What Geek Media Do You Refuse To Partake In?

[Ruin Explorer]

Oh Homeland. I had the same reaction as House. Its ok for a min, but eventually you realize that no matter how smart or good at their job this person is, nobody would put up with the liability. She has a mental disorder that requires medicine and the CIA puts her in charge of a foreign CIA station? Guess what happens? Cmon...

I think you have too much faith in spy agencies.

They're nowhere near as competently or safely run as hospitals. Hospitals have legal liabilities, and require a degree of transparency and traceability. Spy agencies have legal immunity and total secrecy. And indeed the CIA particularly have been doing demented cowboy stuff the whole time they've existed, it's their USP, and whilst they dialled it back a bit in the 1990s (it continued in the 1980s, I mean, need I provide examples lol? Iran-Contra baby), then they turned it back up to 11 post-9/11. I don't think they'd have let her continue but for simple reasons of sexism (any mental illness a woman has is treated as being far more severe than a man with the same, particularly by the kind of person who works in intelligence), not because they wouldn't let someone with mental health issues work there.

Also in the present day says "LMFAO" to the idea that the people who run the FBI/CIA/etc. need to be sane, competent, intelligent, qualified, or the like. I mean come on. What's happening right now is way more of a stretch than that. Though I don't think many people saw that coming, to be fair.

I didnt watch it start to finish but saw more like a handful of eps each seasons. I recall him driving a car through an actual house and was pretty much done with the idea of ever watching it start to finish.

That's from what should have been the very last episode of the show.

They put him in a mental hospital after that and that's where most of the rest of the show takes place - but should absolutely have ended in the episode you're describing.

 

[trappedslider]

House makes a bit more sense if you put in perspective that the place he works is actually a smaller suburban hospital. They have access to modern equipment, but they don't use bleeding edge tech or research grade stuff. He lives in an apartment, has no dependents, and IIRC doesn't even own a car. They talk in the show a couple times that the hospital actually has a budget specifically for his insurance and lawsuits, which ostensibly is a factor in his pay.

Which is a long way of saying: you're right. No major or notable hospital would take on his risk. Which is why he's a relatively poorly paid doctor at a smaller hospital. He has prestigious reputation, but not a matching career.

Admittedly, the show isn't amazingly consistent with that. And being a small hospital doesn't really track with the number of mysterious cases that show up there. Oh well. Maybe they have the medical equivalent of the Hellmouth there?

House was Head of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH) in Princeton, New Jersey.

So..since it's Jersey...yes.

 

[Gradine]

Admittedly, the show isn't amazingly consistent with that. And being a small hospital doesn't really track with the number of mysterious cases that show up there. Oh well. Maybe they have the medical equivalent of the Hellmouth there?

 

[jian]

That's a bit like saying "dark fantasy is awful" or "epic fantasy is awful" or whatever though, because it's such a broad sweeping claim about an extremely diverse genre that it just shows you're basically unfamiliar with the genre.

There's certainly a lot of romantasy that is both trashy and tropey, just bodice-rippers or wish-fulfilment with fantasy settings instead of historical ones, but there's also stuff which certainly gets categorized as "romantasy", like, say, some of T. Kingfisher's fantasy novels, which is a great deal better written and frankly more mature in the true sense (not "lol boobies" as "mature" means to a lot of people), as in emotionally complex, involving serious relationships, complex issues, and so on than the vast bulk of well-regarded non-romantasy SF/F. Like I guarantee you've read and enjoyed fantasy novels which were way trope-ier and dumber than hers.

Also for the sake of clarity to people reading this, there's no relationship between "romantic fantasy" and "romantasy", and basically no overlap in terms of authors or subject matter. Romantic fantasy was just a somewhat sexist term for a subgenre of fantasy largely written by women, that had some other genre characteristics (magic was often more like psionics, for example, they tended to be a bit more LGBT-friendly, they were often about a specific organisation who were good guys, etc.) that really didn't even need a genre term, and romantic was certainly the wrong one, given they had more in common with Star Trek than romanticism as a movement - indeed, they often roundly rejected the principles of romanticism, and also frankly didn't feature any more romance-qua-romance than other fantasy!

So like, if you generally dislike romantasy, I totally get that - a lot of has a very specific deal which is not necessarily interesting in the exact same way a lot of power-trip fantasy (which is less common these days but not unheard-of) is basically uninteresting to a lot of people. But there's good stuff in there too because the term is very broad.

(There's also a lot of stuff which escaped that categorization solely by when it was published. I don't doubt that Shadow and Bone would get called "romantasy" by a lot of people if it came out today, because the first book was basically "1700s fantasy Twilight", though perhaps the sheer lack of sex might hold the categorization off -it'd be the only thing though! And anyway, the books after that went in a very different direction, basically totally abandoning the Twilight angle and going "Nah that guy is actually definitely 100% bad, not a hottie".)

Yup, totally agree. Romantasy is a weird and relatively modern label invented by publishers to sell books that have both fantasy and romance. Valdemar would definitely be labelled romantasy now.

I’ve read quite a few romantasy books and they vary tremendously in genre, tone, subject matter, and skill. It’s as broad a genre as “crime fiction” if that included true crime, golden age detective fiction, Scandinavian detective stories, and John Grisham. As Ruin Explorer says, it varies from Ursula Vernon’s excellent romantic fantasy books (all the ones with Paladin in the title), Fourth Wing (mostly narcissistic YA), Juno Dawson’s queer witches, The Princess g*ddamn Bride, effing Twilight (shouldn’t that be urban fantasy?), and Sarah J Maas.

I think as with most such genres you can only go by author and what you’ve liked in the past. If you’d bounced hard off Maas and Yarrow, that’s fine, don’t read them. Try Vernon or Dawson if you like. Do blame publishers for labelling everything romantasy, that is indeed pretty crazy.

 

[jian]

House makes a bit more sense if you put in perspective that the place he works is actually a smaller suburban hospital. They have access to modern equipment, but they don't use bleeding edge tech or research grade stuff. He lives in an apartment, has no dependents, and IIRC doesn't even own a car. They talk in the show a couple times that the hospital actually has a budget specifically for his insurance and lawsuits, which ostensibly is a factor in his pay.

Which is a long way of saying: you're right. No major or notable hospital would take on his risk. Which is why he's a relatively poorly paid doctor at a smaller hospital. He has prestigious reputation, but not a matching career.

Admittedly, the show isn't amazingly consistent with that. And being a small hospital doesn't really track with the number of mysterious cases that show up there. Oh well. Maybe they have the medical equivalent of the Hellmouth there?

House is honestly a terrible show about medicine - it takes the worst elements of diagnosis from ER (“when you hear hoofbeats, think zebras”) and made it the whole show, with a deeply unlikeable and mostly incompetent (in real life) diagnostician as the protagonist. I was very unimpressed when the show contradicted its own clinical narrative in the first episode.

I’ve known a few colleagues who thought they were House and they were all completely useless as doctors or colleagues. Bedside manner and holistic approaches are real things, you know.

 

[trappedslider]

nvm

 

[Deset Gled]

House is honestly a terrible show about medicine

Sherlock Holmes isn't supposed to be considered true crime, either.

 

[TheHand]

I’m usually game to try something at least once, but some of the geek media I did try and bounce off of are:

Collectible card games. I don’t like purchasing anything that’s randomized, and the surrounding culture is too competitive for my tastes. I also had a former friend who, years ago, got very addicted to MtG and devoted almost all his money and time to building decks so he could compete in tournaments.

Mmo games. I just found I have an allergic reaction to these style of games, though I will admit my one exception was City of Heroes.

LARP: tried it. Not for me.

Warhammer/40k/and friends: I discovered I had more fun painting the miniatures than actually playing the game.

Game of Thrones spinoffs: Many acquaintances want me to try the spinoff shows, but after the first series ended I just can’t bring myself to care about Martin’s universe or characters any more.

A fair amount of Anime: there have been anime shows I do actually like, so I won’t condemn an entire medium, but I check out quickly from the really tropey ones. I hate the ones that devolve into 2 characters endlessly fighting each other while they call out their battle moves and keep evolving new, even more powerful and absurd abilities out of their respective behinds.

 

[jian]

Sherlock Holmes isn't supposed to be considered true crime, either.

Quite true, but House doesn’t even work as a homage to Holmes. Holmes is generally courteous, thoughtful, empathic, and kind, especially to his clients, especially for someone with a regular cocaine habit - he only tends to be impatient and sarcastic with pompous fools, especially people who think they know better than he does, and occasionally with Watson when he’s holding the idiot ball for longer than usual. House is condescending and self-destructively hostile to almost everyone, which is quite unlike Holmes and far from ideal for any doctor.

 

[Deset Gled]

Quite true, but House doesn’t even work as a homage to Holmes. Holmes is generally courteous, thoughtful, empathic, and kind, especially to his clients, especially for someone with a regular cocaine habit - he only tends to be impatient and sarcastic with pompous fools, especially people who think they know better than he does, and occasionally with Watson when he’s holding the idiot ball for longer than usual. House is condescending and self-destructively hostile to almost everyone, which is quite unlike Holmes and far from ideal for any doctor.

I have to admit that's a take I have never, ever heard before.

They put him in a mental hospital after that and that's where most of the rest of the show takes place - but should absolutely have ended in the episode you're describing.

Um, Actually... They sent him to jail for the car crash. The mental hospital was the season before, IIRC. But, yes, the series was spiraling hard by then. At least Lin Manuel Miranda and Andre Braugher made the mental hospital episodes entertaining.