Books And Genres That Aren't What People Think - Films, games, and TV too

[Judge Dredd]

We all know that a lot of people will quote or reference famous works without having read them. But there are times where it's authors or even entire genres that people get wrong.

To start off the thread. Altus Shrugged. I never finished this brick of a book, but it's amazing how many critics of the book, and it's author Ayn Rand, get wrong about it. I could try and list the mistakes, but I'd end up listing everything.
For those that don't know the story. It follows a railway tycoon, a steel company owner, and a cooper company owner turned playboy as they try to build a railway during a global depression while various industrialists, artists, and other movers and shakers are disappearing. Turns out that they're being taken by John Galt, who is taking "men of the mind" to hide in an isolated community while the world sinks into an apocalyptic global depression.
A frequent retort is how industrialists will function in an isolated community, let alone rebuild the world, without a working class to do the labour. Missing several points like Galt taking people from all rungs of society, and that exploitative fat cats are the kind of people left behind. And that's just one plot point.


As for an author. Lovecraft. I heard, repeatedly and often, that every Lovecraft story ends with the protagonist dead, insane, or both. But as I slowly made my way through his work, this is not the case at all. Maybe it happens later. Likewise, the toughness of the monsters is also wrong. If a game has the option to fight a monster, it's considered to have failed. But many of the stories have the monster dead, defeated, or simply delayed. eg. The yeti is killed by a guy throwing a rock blindly in the dark. Cthulhu is sent back to sleep by crashing a fishing boat into his head.


And to finish this OP. Genre.

I struggle to find pulp entertainment that lives up to the promise. The cliche of pulp being shallow action stories about Indiana Jones type adventurers, cowboys, and hard boiled detectives rescuing damsels in destress from railway tracks. I've yet to find these stories.

For modern takes there's a webcomic I'm recommended often, but every time I try to read it, the page has an author insert OC getting into unfunny slapstick hijinks. The comic book Gold Digger comes close, but is rare to find where I live, and the only one I own the title character is secondary, instead focusing on a side cast.

As for the classics. Hard to say. Noir is usually thriller/mystery stories. Westerns are, well, westerns. While the adventure stuff is usually serials with lots of talking to pad the run time until the action cliffhanger.

 

[Elite Kipchak]

Atlas Shrugged is the most overrated piece of shit ever. So is Mein Kampf. I get that it's Hitler, but he seriously won't shut the fuck up about the Jews. It really does get old after a bit. It's like a solid 5/10. I mean I dislike them as much as the next guy but seriously your grand manifesto needs to go just a little bit deeper than that.

 

[Soup Sammiches]

Review. On the surface it's a show about reviewing life events but it gets pretty fucking dark for a TV show.

 

[Mr.Bucket]

The Starship Troopers book.

People who haven't read it and/or worship Verhoeven think it's some sort of mein kampf in space super-fascist handbook. It's a Science FICTION set in a pure meritocracy. There's no 'better race' or any other such shit, if someone is better at the job then they get promoted, simple as.

As a scifi book itself it's freaking great and still holds up to this day. I totally forgot it was written in the 50's when I audiobooked it a few years ago. The only thing I remember that shows its age is the use of radio homing beacons, like pilots used from WW2 up until GPS became a thing.

It has completely ruined the movie for me since Verhoeven made it to make fun of Heinlein and never even got through the first chapter. Almost every character is the opposite how they're shown in the movie. The powers that be actually try to actively persuade Rico to not join the mobile infantry, for example.

I yearn for a faithful live action adaptation.

 

[Skitarii]

Storm of Steel was not "war good"

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

The Handmaid's Tale isn't anti-Christian at all.

 

[David Brown]

Storm of Steel was not "war good"

I can corroborate this (coincidentally I was just thinking about Herr Junger a few minutes ago). To tell the truth, I'm not totally sure what the thesis of Storm of Steel is. I bounced off of it at least once in the past. I read about a third of it and would have summarized the book as "We marched over to this village. Bombs were dropped on us. My friends died. I lived. Then we marched over here." I have read it more recently and was able to take a bit more away from it this time. I think it is at least partly a life-affirming book about making the best of a bad situation. Junger was a unique person though, that mf LOVED fighting. Otherwise he wouldn't have volunteered for war so much. He also lived until 1998, and sadly both of his children died before he did. I would say Ernst Junger absolutely qualifies as a "complex person" and he and his works can't reasonably be reduced to one or two points.

 

[millais]

The Starship Troopers book.

People who haven't read it and/or worship Verhoeven think it's some sort of mein kampf in space super-fascist handbook. It's a Science FICTION set in a pure meritocracy. There's no 'better race' or any other such shit, if someone is better at the job then they get promoted, simple as.

As a scifi book itself it's freaking great and still holds up to this day. I totally forgot it was written in the 50's when I audiobooked it a few years ago. The only thing I remember that shows its age is the use of radio homing beacons, like pilots used from WW2 up until GPS became a thing.

It has completely ruined the movie for me since Verhoeven made it to make fun of Heinlein and never even got through the first chapter. Almost every character is the opposite how they're shown in the movie. The powers that be actually try to actively persuade Rico to not join the mobile infantry, for example.

I yearn for a faithful live action adaptation.

Rico and his family aren't even white, they are all (Americanized) Filipinos, yet they have achieved a high socioeconomic status in society, except for lacking citizenship-through-service, which still doesn't materially disadvantage them. And eventually Rico and his father both join up and are on track to become citizens.

It does become a bit of Heinlein's personal political treatise in those classroom lectures about the decline and fall of the Western nation-states and the origins of the Terran Federation, but it's pretty milquetoast conservative stuff about "urban youths" running amok and destroying high-trust societies, and that the solution for fixing all those societal ills through a meritocratic society that doesn't shy away from enforcing law and order.

In those historical lectures, he does describe the Chinese Communists as being cruel to Russian, British, and American prisoners of war during WW3 by refusing to release them after the end of the war, but it's fairly clinical and incidental, and not a Yellow Peril characterization of the Chinese. In fact, the Western survivors of WW3 are described as being more pissed and disillusioned with their own governments' failure to negotiate for the release of the prisoners, and that sounds the death knell of the Western nation-states. And in any case, the book was written not that long after the Korean War, when prisoner of war mistreatment by Communists was a real thing and much publicized.

There is not even that much action movie stuff in the book. Much of the book dwells on what Rico learns about the organization of his society during high school civics class, his basic training, and his courses in Officer Candidate School.

 

[Rudy Coleman]

Storm of Steel was not "war good"

junger has the typical straightforward apathetic attitude in his writing that you see in lots of german culture.
lots of the books reads like day to day reports from a commander about who died that week.
by the end of the book hes drinking so heavily that he was taking flasks of brandy out during his night raids
at the end of the book hes so shoot up he can barely walk.
the only pro war message i got from it was the stoicism junger and his men had towards their duty, i dunno thats it

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

The Anarchist's Cookbook isn't about making food while living off the grid.

 

[Popper Whiting]

To start off the thread. Altus Shrugged. I never finished this brick of a book, but it's amazing how many critics of the book, and it's author Ayn Rand, get wrong about it. I could try and list the mistakes, but I'd end up listing everything.

As someone who has had the misfortune of laboring through John Galt's 90 page speech on moral integrity (which is basically Ayn Rand lecturing) I am going on record as saying this book deserves every bit of shit it gets, even for stuff it didn't do.

I hold the same opinion of Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, which is a painful fucking slog for different reasons (especially the "Men are so dumb and need cunty women" Jordan put's into nearly every single chapter of that fucking series).

Anybody who likes Ayn Rand or The Wheel of Time books needs to be chemically castrated.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Alice in Wonderland isn't just another piece of children's literature. Imo it's essentially a satire on math.

 

[𒀭Δημιουργός χάος]

Alice in Wonderland isn't just another piece of children's literature. Imo it's essentially a satire on math.

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be it would. You see? only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish" Lewis Carroll

 

[BradeRunna]

Night of The Living Dead the Zombie movie by George Romero had some political messaging in it. I can remember what exactly. But everyone else just saw a horror movie with zombies.

The song from the early 80's Every Breath You Take by The Police isn't actually a love song. It's a song about a stalker. It was used in a lot of movies but it's not really a love song in the way people think. It's about a stalker. I guess you could say it's a strange kind of creepy love. But it's not really meant to be a romantic song despite what people think.

 

[Stasi]

As someone who has had the misfortune of laboring through John Galt's 90 page speech on moral integrity (which is basically Ayn Rand lecturing) I am going on record as saying this book deserves every bit of shit it gets, even for stuff it didn't do.

Oh is this the Atlas Shrugged survivors support group? Can I join in? I honestly cannot believe people take this book, and Rand, seriously. I am convinced that the only people online who praise the book are the same ones who praise Ulysses i.e. people who haven't actually read it.

 

[VIPPER?]

Cyberpunk is a mess and normies think it's all neon signs, robot arms, and katanas.
Anyone who says "we got the lame boring dystopia instead of the cool one " is a retard who should be subjected to incredibly boring math and networking classes given by unenthusiastic instructors as punishment

 

[Judge Dredd]

As a scifi book itself it's freaking great and still holds up to this day. I totally forgot it was written in the 50's when I audiobooked it a few years ago. The only thing I remember that shows its age is the use of radio homing beacons, like pilots used from WW2 up until GPS became a thing.

And the stuff about hypnotism.

Much of the book dwells on what Rico learns about the organization of his society during high school civics class, his basic training, and his courses in Officer Candidate School.

That was my thought as well. There's only a few action scenes in the book.

I am convinced that the only people online who praise the book are the same ones who praise Ulysses i.e. people who haven't actually read it.

If people were to say it's boring or goes off on tangents or is way too long, I'd get it. Yet the people who condemn it do so for things that the book doesn't do.

Maybe some of the stuff people condemn happens later, but complaints like "the book is obsessed with cigarettes" or "it tells you to laugh at poor people" don't happen.

Others are outright contradicted. "Galt only takes rich industrialists" isn't what happens. There's a scene early on where Dagny is trying desperately to persuade some guy (I think he sells tickets) to stay, with the implication that him leaving is him being taken by Galt. It's not rich people he takes, it's men of the mind. James Taggart is a rich industrialist, but he's presented as a bad guy and not someone Galt would be interested in. Industrialists get mentioned a lot because the plot is about trying to build a railway.

Night of The Living Dead the Zombie movie by George Romero had some political messaging in it.

People used to say Dawn of the Dead was a parody of mall shoppers, comparing them to zombies, but I think Romero said that wasn't the intended message.

 

[Popper Whiting]

Oh is this the Atlas Shrugged survivors support group? Can I join in? I honestly cannot believe people take this book, and Rand, seriously. I am convinced that the only people online who praise the book are the same ones who praise Ulysses i.e. people who haven't actually read it.

Curiosity is can be either a blessing or a curse. Ran into too many objectionists in my first run of University who swore it was the fucking bible. I read it, and it was terrible. Terrible fiction, terrible writing and terrible philosophy. I've said it before but Ayn Rand is a despicable Jewish Cunt, and all anyone who is sensible has to do to come to this conclusion is read Atlas Shrugged and watch 2-3 hours of her interviews.

Probably should go with the thread theme of misunderstood fiction. People think Alice in Wonderland is some deep psychedelic experience, which is a fever dream, it isn't. Reality is Lewis Carroll was criticizing British society through a children's story (and those criticisms still hold up for Western Society), anyone who's sat through a pointless fucking corporate meeting, or club meeting (sports club, scouts, surf club, name your fucking club) can read the Caucus Race can see he was taking the piss out of people who want to be heard at meetings but contribute absolutely nothing, and as a result nothing gets achieved by such meetings.

 

[VIPPER?]

The only thing I remember that shows its age is the use of radio homing beacons, like pilots used from WW2 up until GPS became a thing.

This is completely off topic, but radio beacons for landing and aircraft guidance are still in use and GPS itself is basically a huge array of space-borne radio beacons.

 

[Stasi]

Curiosity is can be either a blessing or a curse. Ran into too many objectionists in my first run of University who swore it was the fucking bible. I read it, and it was terrible. Terrible fiction, terrible writing and terrible philosophy. I've said it before but Ayn Rand is a despicable Jewish Cunt, and all anyone who is sensible has to do to come to this conclusion is read Atlas Shrugged and watch 2-3 hours of her interviews.

Add The Fountainhead in there while we are at it which I also read for all my sins.

People think its some grand ode to individualism? Nah, its just a thinly veiled vehicle for Rand's rape fantasies.