Lore
[Rare Trope] A story element that popularized a concept is actually the polar opposite of that concept
Some franchises start off a bit specialized and evolve into something else later. Some stories get warped by pop culture and burdened with misconceptions. Some stories just don't make sense, or send the wrong message on accident.
Not these!
No, these examples are very clear (and not retconned) and yet pop culture has done a complete 180-degree turn on understanding them.
Romeo and Juliet routinely gets alluded to as though it's a classic love story. In fact it is an intensely melodramatic tragedy all the way through, everyone is shallow and exploitative and desperate--and they die for it. Even the opening of the play self-indulgently advertises how dire the whole situation is.
The One Ring from The Lord of The Rings isn't exactly meant to be a cursed item that corrupts the greedy or weak-minded. Geeky discourse loves to offer up examples of characters "strong enough" or "pure enough" to resist it, but The One Ring turns that trope on its head. The One Ring is an amplifier for power but lesser beings can't make full use of it. Being strong and noble and pure makes you more corruptible, you can bear a heavier load of its dark essence.
Keyzer Soze from The Usual Suspects is one of the most famous examples of a villain who fooled everyone and got away with his plotting scot-free. However, the whole huge convoluted mess of a scheme was intended to kill off the last living enemy capable of ID'ing him. Not only did Soze accidentally leave a new witness alive who then cooperated with the police and their sketch artist, he also got himself closely inspected by a whole police station (who now know his true identity.) Yes, it was a good twist and yes, Soze escaped police custody, but his efforts to tie off one loose end resulted in high-quality images of his real face for the FBI Most Wanted list. In most ways this was truly an epic failure for him.
Beat me to it, but yeah. Normally people prop up that whole knowledge vs wisdom quote. But the original novel is pretty clearly about two men who are made monstrous by their human emotions, as a kind of poetic irony and tragedy.
He literally got what he set out to do, but the trauma of the Creations birth gave them both PTSD they couldn't get past. Victors the failure that his Creature was y'know, in birth agony instead of coming out eloquent and a "human" from the get go, the Creature the rejection he suffered because he was a newborn undergoing said birth agony and Victor had no means to cope with it.
Also, in the book, the monster wasn't created using lightning, but because of the movie it has become cannon. (of course, that is only one of the significant differences between the book and the movies)
also because in the book the doctor keeps the method of revival secret out of regret for what he's done and successfully takes it with him to the grave, so even if the movie wanted to it couldn't really be book accurate
In all fairness, Shelley glosses over the creation of the creature itself, and the use of lightning as a ridiculously strong power source to force life into a corpse fits the science-fiction roots of the book well. Electricity was a fairly new concept at the time, and had Shelley thought of it, she probably wouldn't have been opposed to that explanation.
I once heard that the recent discovery of galvanization was one of the inspirations for the book, and that was the reason the monster movie adaptation used electricity
Apparently Shelley was in the audience when electricity was passed through the recently-deceased corpse of a criminal that was hanged. It was an experiment to see what would happen, and given it had never been done before, some were concerned that it might genuinely revive the man. As we might expect with our modern knowledge, his limbs did move and it was deeply disturbing for all that witnessed it.
The whole story can be read as an allegory for deadbeat parents not stepping up for their child and children feeling lost and abandoned by their family, which is especially interesting when you consider Mary Shelley's own upbringing, marriage, and family life.
This applies twice actually, because the Creature is also often depicted as a misunderstood gentle giant -you often see people saying that "Frankenstein was the real monster all along", when in the novel he's very much not. He's a vicious, misanthropic serial killer who picks Frankenstein's friends and family one by one in an attempt to coerce him into making him a wife, which Frankenstein refuses in a moment of clarity because he doesn't want to create a species of human-hating supermonsters, plus there's no way to know what the bride would want (that's how you know it was written by a woman).
The misunderstanding of mortality of the characters irks me the most because Mary Shelley presented a very interesting case for certain characteristics being born of nurture, while people keep arguing about the nature of the characters.
The Creature addresses this himself: "I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."
It was kinda flipping the script on how many religious folks view themselves as reflections of their deity, their creator. Victor is an asshole creator, it helps to explain a lot of the Creations behavior, plus in a way he views humanity as other from his experiences, and that also shapes how he, as a distinct new type of entity, acts.
The part in the book where the monster is boasting about the fact that he killed a 4 year old child is weird as hell. Its in fcat one of those "no one is good in this story" except the people that killed.
Victor is fundamentally a very young man who does something well beyond what he should be capable of - and immediately regrets it. He makes further mistakes in trying to undo his work without ruining himself, but eventually realises he has to track the monster to the ends of the earth and finish this all even if it kills him.
The monster won't stop killing people to terrorize Victor into making him a wife. He is also incredibly smart and charming and talking to him is considered dangerous. Stop killing humans, monster, and you'd have your wife long ago.
the best version of Frankenstein and his monster (Penny Dreadful) makes it clear that the monster is incredibly intelligent, but has the emotional regulation abilities of a toddler because he's only a couple years old.
Victor simply wasn't prepared to be a father when he created life, and it ended up costing him everything.
Funnily enough, James Gunn’s Creature Commandos has probably the most book accurate depiction of Frankenstein ever produced. He’s extremely eloquent and intelligent, but also selfish, vain, and often ignorant of the greater world and the emotions of those around him.
Lolita as written by Nabokov is effectively a horror story told from the perspective of the villain that depicts a pedophile systematically ruining a young girl's life. Lolita as directed by Kubrick is a "dark comedy" that gave the story a pop culture reputation as being about a coquette girl seducing an adult man (and may or may not have resulted in the real life child actress being sexually abused on set)
JK Rowling coos over it, saying that the ending makes her cry every time:
There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them, and one is Lolita. There is so much I could say about this book.
There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing.
For reference, the ending is nothing particularly special:
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
I can see why a bad author would see it as special.
Probably the single most egregious example of this trope ever made. A story literally about child grooming and sexual assault, becomes "ooooh, sexy girl tempts men to their doom!"
Kubric even 'aged up' Lolita -- in the novel she's 12, in the film she's 14 -- but if it was an attempt to make the story more palatable I'd say it failed.
I read Lolita, and anyone saying that the girl "seduced" him should get slapped. He literally married her mother with the intent of using it as an opportunity to groom and assault Dolores. When her mother finds out and tries to stop him, she gets killed in an accident, leaving him as her custodian. There was no seduction. She was groomed and there was no one in the system that could help her.
The Ring also isn't resisted by being a good person. Instead if you try and use its power to do good, it'll just taint and twist your goodness until you're just as bad as Sauron himself.
First it'll start as doing something bad 'For the greater good' and pretty much slide all the way down from there.
Yeah, pretty explicitly, the reason the ring has lower affect on hobbits is not that they are more or less good than other men. It is that they just don't want much, a perfect hobbit ending is a nice warm hole in the ground, good food, and a few good friends; not something like, prosperity for all and peace on earth, which would arguably be a more "good" wish.
When Sam holds the ring it connects to his want to be a gardener but it cant help itself, he sees a whole country as a garden with himself as the ruler great and terrible, forcing everyone in the land to tend to the plants properly. And Sam basically goes "meh that's way too much work, one tree and a couple rows of veg is plenty thanks"
To add to this, a big reason for the One Ring to be less effective on hobbits is also because it was forged by Sauron, and Sauron just cannot really comprehend the idea of not wanting more and more power. His incapacity of considering hobbits as a factor (because in his mind, people incapable of high ambitions cannot accomplish anything of note) in anything is really his downfall.
Thanks, you just made one of my favorite LOTR lines even better!
Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
What a nice little city, Stratholme. I sure hope no one imports infected grain from Andorhal and starts a plague that turns humans into zombies and makes Prince Arthas lose his mind as he slaughters large parts of the population in an - ultimately futile - attempt to contain the plague.
Given the time they had there really wasn't one. At best they could quarantine the town and wait for the infected to turn which would put the soldiers lives at risk fighting them and also kill a ton of the civilians with the risk of the plague spreading even further.
I still defend the prge and im not even an Arthan fan... Plus, very egoistical to not give another option and let him to deal with It because you dont want your hands dirty.
Well don't feel bad, it confused me as an adult! :)
I choose to think they wrote it that way because it made Arthas feel alone in his decision with his friends and advisors not wanting him to do it but also not showing him a better choice so he had to bear the weight of his actions all by himself.
I like when The Ring tries to whisper dark suggestions to Sam it really struggles to find anything to tempt him with. He doesn't want money or power or ruling a kingdom or to defeat his enemies in glorious battle. He wants to go home and live a peaceful life.
The Ring suggests an army of enslaved Orcs working to tend the fields, plough the lands and plant nice flowers. Because The Ring is kinda dumb and thinks suggesting dominion over an army is the way to win over everyone if you just tweak the small print.
If The Ring really understood Sam it would have lied and pretended to be a victim. "Oh please Mister Hobbit. Don't let that evil Sauron use me again. Take me home and hide me in your garden where no one will find me. Or being destroyed is better than being Sauron's slave. Actually, I know a shortcut, if you go down this tunnel it will lead you straight to the fires of Mount Doom. It's not an Orc ambush, honest."
It's because the ring is an extension of Sauron's own mind and will. It's literally the greater part of his innate being and soul confined within the object. The ring can only offer what Sauron himself would think you are tempted by.
Oedipus didn’t suffer from an Oedipus complex, in fact he did absolutely everything he could to try and avoid sleeping with his mother, and yet we name that very psychological concept after him
Similar issue with Electra, though not as famous. She was neither romantically interested in her father nor viewed her mother as a rival. She just wanted Orestes to avenge Agamemnon's death by Clytemnestra's hands as a filial child.
The thing with this dead guy in particular is that he sought to give Psychology some scientific standing, and his best bet was to try and tie it to Medicine. So, putting sex at the base of his theory gave it grounding on something regarded as a "universal," "natural" biological drive. Using Greek myths for the naming convention only gave it another layer of reputability.
But in the case of Electra specifically, it wasn't just "we need another complex for the womenfolk" but rather "we keep getting these women from well-off families reporting child abuse from their relative, it cannot be that our betters are abusing their own children, right? It's the children who are obsessed with their fathers!"
In a sense i kind kinda get villain couple goals. The "no how awful i am your ride die. Im there seeing and supporting it"
The problem is joker and harly have an explicit abusive relationship.
There are villan couples that work. Some like clare and frank underwood have and equal say in the relationship. And just as equally power hungry and cruel people
Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers are a good example of what you're talking about. They are equals, they care about each other, they protect each other, they love each other. Harley is a victim. Joker is an abusive, manipulative killer.
For Pete's sake, in one comic he chained her to the wall in a room with a bunch of dead bodies dressed exactly like her to make her think she's nobody special and is just as much of a throwaway as all the others.
There's a guy I went to school with, he was the typical nerd who had all the problems that exacerbated the problems nerds had. Terrible eyesight requiring thick lenses on his glasses, terrible teeth that required one of the worst types of braces, had problems with his upper back meaning he was always sort of hunched over at his shoulders, he was super thin but had really long lanky limbs and ended up getting some of the worst acne I've ever seen in my life. He was also a bit awkward, clearly had social anxiety issues and whenever you saw him out of school he was wearing a shirt with some sort of pop culture character on it. He wasn't bullied thankfully, otherwise I'd think he was cursed. He was a nice guy though.
He sort of transformed himself after high school, got rid of the glasses after lasik, put on some weight and muscle and through that fixed his back issues.
Well when we were about 23 he got a Girlfriend who was 18, almost 19. Almost immediately he started posting images on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram of him and his girlfriend, every single one was labelled with "She's the Harley Quinn to my Joker". He'd badly photoshop images of them together to look like them, he started dying his hair green, she started to dye her pony tails red and black to mimic the Arkham games Harley Quinn.
It just looked like such a weird relationship. Well a few years later he got arrested for domestic abuse and assault. They had gone out into town, she had done something he didn't like, because he had turned into a controlling asshole, and he choked her. Down the street, in front of a whole heap of people. Just wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed enough to cut off her airway but only for a second or two.
Turned out he had been quite comprehensively abusing her for most of their relationship because that's what the Joker and Harley Quinn had. The worst part was, she was thoroughly in love with him and thought it was okay that he was choking and hitting her when she did things wrong.
She spent years in therapy before she finally got to a point she could admit the relationship wasn't right.
So yes, any couple that thinks the Joker and Harley Quinn are couples goals needs help.
Surface level I can get it. You see two criminals who appear in love having fun and doing crime. Imagine being so love struck that you don’t care about jail as long as you’re together.
"When your taste in men is as bad as mine, they don't just go away quietly. They slash your tires and they kill your dogs and tell you that the music you like ain't real music at all. And all the cruelty tears you apart after a while." -H. Quinn, "The Suicide Squad"
a lot of modern Beauty and the Beast "retellings" have the beast be a hot guy with a bad attitude. Some not modern versions at least have him not be hot, but still be a real jerk. A lot of that stems from the Disney adaptation, where most bride-and-beast fairytales that predate it have the beast be, if not a perfect gentleman, still a nice enough person who was cursed through no fault of his own.
He is also large and muscular in most retellings, with exaggerated masculine traits, which I think detracts from the idea he is supposed to be hideous or unattractive.
Interestingly in one of the older versions of that story the beast isn't really a beast at all. It's the god Eros pretending to be an invisible beast because his mother Aphrodite has a personal grudge against his beloved Psyche
Eros and Psyche is absolutely an adjacent story to Beauty and the beast, with East of the Sun, West of the Moon slotting neatly into the gap between them --the Lass, like Psyche, isn't supposed to see her lover, and upon breaking that has to undertake a journey/ impossible tasks to get him back, where most Bride-and Beast stories don't have those elements but do have a curse that must be broken to save the prince-turned-beast/bear.
The story went from "be patient with the ugly bastard they sold you to" to "if you're unique and special enough, any Hunky bad boy will change for you". A true reflection of changing values in society...
Although, funny enough, the idea of an emotionally distant/violent male partner as a default to be corrected, remains through time, and histories of kinder partners, or girls that run away, are not as prevalent...
There's tons of stories of girls that run away. Japan has Fox-Wives, the Scots have Selkies. There's also Melusine.
Tales that are basically: If you don't treat your wife right, she'll bail out out you and vanish into the wild. With small a tint of slavery added, just because.
I think it interesting that the most “fleshed out” what if we get from Tolkien about if someone else took the ring is actually Gandalf…
I believe it’s only short, but he commented on how the ring would twist Gandalf’s sense of justice and actually he could potentially be worse than Sauron in the end because he would believe he was righteous
The Hobbits were perfect ring bearers because they had little power, and simple desires… so little for the Ring to twist. And the actual message there is that simple desires and a simple life can be both a good thing and a happy thing.
The Hobbits were perfect ring bearers because they had little power, and simple desires… so little for the Ring to twist.
And even then, when the moment came to cast the Ring into the fire, even the perfect Ring bearer couldn't do it, because no one could. The Ring was too powerful.
Adding to this, Most people don't even see a point in Tom Bombadil being in the books. And more ironically, many are too focused on how powerful he is and why he's so powerful.
I see Tom Bombadil as a necessary example of what hobbits would be like if they had even more of the traits that makes them less tainted by the ring, but also why it wouldn't work if they had even more of those traits.
It works because they're more care free and less self focused, but if they were TOO care free and not even self preserving then they wouldn't have the agency to try to destroy the ring, they wouldn't care if the world was destroyed.
That's exactly it. Tom isn't all-powerful; he just is entirely devoid of any ambition or desire whatsoever, a complete lack of control which Tolkien shows is as bad in the context of the quest as to opposite (total control). To Gandalf's "all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us", Frodo showed his worth by making the choice to be proactive and act for the good of Middle-earth; Tom would have a completely different answer, and it definitely isn't meant to be a good thing.
That is also why seeing Tom as a powerful person who should help them is missing the point: even if you were to somehow find a way to involve him in the quest of the Ring, by tricking him or else, the only thing you'd have done is giving him an ambition... And therefore, a way for the Ring's temptation to get him. The only way to make his supposed "immunity" useful for the quest is by removing the exact parameter that makes him immune.
I feel like I remember Frodo directly asking Gandolf why Tom doesn't bear the ring, and Gandolf responds with a pithy remark that Tom would simply forget what he was supposed to do. (Also the ring itself has ambition, and would probably slip off Tom's finger and into a stream the first chance it got). I always saw Tom as having reached enlightenment and done away with earthly things. Whether that's good or bad or neutral is left up to the reader.
The Grinch was originally created because Dr. Seuss disliked how commercialized Christmas had become. The story famously ends with the Grinch changing his mind about Christmas when he realizes it “doesn’t come from a store”. Nowadays, the Grinch is just as commercialized as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
American History X is an anti neo Nazi film, and it's not the least bit subtle about that. It has, however, been used by neo Nazis for recruitment, because you can only control what you put into an artwork, not what people take away from it.
I think it was Lindsay Ellis who pointed out accurate and serious depictions of such groups, or even the original Nazis, often gets co-opted by them or is bastardised into recruitment. See 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret being taken out of its context of "oh god I see where this rhetoric is going" to becoming an anthem of the alt-right with some even pretending it wasn't written for the musical and is instead a true patriotic anthem.
The only depiction safe from this, and that works as a truly anti-Nazi force, is comedy where they look like idiots. You don't see Neo-Nazis singing Springtime for Hitler, nor do they co-opt Jojo Rabbit.
Dante's Inferno is often thought to be the poem that popularized the "fire and brimstone" depiction of Hell you often see in media. However, Hell as depicted in the poem actually has pretty diverse geography, and indeed, the final, worst circle of Hell where Satan himself resides is actually depicted as being completely frozen over.
I learned this bit from a priest back in grade school when I was asking him about hell. He said hell would be a cold place because it was furthest from the warmth of gods love. Makes a kind of sense if you believe in all that
Some theologians have speculated that the enlivening fire of God's glory in heaven, the purifying fire of purgatory, and the painful punishing fire of hell are in fact all the same undiluted fire of God's being - the difference being in the soul's disposition towards it.
However, this is pure theological speculation, and not established doctrine. There's very little we can say with much precision about the matter, because there's not much that's been revealed to us. And given that, at least until the final judgement, these are non-corporeal realities, our minds at present have a great deal of trouble imagining what it might really be like.
Another over-simplification I see a lot is that the Inferno was largely expressing some personal grudges.
Although there are definitely a lot of political/social statements made about who went to Hell, he also shows significant empathy to those in Hell.
He puts his beloved mentor in Hell (Brunetto Latini) with quite a bit of lamenting about the whole situation—and iirc, some questioning about whether Dante really deserves all this grace for his earthly sins. He also revisits the memory of the forbidden lovers in the Second Ring with some grief.
https://giphy.com/gifs/l2YWAOJso1n136fM4
Night of the Living Dead created the modern zombie movie including the zombie apocalypse concept we see in its sequels and spinoffs. However, the original Night of the Living Dead film actually ends with the outbreak successfully suppressed (though all our leads do die before it can happen).
Actually, not all of the leads. There is one survivor Which ironically was the black character. Being the only one to make it to the end of the movie. But he dies of police violence, thinking of him as a zombie. I'm sure that you can take something from that
A lot of popular media portray Schrodinger's Cat as a demonstration of the weirdness of quantum physics, where a cat could end up being simultaneously dead and alive until an observation is made. But the whole thought experiment was meant as a reductio ad absurdum for certain interpretations of superposition.
"The Schrödinger's cat paradox outlines a situation in which a cat in a box must be considered, for all intents and purposes, simultaneously alive and dead. Schrödinger created this paradox as a justification for killing cats"
Right Schrodinger specifically disliked the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It was very popular at the time (and still is).
The point of his thought experiment was to show people that it didn't just create quantum weirdness you could wave away but could have real macroscopic effects (a dead and alive cat) that don't track with our lived experiences at all.
This is true, but unfortunately for Erwin Schrödinger there are reasons to believe his cat setup is pretty much physically accurate. (Just not on a scale as large as a cat. Well, probably not....)
Squid Game was created to satirize a society that trivializes human life for the sake of wealth, creating an extreme version of reality shows for the amusement of the rich. It is now treated as inspiration for multiple commercial properties including actual reality shows. The comparison to Mr. Beast’s content is hard to ignore.
It's genuinely hilarious that both squid game inspired game shows had allegations of contestants being mistreated. Couldn't be more on the nose if they tried.
Personally the funniest part was Mr beast claiming Beast Games is not like squid game because they don't kill people. Despite the obvious inspiration and his multiple previous squid game videos that also didn't involve killing.
Superman being an allegory for Jesus, its a super common take at this point and its understandable why, a being beyond humanity sending his only son to earth to save people.
Theres a few issues here, one being that Superman has a lot more ties with the old testament than the new. The story is closer to the story of Moses or even The Golem of Prague but even then, these arent the best comparisons.
Another major issue is that Superman isnt a savior, he isnt giving divine commands or telling people how they should live, hes just defending them. Hes a man like anyone else, just using what hes been given to help those around him
I never understood why people made Superman a Christ figure. Like, “parents send their baby boy randomly out into the world in a vessel hoping that he’ll be saved from the destruction of their people and that boy is adopted by strangers” is so obviously Moses-coded that I could see the connection even as a child.
The absolute most interesting things about Superman are exactly what make him not a Jesus figure at all:
--There's no divine conception. Kal-El is just an average kryptonian baby. his parents aren't particularly moral. they've usually contributed to the climate disaster, too. They saved their baby, and maybe their niece (the two most common variations here being that they sent her to babysit and raise Kal-El or that her parents copied the rocket designs after Kal-El has already been sent to earth) but not anyone else's baby. The absolute most morally pure I've ever seen anyone make them, the resulting depiction of Superman was boring, angsty, and basically someone's power fantasy in red and blue.
--He isn't trying to lead people. He tries to form out a justice league as a democratic organization, ends up the poster boy, and usually leaves 'management' roles to someone else. the closest to preachy he ever gets is being the face of PSA's, and he comes out sounding more like Mister Rogers than he does Jesus. it's very 'don't do drugs kids' and not 'here is my divine wisdom'
--there is a distinct lack of divine edict. he chooses to be a hero just because he was raised right. his morals come from a nice midwestern couple that plucked him out of dirt and wreckage.
My Fair Lady, or Pygmalion, romanticized the relationship between its two leads despite the original playwright trying desperately to make people see that it wasn't belligerent sexual tension between an upper class man and a lower class woman, but a fuckass twat who takes a girl and linguistically strips her of her identity to the point she doesn't really belong anywhere, and she ultimately leaves him in the end. He wrote so many letters trying to get people to see that but audiences of the time took away "they should've gotten together at the end" and the people who wrote the movies put it in every adaptation
"The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges.
Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular."
Shrek went all-in on celebrity voices, pop culture references and licensed music to riff on other animated kids movies, particularly fairy tale musicals, ESPECIALLY those from Disney.
Then everyone else tried to copy Shrek’s act, not knowing why Shrek did all that in the first place.
My favorite part is that even the shrek franchise itself started becoming a parody of itself, the third movie happened and also shrek filled twinkies. The fourth movie not only represents the characters midlife crisis, but also on a meta level what the franchise became at that point.. and now we're getting a part 5
Hunger Games was about how bad and messed up their society was, and how people will focus more on spectacle and celebrity drama than atrocities being actively committed, as well as commenting on how messed up it was to turn the children into celebrities while they're forced to kill each other.
And now we have a club remix of the hanging tree and a million clones of Hunger Games that just focus on the female protagonists love interests.
Also also, the romance was, in-universe, the "bread and circuses" distraction from the rebellion. And then, IRL, marketing for the books and movies veered away from the social commentary and political intrigue aspects of the story to focus on "Which guy will Katniss end up with?! Will she and Peeta ever kiss?!"
I would like to say as much as the marketing did do this I think the Author did a fantastic job of making Katniss' personal relationships with Peeta and Gale matter, make sense, and have some depth.
Gale was your typical strong boy type. Hunter, handsome, and seeking violence as revenge. It would make sense for our similarly minded protagonist to want him considering lived experience and temperament. The movies also picked a more conventionally attractive actor.
Peeta, was a peaceful baker who just wanted to survive. He was made a dancing monkey for a populace that pretended to care about him. He was tortured into seeking violence. Lastly... only Peeta could understand Katniss after their shared experience and trauma.
Based on the 2 love interests, Gale represented continuing violence and Peeta represented struggling for peace. Gale was the easy choice. Peeta was the correct one based on the tone of the book.
That's another thing that was unique about HG, Fatness never really had a tru love. She loved Gale, but never solidified it, she loved Peeta but it grew out of circumstance. Her romances all felt very real and grounded to me. Very, "yeah I like you guys, but theres bigger shit going on here."
To be fair, out of all of the young adult series made at that time, The Hunger Games is one of the LEAST capitalized franchises out there. Suzanne Collins could have easily made tons of books set in this world, especially since less popular franchises were doing it. But she didn't. It took 10 years to release The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes since the last book in the trilogy, and 5 more years for Sunrise of the Reaping. Besides movie adaptations, we don't get a lot of other stuff. You can still argue that's still capitalizing, but considering how big the franchise is, I'm surprised they're holding back that much.
The Hunger Games X Subway commercial is hilarious, though!
In the original ending, Rambo killed himself at the end.
Same with Rocky. The first movie is about a common man in an extraordinary situation, where he ends up losing but finding purpose. In the next movies, he's a machine that will beat communism and the Soviet Union with his fists.
The first Rocky Is a goddamn beautiful movie about a couple of completely opposite humans in love with each other. It blows my mind how weird the sequels are compared to the first one.
Moriarty being the "negative mirror counterpart" of Sherlock Holmes- Moriarty popularised the idea of a negative hero- someone who resembles the hero in every aspect, with the main difference being that they are evil, which we see now with folks like Reverse Flash for Flash, Zod for Superman and so on.
In the original story however Moriarty was supposed to be more of a one time villain who was a threat to Holmes, so that the writer Arthur Doyle could find a way to kill Holmes and move on from writing Sherlock stories. He wasnt supposed to be the grand negative counterpart to Sherlock (like Lex Luthor to Superman) in the way he is now thought of to be.
Similarity, the Joker wasn't meant to be Batman's mirror, but rather just the first of many mob bosses with a quirk Batman would have to face. The idea that he would be Batman's arch nemesis came about in the 1970s, almost 40 years after being introduced into the comics!
EDIT to add: The same can also be said of Zod, where he was one of many kryptonians who were similarly powered as Superman, but happened to use their powers for nefarious schemes rather than heroic ones.
It was the editor at the time, not fans. Because he's also shown to still be alive at the end of Batman #1, which couldn't have possibly been in response to a fan reaction which hadn't happened yet.
He gets revived in the 70s as a dangerous criminal after a long time as a joke character but the OP downplays his importance in the Golden Age
Working off Sherlock The idea of the fair play mystery. Contrary to popular belief the original books were never 'fair play whodunnits' as in; It is impossible to figure out the mystery or crime with what the author gives you in the story and you the reader are left to the mercy of the protagonists to figure out the plot
Sherlock Holmes books did inspire a lot of fans who would later come up with the framework for what would come to be known as the 'fairplay whodunnit'. Ronald Knox, the guy who was probably the first 'sherlockian' would also be the first to come up with 'the ten commandments of detective fiction' which laid out the rules for fair play and he was also part of the detection club which was a group of writers which included the likes of Agatha Christe who would go on to popularise the fair play mystery
Yeah this is why, while I do think a good story should have proper set up and foreshadowing, I never bought the common criticism that any mystery story that doesn't lay all out the evidence for the audience to decipher and figure out is a bad mystery, because there are plenty of classics that don't do that
Well I mean Moriarty was introduced as the guy who was behind several of the ‘smaller scale’ crimes Holmes had solved in the past, and he wrote an entire book, ‘The Dynamics of an Asteroid.’
He’s literally said to be as smart as Holmes, so the idea he’d be a sort of shadow self has precedent.
Frankenstein's Monster being associated with stupidity and brute force
In Shelley's novel the creature teaches himself to read, studies philosophy, and articulates his suffering more eloquently than any human character around him. The dumb lumbering grunt is entirely a Hollywood invention.
It gets thought of as a forbidden love story between an older guy and an underage girl who is in love and seducing him.
The book? The book makes it absolutely clear that Humbert is a fucking weirdo who's obsessed with Lolita, and the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and that Dolores was just a kid - one that get's targeted and groomed by Humbert.
Heck, Lolita has become a cultural shorthand for a young seductive girl, when the book is more about Humbert’s obsession and delusions.
People quote a line from Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" in the way that is not what Frost intended all the time.
"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors"
The character who says this line is cast as a sort of moron and the speaker recognizes him as one. But people use this phrase sincerely, completely against Frost's meaning
In Ulysses a teacher quotes Shakespeare but Stephen (?) mumbles "Iago" under his breath. Just because it's in a Shakespeare play doesn't mean it's wisdom if you ignore WHO actually said it. e.g. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" is from the mouth of the controlling, pompous Pollonius.
Maybe someone smarter (or with a better memory for the podcast, cracked article or QI episode I got this from) can add on. But Robert Frost seems like he had this happen to him often.
His poem The Road Not Taken, which is a guy saying he took the road less traveled and that made all the difference, is often quoted to honor people with a unique style of living or with strange attitudes.
Frost wrote it specifically to mock one of his friends, who had said something like this and the poem does take some time to point out that both roads are pretty much identical.
Yeah, now that you mention it, that poem explicitly says that the two roads have been worn down the same amount, which immediately comes after the speaker's justification for his choice. Everyone turns that poem into Butterfly-Effect-Optimism, but it's really about uncertainty.
Also, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" is often painted as this idyllic nature scene when really it's (debatably) about a man contemplating suicide.
The same thing goes for a lot of prestige TV in the 2010s. The sopranos, breaking bad, sons of anarchy, Etc were all shows with douchebags as protagonists with the overarching story talking about how shitty their life really is, and yet people idolize them and the lifestyle.
Carmen is an even worse offender than Romeo and Juliet. When you think Carmen, you think sulfurous love story, but not really. Virtually all the characters could come straight out of the worst, trashiest reality TV.
The plot is basically: Carmen gets arrested for trying to stab another woman over a love quarrel, she seduces the soldier in charge of bringing her to prison, which ends up following her and her band of smuglers when they ditch town because he basically fucked his life over letting her escape. Turns out the guy is terribly jealous and Carmen gets quickly fed up with him. She dumps him to get swept by the toreador, but her ex finds her and kills her out of jealousy.
Everyone is vain, petty, jealous, prone to anger, sometimes straight up rapey; there's, like, one character that's not a complete jerk or a tool.
How techbros took literally every lesson from dystopian fiction, ie 1984, Neuromancer, Terminator, *
Fahrenheit 451*, etc and decided to pour resources into making those a reality.
There is a sci-fi series currently coming out as a prestige show that uses this as part of the plot, kinda.
Spoilers for the Apple TV show and book series Silo:
An eccentric billionaire/ influential senator has decided that weaponry will only get deadlier and easier to make, and so constructs 50 bunkers each capable of housing an entire society of 10,000 people. Then, to make sure that the ‘bad guys’ don’t unleash a nano machine swarm or nuclear detonation by surprise and target the silos before anyone can evacuate into them, he launches the attacks himself while they’re full of people ‘invited for a tour.’
The thinking, if we’re being charitable as possible, may be something like “well someone’s going to do it, and if someone does it, it should be me.”
I computed the odds of there being a bomb on the plane I'm flying in, and the odds were high enough to scare me. For a long time, I didn't fly. But then I computed the odds of two bombs being on a plane, and that pushed the odds so low that they no longer worried me.
Jekyll and Hyde popularised the trope of a character having a split personality with a good side and a villainous side. The original Jekyll and Hyde, however, were simply the same man changing his appearance so that he could freely act on the evil urges he was too ashamed to be seen doing as himself.
it was more complex than that, the potion did legitimately change how he thought and behaved as it dragged all the darkness in a humans heart to the surface, and so anyone that drank the potion would behave roughly the same has he did. the thing that made Jekyll evil is that he enjoyed the feeling of the potion so much that he was willing to keep drinking it regardless of the people he was hurting.
Ok I don't know if this idea the "Hyde is nothing more than a chemical disguise for Jekyll" originated with Red from OSP, but I feel like that video definitely popularized it, and it's wrong.
The cultural stereotype of Hyde being a completely distinct person from Jekyll who the potion magics into existence is definitely not correct, but the idea that Jekyll and Hyde are the exact same mind and person, and that the potion does nothing more than act as a disguise by transforming his physical features while leaving his mind untouched, is also definitely not accurate, particularly by the end of the book. Jekyll and Hyde share continuity of consciousness and memory and start out as more or less the same person, and Hyde definitely is an aspect of Jekyll, but it's not Jekyll and Hyde are actually the same dude who merely acts differently because he thinks he's free of social consequence.
If you could change just part of the potion so that, instead of changing into a completely different physical appearance, only Hyde's eye color changed, or maybe he looked exactly the same as Jekyll, Hyde would *still* act radically different than Jekyll does, because he's psychologically much different. He's all of Jekyll's worst impulses and desires given free reign, without restraint. Not "As Hyde, Jekyll chooses to act without restraint because he believes he will be free of consequence" but because as Hyde, Jekyll is in a fundamentally much different state of mind and personality that does not care about inhibiting his urges or being good. Hyde and Jekyll also begin to perceive themselves as distinct people, or at the very least as distinct personalities. This is why we have scenes like Hyde maliciously destroying all of Jekyll's stuff out of resentment for Jekyll. Jekyll/Hyde were locked in their room at this point, so it's not like public perception affects how Jekyll acts now that he looks different. The transformations act differently because they are psychologically distinct identities. Jekyll-as-Jekyll doesn't want to destroy all his stuff, he realizes this experiment has failed, wants to erase Hyde, and wants his old life back. Hyde, meanwhile, wants to continue existing, and is lashing out like a caged beast, afraid and furious at the idea of being restrained, or worse, erased.
In a real sense, Hyde is an aspect of Jekyll's personality amplified (basically everything Hyde does, some part of Jekyll wanted to do anyway), but it's not just Jekyll wearing a mask. Hyde is more akin to Jekyll's id put in the driver's seat detached from his ego or superego, rather than merely Jekyll wearing a mask.
Thank you for being the one to deliver this one. I don't know where the "Hyde was a disguise" concept became so persistent, but it absolutely fails to mesh with the story itself. Jekyll has a whole death of personality event and a final note, and Hyde shoots himself because he isn't capable of what Jekyll can do. If there was no difference in personae, there would be no split, only a smooth transition.
Among other things the book is also commentary on alcoholism. Dude drinks his magic potion and turns into a monster, but also to maintain his normality he had to drink another potion. Also, 1880s Scotland.
Yeah. It’s a story about a man who — through his invention — is able to act with complete anonymity and impunity. The facade he uses literally melts away when he’s done. Jekyll always had whatever urges he had, throughout his life, but he couldn’t indulge them. Through Hyde — free of consequence — he could.
But once he started with Hyde, he just couldn’t stop. Even when he tried to be good and upstanding, he’d “slip into Hyde” and start acting like a fucking psycho. He “becomes Hyde” more, and more, and more. He becomes an incredibly worse person.
Eventually, he gets stuck as Hyde. Not only is he stuck as a horrible person (even though it’s still just him), that impunity and anonymity is gone. The facade will never go away. That’s just his face, now. He kills himself to escape what he’s become as well as the consequences of his own actions.
Basically. The story was written at a time when upstanding Victorian gentlemen would sneak off to Soho so they could shed their upright reputation and indulge in vice. Jekyll was already failing to keep those two versions of himself separate before he came up with the potion; the narrator of the story says that he often ends up as the very last friend of formerly respectable men, and that Jekyll will be one of them soon.
That's not entirely accurate. I recently read the book. At first, he feels more free because he doesn't have inhibition, but later on Hyde makes him more wicked.
When he first drinks the potions he feels that he has become ten fold more wicked, but it delights him. Later on, he avoids drinking the potion for 2 months, but has basically become addicted and falters. Hyde comes back significantly more twisted and murders a man. In the morning, Jeckyl falls to his knees, horrified and full of remorse.
Here's a quote from the book that illustrates that well:
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.
This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone, Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience.
It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.
But originally Jekyll didn't want to have those urges, which drives him to create the serum in the first place to separate the evil from himself. It is when he is give the anonimity that his urges get the better of him, but it is also a story about the struggle one has with themselves about good and evil. It's not just "oh, bad person was just trying to do evil for himself and got what he deserved, the end."
In a way I suppose that it also an allegory for addiction to alcohol and other drugs that change the behaviour of people for the worse but you will get the urges even when the rationalization stops you for a while.
Also, now dashes always trigger an AI alert on me.
Edit: I mean this comment for one of your replies, not for you. Well, it's the same.
"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife."
The first few lines tell the whole plot. My English teacher was always angry that everyone got the Star Crossed lovers line wrong. From what I came to understand, they angered, or crossed, the fates, or stars, with their doomed love.
Dracula: Almost everyone think it's a tragic love story and that Dracula is just trying to recover his past love, but in the book Dracula is a monster, he doesn't have a tragic love story, he hunts mina and Lucy because he wants to
the love story between Jonathan and Mina, and between Lucy and her three suitors, is so strong that it shapes the whole story, and yet every adaptation harps on making Mina and Dracula something. it annoys me to no end.
That was the tell that Luc Besson was ripping off Francis Ford Coppola's version with his recent movie and probably never read the book. Besson said in interviews that he wanted to focus on the love story since it is an important part of the book that most versions leave out. Add to that the fact that so much of Besson's movie is obviously plagarising Coppola.
The Starship Troopers movie was supposed to be a satirical commentary on how fascist militarism is glorified through propaganda. It is now seen as more of a surface level sci fi action flick where people in cool robot armour fight ugly alien bugs.
The meme of Charles Foster Kane applauding that people post when they want to give credit to something is actually the opposite because in the movie Charles Foster Kane was applauding his wife's awful singing performance in the opera he forced her into, no one else was clapping.
After being bitten by the spider, Peter sees better without the glasses. That's the whole point of the scene. He doesn't use the glasses after that in the whole trilogy.
Bonus addition to the Romeo and Juliet example - when people use "star crossed lovers" to say a couple is "meant to be" or perfect for each other when it actually means the complete opposite
Die Hard's (later) sequels completely fail to understand Die Hard.
The first movie is a hyperly realistic and believable thriller that openly mocks action movies and particularly their unbelievable "heroes". It's a deconstruction of what we are usually shown to be "cool" and "heroic". John McClane is not a hero. He gets dragged into the events by mistake, he barely has the situation under control at any point, he has no idea how to win, and he very nearly doesn't. By the end of the story, he has broken several bones, lost litres of blood and can barely walk. He's been BROKEN, mind and body. Not an action hero. A horror movie survivor.
The sequels slowly start going in another direction. By the fourth movie, McClane goes up against a military jet in a truck while the bridge around him collapses. He has some blood on his face, but mostly seems to be a-okay physically and mentally, having become the very archetype of the indestructable American action hero he openly laughs at in the original work. A total Flanderization. It's hilarious.
Even the iconic "Yippe-ki-yay" line is supposed to be an ironic reference to "cool" one-liners, and now it's one of the most recognizable and most-quoted phrases in film history, up there with the likes of "I am your father" and "Hasta la vista, baby".
7.5k
u/[deleted] Aug 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment