re-iterate what I'm doing here, I'm examining this show from two very specific angles.  I'm delving into two key points in the series (or what has aired so far which is the first 2 seasons) when I realized that this show was not quite like anything else I had ever seen on TV ... or anywhere for that matter.  My first analysis was on "Spacewalker", and also on the entire Clarke/Finn relationship, and how it progressed from the pilot through Spacewalker.  For my second analysis, I'm going to focus on "Rubicon".

WARNING: Like my last review of The 100, this review contains SPOILERS.  LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS.  TURN BACK HERE if you have NOT seen the first 2 seasons of this series in its entirety.  Seriously.  If you haven't seen the entire show and you continue past this jump, you're an asshole.

The Plopper Discovers 'The 100'

Hey look at this fancy new show I've discovered!  O.k. fine, "new" might not be an entirely accurate description.  But it's new to me, and that's what matters.  It only took me 2 seasons to discover it!  That ain't so bad, is it?  It's not that I didn't know this show existed; I did.  As a matter of fact, Matt Barber, former editor of Chuck and coincidental friend-of-a-friend, was an editor on it in season 1.  It even got positive reviews from critics, from what I saw on Twitter.  So why was I so skeptical?  Well, it takes a LOT for me to get into a new TV show these days.  There are just sooo many shows on the air right now, how the hell does a girl decide??  What finally swayed me to check out The 100 was Mo Ryan, one of my favorite critics since the Chuck days.  She's always said good things about this show, and they only seemed to get better in season 2.  Plus, someone I know on tumblr started posting a bunch of 100 pics and memes and gifs recently, and it must have wormed its way into my brain.

Updates: Has Twitter FINALLY Taken Notice of TrollBoy?

A little over a year ago, I posted about Piper Perabo's Twitter stalker/harasser, who has been trolling, bullying, and harassing her and her followers for over 2 full years now.  My intent was to try to get the word out about how insanely pathetic Twitter's anti-abuse measures were.  At the time I made that post, in July 2014, to even call them anti-abuse measures at all was laughable, because these theoretical "measures" didn't actually exist.  Twitter had abuse policies, sure, but they were doing nothing to enforce them.  Like, literally, at least in our case, nothing at all.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  The policy was like, "Hey guys, don't do this stuff, k?"  "Oh o.k. so you're doing it?  O.k.  Oh well."