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

[Safir]

For those that don't know. Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy game. Bog standard medieval fantasy with orcs, elves, and magic spells.

It's not!
D&D is Iron Age (historical and mythical) + sword and sorcery + colonial adventure. Pretty much no "bog standard medieval fantasy" book, after bog standard medieval fantasy got codified, has a plot even remotely representative of D&D.

D&D doesn't have faux-medieval dynasties, or Big Bads, or any of that shit. D&D's collective protagonist is an adventuring party (1. adventuring 2. party; this is different from having several protagonists). The old webcomic DM of the Rings (note: the author Shamus Young is dead and his daughter is a pooner) shows why Lord of the Rings can't even make for a (bad) tabletop adventure, the tropes are all wrong.

Hercules and Odysseus are decent-ish D&D protagonists. Hercules does his 12 monster-slaying and treasure-hunting quests, Odysseus goes on a kitchensink "you were teleported to an unknown land and need to come back home" adventure. An adventuring party can stand for either except in sex scenes (where a single character would do the dirty off camera).

The only genre of media that has adventuring parties is isekai and isekaiesque anime. But isekai anime arose from early roleplaying videogames, which are to tabletop as a stinkditch is to real china.
For example, the recent animu darling Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (don't judge me, I had to download something freeleech for seeder credit, and then I was stuck without interwebs access on an indoor rowing marathon) has a plotline where the adventuring party needs to cross a border, but (for whatever reason) only top-rank normie wizards are allowed to cross (by whom? there's no centralized authority, and the titular loli is too 'really 7000 years old' to recognize any authority), so the overpowered characters take a detour and suffer through a retarded tournament arc to get formally certified as top-rank. Not a key (which would be bad enough) or a "you have to be this tall" powerup (such as fire resistance, to go to hell -- this is a normal obstacle D&D but it gets resolved with logistics, not plot arcs), just a fucking tourist visa. This is as far as possible to get from "D&D adventure" without going full picrelated.

Really? You can't jump the fucking border? Even Mexicans can do it. Fucking take a long way around, sneak by, disguise yourself, forge a permit, bluff, find a passage through the ancient dwarven mines, cast fly, ride dragons, teleport, turn invisible, put the guards to sleep, bribe them, kill them, or sic a goblin horde on them. This is D&D.

 

[peachlover669]

Fight Club is NOT about rebelling against society because consumerism took away your balls. Actually, Chuck Palaniuk always said "when people ask me how to join Fight club or find Tyler, I tell them "you don't get it". The book and the movie actually warn about dangers of trying to figure out manliness with a help of some guru, who will just use you for profit and power. And with the rise of the internet it is more evident that ever - Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, etc. Collective Tyler who will teach you how to live, just for $99.99, no refunds. Palaniuk himself said "if I wrote Fight club today, Tyler would be selling NFTs".

I dont know man, sounds to me like even the creator didnt understand his art with this one. If the artist makes (literally coolest thing ever) and says its actually (literally gayest thing ever) then im inclined to disregard the artist entirely.

 

[Neodanthril]

The YouTube link is blank, and the article is just some paragraphs then links to a Kotaku article.

fuck im retarded. fixed it.

I've not read a warhammer novel since 2006

i downloaded a bunch of 40k audiobooks, no idea of the dates of stuff but the series about dante that culminates in all the sons of sanguinius uniting to defeat hive fleet leviathain is great. and i havent listened to one that has not given me the action i wanted. pulpy stuff is just universally derided in literature circles because anyone who makes reading a central part of their identity is a pseud that wants to read shit they think makes them clever or something. that said they arent all winners, but more often than not i have been satisfied.

 

[Neo-Nazi Rich Evans]

for me, two genres i would include are westerns and neo-noir.

for westerns, people who arnt into it think it is all jsut cheap movies of cowboys shooting at indians int eh desert. while you can find movies liek that, there are plenty of movies which are anything but that. you guys int he RLM thread know all about this

i am a fan of noir films and i get annoyed by people who dont watch them thinking they are just stupid tropes.

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.

this is my go to example. i was kind of shocked at how tame it was when i read it. i went into it with the reputation that we all know about it and was amazed at how non facist it came off. the ovie really didnt do the book any favors. after reading the book i really wish they would have done a competent accurate adaptation of the book.

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.

the only rand book ive tried to read. i had too many objectivists/libertarians tell me this is the book to read to get into her work. i never got far, her writing style sucks way too much for me to waste my time on it.

I actually have read Ulysses, I don't know if it is his best work though, Dubliners might be.

i read about 1/3 of it. it isnt bad, but it also isnt good enough for me to justify putting up with his, at times, difficult to follow prose.

On the topic of movies - every "sigma male movie" be it American Psycho, The taxi driver or Fight club, many more of these. By God their meaning flew over people's heads so high it left our star system.

i dont know if it counts as sigma male, but for me it is scarface. in HS every guy, especially the black ones, at my school through it would be so cool to be scarface. when i watched it, i took the opposite view. it is about a guy who gets everything he wants, and this makes him miserable. by the end of the movie he has no joy left. nothing he got every brought much joy or happiness to him.

I constantly see people assume Rambo is the quintessential "mindlessly firing bullets everywhere" macho American hero, and worse--assuming that the movies (and original novel) are meant to support a patriotic, America-first ideal of foreign policy.

Anyone who isn't a retard and has actually seen the first two movies and/or read the original David Morrell novel though, should know that Rambo is literally the opposite of that. The movies are critical of America and how utterly wasteful, damaging, and pointless the Vietnam War in particular was. Heck, in the second movie, Rambo's real enemy ends up being a higher-up who wants to cover up the existence of unrescued POWs.

i went into rambo with the reputation of it being mindless action. i quickly realized that it is anything but that.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I dont know man, sounds to me like even the creator didnt understand his art with this one. If the artist makes (literally coolest thing ever) and says its actually (literally gayest thing ever) then im inclined to disregard the artist entirely.

Fahrenheit 451 is this for me, although I never read it. Everybody reads it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship, but supposedly the author was strongly against that interpretation, saying it was about the dangers of TV overtaking books in popular entertainment.

or westerns, people who arnt into it think it is all jsut cheap movies of cowboys shooting at indians int eh desert. while you can find movies liek that, there are plenty of movies which are anything but that. you guys int he RLM thread know all about this

Guilty.

Although I did have a soft spot for the lone ranger.

I got into westerns a little thanks to a Razorfist video on the subject. He supposedly made two, so here's both of them.

i am a fan of noir films and i get annoyed by people who dont watch them thinking they are just stupid tropes.

Much like westerns, it was in part a razorfist recommendations that got me to start. So I've seen a few. I'm not sure about neo-noir, since I don't trust modern film to get it right and just have a guy in a fedora stand in the rain.

the only rand book ive tried to read. i had too many objectivists/libertarians tell me this is the book to read to get into her work. i never got far, her writing style sucks way too much for me to waste my time on it.

I always hear the film is better.

i went into rambo with the reputation of it being mindless action. i quickly realized that it is anything but that.

I think the later films are that, but it's been a while since I've seen them. It's like how Death Wish goes from character film about a guy becoming a vigilante (classic film btw), to a live action NES game with 80s punks leaping out of trees and windows for Bronson to gun down with a variety of oversized weapons in Death Wish 3. Both are entertaining in their own way.


Thread tax. Resident Evil.

People assume it's a comedy because of the goofy voice acting, bad graphics (by modern standards), silly movies, and a few over the top clips (usually from RE5 and RE6).

 

[Argos]

No one's mentioned "Born In The USA"?

Anyone who think it's a patriotic song has never paid attention to the lyrics.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

Fahrenheit 451 is this for me, although I never read it. Everybody reads it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship, but supposedly the author was strongly against that interpretation, saying it was about the dangers of TV overtaking books in popular entertainment.

it's even more amusing when you remember that "reality tv" and porn were pushed in a sort of social engineering way weren't they

Guilty.

Although I did have a soft spot for the lone ranger.

I got into westerns a little thanks to a Razorfist video on the subject. He supposedly made two, so here's both of them.

Man, I hate the flanderization and misappropriation of the Western. There's tons of westerns that aren't just action-packed pulps. Razorfist is someone I don't watch, but the man's clearly passionate about this stuff.

Much like westerns, it was in part a razorfist recommendations that got me to start. So I've seen a few. I'm not sure about neo-noir, since I don't trust modern film to get it right and just have a guy in a fedora stand in the rain.

From what I understand, a lot of the post '80s noir can be hit or miss, or overlap with the general crime-thriller stuff. I do hear Andrew Vachss is good, but he's also dead now.

this is my go to example. i was kind of shocked at how tame it was when i read it. i went into it with the reputation that we all know about it and was amazed at how non facist it came off. the ovie really didnt do the book any favors. after reading the book i really wish they would have done a competent accurate adaptation of the book.

Yeah, it's funny watching shitlibs act like they've read the book because they watched 1 or 2 breadtube videos on this.

i am a fan of noir films and i get annoyed by people who dont watch them thinking they are just stupid tropes.

I hate it when people act like noir is a list of tropes. It's TVtropenigger midwit filtering. You don't need to understand the exact context in which noir films and the works they're influenced/based on were made, but I hate deconstructionist niggers who go out of their way to act like it's special that they note "cliches" and "tropes" without considering how well executed they were.

Yes, Mickey Spillane is peak pulpy hardboiled noir. It's not amazingly done, but it hits the general feel. I get people telling me about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler's works like they read a fucking tv tropes page and it makes me so goddamned MATI.

Deconstructionism was, ultimately, a flash in the pan. I hate how midwits just resort to it without understand what makes a genre or work great. I remembered reading the Morrison JLA and Busiek-Perez Avengers from the late 90s "reconstruction" era that tried to bring back the core of the heroes and what made comics great, while still allowing for character depth and exploration.

 

[Sigg Kyle]

Mech is probably the most misunderstood genre ever made. It’s universally derided as ‘cheap slop’ by midwits and that derision gets in the way of the few people who actually understand what it’s capable of.
You’d think that art people would goon to the thought of becoming living abstract art-pieces, you’d think autists would find the whole ‘limbs are extremely useful in space’ idea good, you’d think that more writers would be curious about the ramifications of spiritually being more akin to a ‘two-body’ organism, or that pulpheads would abuse the idea more, but almost nobody except the japs ever do.
The slander of pygmalion’s mythos has fastened irons to the world of art.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

"All Visual Novels are galgames" - Primarily by snobs. Galgames itself is a dead genre, and while there is no shortage of coom games, talks on the genre are usually on games with plot.

Starship Troopers

When I read it, it amazed me how much globohomo it was. Really exemplifies the fact that you can be as leftist as possible but if you admit social taboos (niggers), then the left will piss on your grave.

On the topic of movies - every "sigma male movie" be it American Psycho, The taxi driver or Fight club, many more of these. By God their meaning flew over people's heads so high it left our star system.

Tbf, it's more that people interpret those films differently. Especially as the social status of White males dropped off a fucking cliff since they aired.

 

[Illumithotty]

I do hear Andrew Vachss is good, but he's also dead now.

I was really disappointed by Vachss for a couple of reasons. When I read his first three books I was just finished being disgusted by John MacDonald, he's an actually inspirational person, and I felt like getting into an urban grittiness noir novel. I don't think his books were terrible but they are painfully 80s.

What I expected: Repairman Jack but kicking the shit out of child traffickers instead of cosmic evil.
What I got: kung-fu master romantic interest and crowbarred in exoticism that made me briefly sympathize with Knox's 'No Orientals' rule.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Mech is probably the most misunderstood genre ever made. It’s universally derided as ‘cheap slop’ by midwits and that derision gets in the way of the few people who actually understand what it’s capable of.

It's worse than that.

People assume that a lot of mech stuff is Japanese kids in robots screaming the names of attacks like "Giga Ultra Mega Power Buster Slam!" but as someone who likes some mech stuff, most I've seen isn't that. I'd say it was the fault of power rangers and Godzilla, but I'm fairly sure even those don't have that. I guess that stuff was from the 70s?

I'm also bitter that the genre is defined by three IPs that are shit. ...okay, not really shit, they are fine, but I have issues with them.
Pacific Rim, which I've not seen but hear is fantastic. I'll take people's word for it. I assume it's like Bayformers where they make it acceptable to normies with ugly CG and making the robots a minor part of their own movie?

Within anime circles, it's always Evangelion and arguments on which of the three "love interests" is the hottest. Evangelion could be a thread tax itself because what I remember of that show, it was not a harem anime. If anything it's anti-harem . The male lead famously masturbates to a girl in a coma.

The third is Battletech. I find the fanbase frustrating. From the assumption that mech game = Battletech. To complaining about cliches that Battletech is guilty of, (There's no dumb transforming robots like Macross! ...what do you mean Land Air Mechs? They don't count because they're cool. And we don't send mechs into melee like Warhammer and Gundam ...Axeman and giant robot katanas don't count because reasons.) Razorfist recently accused 40k of being a "battletech rip off", which is rich coming from a franchise so desperate they're making "Battletech gothic" to cash in on the success of Trench Crusade and 40k, and famously took mech designs from popular anime of the time.


My point is if you want deeper stories, theres mech media that provides that. If you want stompy robot destruction, that exists too. But we're stuck with three less than ideas flavours, while stuff like Titanfall falls by the wayside as "goofy" and "unrealistic".

Razorfist is someone I don't watch, but the man's clearly passionate about this stuff.

He's hit and miss. He has a thread, and is currently on a miss streak as he's tried to go born again Christian that cares about moral decency in media.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

He's hit and miss. He has a thread, and is currently on a miss streak as he's tried to go born again Christian that cares about moral decency in media.

yeah but at least he's clearly passionate about the genres he enjoys, unlike faggots that try to police the "fandoms"

People assume that a lot of mech stuff is Japanese kids in robots screaming the names of attacks like "Giga Ultra Mega Power Buster Slam!" but as someone who likes some mech stuff, most I've seen isn't that. I'd say it was the fault of power rangers and Godzilla, but I'm fairly sure even those don't have that. I guess that stuff was from the 70s?

I'm also bitter that the genre is defined by three IPs that are shit. ...okay, not really shit, they are fine, but I have issues with them.
Pacific Rim, which I've not seen but hear is fantastic. I'll take people's word for it. I assume it's like Bayformers where they make it acceptable to normies with ugly CG and making the robots a minor part of their own movie?

Within anime circles, it's always Evangelion and arguments on which of the three "love interests" is the hottest. Evangelion could be a thread tax itself because what I remember of that show, it was not a harem anime. If anything it's anti-harem . The male lead famously masturbates to a girl in a coma.

The third is Battletech. I find the fanbase frustrating. From the assumption that mech game = Battletech. To complaining about cliches that Battletech is guilty of, (There's no dumb transforming robots like Macross! ...what do you mean Land Air Mechs? They don't count because they're cool. And we don't send mechs into melee like Warhammer and Gundam ...Axeman and giant robot katanas don't count because reasons.) Razorfist recently accused 40k of being a "battletech rip off", which is rich coming from a franchise so desperate they're making "Battletech gothic" to cash in on the success of Trench Crusade and 40k, and famously took mech designs from popular anime of the time.


My point is if you want deeper stories, theres mech media that provides that. If you want stompy robot destruction, that exists too. But we're stuck with three less than ideas flavours, while stuff like Titanfall falls by the wayside as "goofy" and "unrealistic".

I think we somehow missed out on mechas in the golden age of SF in america/western europe and all that.

 

[Popper Whiting]

i dont know if it counts as sigma male, but for me it is scarface. in HS every guy, especially the black ones, at my school through it would be so cool to be scarface. when i watched it, i took the opposite view. it is about a guy who gets everything he wants, and this makes him miserable. by the end of the movie he has no joy left. nothing he got every brought much joy or happiness to him.

Scarface is a good one. Because not only was Tony miserable, he was also a fuck up and an idiot. He got busted by the feds by trying to go cheap on money laindering requiring Sosa to bail him out. All he had to do was let the bald guy blow up the car, but he had to suddenly get morals about kids (despite not really having any morals up to that point), which I put down to cocaine usage. This meant he'd either end up in prison or would be killed by Sosa. He then shot his best friend, once again whilst coked up, because Manny got with his sister, without giving either time to explain what was going on. He doubled down on being a fuckwit by telling Sosa to go fuck himself, and knowing a death squad was coming kept his sister and remaining friends/loyal employees around to get killed whilst he snorted coke.

Tony Montana, through sheer audacity, put himself into a position to win. But because he was a miserable fuckup he blew every chance at success and happiness he got, and not only destroyed himself, but his family and the friends who were loyal to him. The fact so many people take the wrong message from it is amazing.

 

[skykiii]

People assume that a lot of mech stuff is Japanese kids in robots screaming the names of attacks like "Giga Ultra Mega Power Buster Slam!" but as someone who likes some mech stuff, most I've seen isn't that. I'd say it was the fault of power rangers and Godzilla, but I'm fairly sure even those don't have that. I guess that stuff was from the 70s?

Most of the time when I've seen mecha media have an attack that gets called out, its some sort of big finishing move. The Super Sentai always have some move they do to finish off the monster of the day, but before that its just a fight. I know the Mobile Fighter G Gundam dude had the Shining Finger because that attack name was hilarious.

 

[NoReturn]

Cthulhu isn't a giant squid monster. The brain just sees him as a giant squid monster because it's struggling to comprehend something beyond anything the viewer has ever even thought of in his entire life.

On that note, the ending of the music video for DYE "Fantasy" (MUH TRAUMA) is one of the more truly-Lovecraftian things I've seen.

 

[McMitch]

Pacific Rim, which I've not seen but hear is fantastic. I'll take people's word for it. I assume it's like Bayformers where they make it acceptable to normies with ugly CG and making the robots a minor part of their own movie?

The irony of posting in this thread about people making assumptions about media and then immediately making the same mistake the thread is intended to ridicule.

 

[Space Police]

Mech is probably the most misunderstood genre ever made. It’s universally derided as ‘cheap slop’ by midwits and that derision gets in the way of the few people who actually understand what it’s capable of.
You’d think that art people would goon to the thought of becoming living abstract art-pieces, you’d think autists would find the whole ‘limbs are extremely useful in space’ idea good, you’d think that more writers would be curious about the ramifications of spiritually being more akin to a ‘two-body’ organism, or that pulpheads would abuse the idea more, but almost nobody except the japs ever do.
The slander of pygmalion’s mythos has fastened irons to the world of art.

Mecha is just a plot device. Spaceships could be substituted for all the mechs in most mecha shows and little would change. Mecha tends to be very realistic with respect to how the mechs develop because it was made by military spergs for military spergs.
To be fair, spaceships are often much cooler than mechs because there's a lot more variety, but mechs are cool in stories like Gundam and Votoms that incorporate them well. I'm not sure why people would think the best mecha shows are cheap slop; real robot shows tend to get quite repetitive and long for the stories being told, and super robot shows are repetitive by nature, but they are good stories.

People assume that a lot of mech stuff is Japanese kids in robots screaming the names of attacks like "Giga Ultra Mega Power Buster Slam!" but as someone who likes some mech stuff, most I've seen isn't that. I'd say it was the fault of power rangers and Godzilla, but I'm fairly sure even those don't have that. I guess that stuff was from the 70s?

Most super robot shows do that, but the only ones that have no substance aside from that are tournament mecha like Daigunder and G Gundam and RPG fantasy mecha like Wataru. Most Brave shows have good stories for individual episodes, and the 70s mecha shows have lots of weight, variety, and strategy.

Within anime circles, it's always Evangelion and arguments on which of the three "love interests" is the hottest. Evangelion could be a thread tax itself because what I remember of that show, it was not a harem anime. If anything it's anti-harem . The male lead famously masturbates to a girl in a coma.

There are also the people who think Evangelion is a lot deeper than it really is. Gundam shows get misunderstood a lot (especially UC and SEED), but only the Reddit/Xitter crowd (ironically into "media literacy") tends to misunderstand them. Ideon is another mecha show that gets misunderstood; people act like its only value is the dark ending but the individual episodes are very good since they both have interesting stories and develop the characters.

 

[Calandrino]

Lovecraft has been mentioned a lot, but one I've run into is people who assume that all of Lovecraft's fiction is literally about race relations, that his monsters are all meant to be stand ins for black people etc. People who say this out loud should be locked in a room and forced to read every story Lovecraft ever wrote.

I think the perception of Lovecraft is heavily filtered through pastiches, video games, the CoC rpg, whatever. You can read through a number of his more famous stories and never run into a tentacle monster or anything like that.

Pacific Rim, which I've not seen but hear is fantastic.

That's a surprisingly common misconception.

All games are made to be fun but Dark souls was specifically made to be a unique experience where unlike most games where your power progression is linear and tied to ingame powerups, Dark soul's difficulty would be entirely vested in the player itself.

A played it a little and thought it seemed like the opposite of that. Also, purportedly, "death matters", even though you loot your corpse and carry on exactly where you left off. Some video games don't even have any RPG mechanics, y'know? Those would be the ones vesting the difficulty in the player.

 

[peachlover669]

A played it a little and thought it seemed like the opposite of that. Also, purportedly, "death matters", even though you loot your corpse and carry on exactly where you left off. Some video games don't even have any RPG mechanics, y'know? Those would be the ones vesting the difficulty in the player.

Come back to me when youve beaten pinwheel at level one

 

[RazorBackBacon]

If it hasn't been said, Jurassic Park. Most people seem to think it's a bog-standard critique of capitalism, probably because they're only familiar with the films/games. It's actually a critique of human arrogance and our erroneous belief that our Hot New Tech (tm) can control an unfamiliar complex dynamic system like an entire resurrected ecosystem. In the novel, the only way the Costa Rican government can reassert control over the situation is just napalm all the dinosaurs on the island, which doesn't even solve the issue because the dinosaurs have already reached the mainland (if you haven't read the novel, the dinos established breeding colonies on the mainland before the book even starts.)

The dangers of intellectual arrogance, inadequacy of technology, and the illusion of control are common themes in Crichton's work. He's probably the only 'techno-thriller' author I can think of whose tech is explicitly useless in every book.