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Welcome back to Airy Monday, our weekly take on pop culture as it relates to magic and religion. This week our topic of discussion is identity: what it means to you, what it means to us, and what it means to others. Join us as we take a look at racebending, feminism, and the importance of representation in this week's edition. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Welcome back fellow Witches and Pagans! We hope you enjoyed your weekend! This week for Airy Monday we've brought you a whole gamut of stories featuring magic and religion in pop culture. Read on to learn how one self-defined "urban hipster" got involved with witchcraft, which popular villains were most successful, and how the animated series Steven Universe has developed some of the most complex protagonists in television. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Welcome back! We hope you had a great weekend. This week for Pagan News Beagle's Airy Monday section we take a look at what is arguably the biggest pop culture phenomenon of our times: Comic Con! We share a number of stories from the cross-media extravaganza held at the end of last week, including new details about Once Upon a Time, The Legend of Korra, and Warcraft. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Who says pop culture doesn't matter? This week for Airy Monday we took at the ways that pop culture, society, and religion all interconnect. Read about the connection of Mad Max: Fury Road to the Morrigan, popular subversions of fairy tales, and how the political intrigue of ancient Greece compares to Game of Thrones. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Yesterday, the first issue of Marvel's LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD arrived in your local Comics and Games Emporium. I haven't yet acquired my copy, because a frost giants are currently attacking my neighborhood and my roommate is too busy binging on Star Trek: Enterprise to dig his car out so we can exit the driveway, but I want to encourage you to pick up this comic.* If you have any interest in Marvel comics, or the Marvel movies – or, to tread into dangerous waters, in the ongoing folkloric evolution of Norse mythology through popular culture – you should give it a read.

The first two categories should be obvious: Loki is a major character in the Marvel Universe, and arguably the second most popular character in the movies after Tony Stark. AGENT OF ASGARD appears to be the culmination of several years of intense character development for Loki as well as a re-alignment of the character to better match Tom Hiddleston's portrayal in the films. But my third reason may require more explanation.

At this point, you ought to know whether or not you like Marvel's particular approach to superhero movies. I do. If you also liked the rest of the Marvel Universe films, you'll like THOR: THE DARK WORLD - and likely rate it among the best of the films in the series.

Director Alan Taylor's THE DARK WORLD is an decided improvement on Kenneth Branagh's THOR, which was hampered by having to do too many things within its running time: the backstory of war with the frost giants, revelations about Loki's true nature, the romance with Jane Foster (and wacky Midgard hi-jinx that ensued), some business with the Destroyer, etc. All of that got in the way of presenting a convincing character arc for Thor himself, who had, all told, maybe ten minutes of time actually devoted to his transformation from glory-hungry barbarian to self-sacrificing guardian of mortals. If you're a fan of the comics, you know this is how it has to go, but cinematically, it was not particularly well-done. That's forgivable, since the noble, stoic Thor we ended up with is really the character we wanted all along, but still, it made the movie less enjoyable

You can blame my girlfriend for this post.

Although I was an early adopter of Facebook - way back in the days of legend, when one needed to be a student at an approved college and we spelled Facebook with a The - I had managed to avoid the time sucking vortex of Facebook games for many years. They were, after all, Skinner boxes, one and all, designed to slowly but persistently separate dollars and time from those gullible enough to fall into their traps. In terms of sophistication, Facebook games are little better than the puzzle in the polar bear cage on LOST, except Facebook games don't even have the courtesy to reward you with a fish biscuit.