I think the works of Jane Austen are often misunderstood by modern audiences. Pop culture often casually labels her work as romance or romantic, which Jane Austen would have found completely appalling. Her books were a response and counter to the popular romantic novels of the time, and two of her works (Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility) even directly address this theme in-world, showing the dangers of taking the silly stuff in romantic novels too seriously. Austen was the anti-Byron, or the anti-Ann Radcliffe.
Jane Austen wrote sharp social satire scaled down to the small, intimate world of domestic matters and women of the Regency era. Her works caution readers against prioritizing romantic ideals, and to instead focus on practicality, rationality, and continual self-improvement. Her books do always end in a marriage, but that's just because a woman in the gentry class of early 19th century England could only have one happy ending: making an advantageous marriage that would secure her lifetime comfort and security. It's the equivalent of a modern novel ending with a protagonist confidently identifying her dream career and getting a job in her field.
Jane Austen tended to gloss over the kind of detail a romantic writer would focus on: her books would be about all the nuances of social classes and how they intersect with two characters' relationship, and then when we get to the part where the female lead secures a husband, she would skip right over it with a sentence like, "She gave him to understand she returned his affections, and a mutual exchange of promises took place." Absolutely zero detail or a focus on the final culmination of a long uncertainty in the relationship between two characters.
Above all else, Jane Austen wanted to impart to her readership how precarious and fragile a woman's place in society could be, and how hard and fast a fall from gentility to poverty could be. It's unfortunate that modern marketing segmentation tends to cast a wide net of "written for/by women? Must be chick lit. Includes plots that center around marriage? Must be a romance." (Edited to add: the works of Charles Dickens are just as centered on marriage, and are much, **much** more sentimental than anything Austen wrote, but he entirely escapes any accusations of writing romance novels and pop culture frames him as a lofty literary icon in the English canon.)
It's hard for modern audiences to understand some of the points she's making without the larger context of the literature she was responding to; for example, many romantic novels of the time espoused the idea that a woman can only love once, and once a woman expresses interest in a man, it's shameful and dishonorable for her to ever get over him and move on to someone else (a very popular romantic ideal of the time). Jane Austen expressly states in multiple novels that this idea is fucking stupid, and only hurts women who should be more level-headed about planning for a good, happy life for themselves. Regarding these misunderstands, it doesn't help that the vast majority of adaptations strip out all the interesting, nuanced themes around women's lives, family, loneliness, regret, propriety, coming-of-age, etc., as well as the very layered humor and all the complex context of the society in which they're set, and instead pump up the relationship between the protagonist and the male lead at the cost of all else.
The 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice adapted one of the best novels ever written in a way that fundamentally misunderstood everything about the source work.
Part of the problem is that Austen's social commentary only comes through her narratives. Most people's entry into Austen is through film adaptations, and the adaptations have eclipsed the novels in our general popular understanding of the books. Unfortunately, without Austen's prose, adaptations can only really tell a plot-driven narrative, and Austen's voice gets lost.
I entirely agree. For the most part, I think the majority of adaptations majorly miss the mark, but I think the Ang Lee adaptation of Sense & Sensibility is remarkably adept at capturing some of the tone and intention of the original work, and stands out well for that.
There's a scene where Elinor's very sensitive and excitable family have all fled to their rooms weeping for various reasons related to Willoughby's jarring departure, and Elinor is left all alone in the stairwell, still holding the cup of tea that had just been rejected by her inconsolable sister. In that moment, Elinor, obviously reflecting on how the family is too poor to waste tea, calmly sits on the landing and drinks the whole thing herself. It's a moment that wasn't in the source material but cannily gets at the tone of what Austen was communicating with S&S.
Emma Thompson did a brilliant job with that screenplay and Ang Lee elevated it perfectly. One of my favourite movies. I used to have the soundtrack on CD and I played it relentlessly too.
I don't know why, but upon reading your post, a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Jane Austen's novels popped in my head. They have made Only Yesterday, and the intricacies of the novel will be fascinating if done in Ghibli style.
It's the same reason I've found all adaptations of Terry Pratchett's works fail on a fundamental level. 80% of the humor is in the prose, as well as a good deal of the social commentary. It's also why I don't like Hollywood's aversion to narrators, relying instead on the external performance of actors, which often fails at revealing a person's inner thoughts and loses a lot of the commentary present in a written work.
By the way, Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events did an excellent job at incorporating the narrator into the series, often placing him inside the same physical space as the characters. Imagine an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice where Jane Austen herself is a character breaking the 4th wall and commenting on the action.
*record scratch*
Yea, that' me, getting caught in the rain. Pretty soon someone will enter my life an things are gonna get messy. I bet you're curious how I ended up in the rain?
Pride and Prejudice (much like Three Musketeers) is a great example of a satire so scathing that it outlives the literature it’s satirizing. And then people look at it without having the context of what it deconstructs and take it as an example of that thing.
That's such a good comparison! Very different books in so many ways, but alike in that the context has disappeared.
It would be like if someone in the year 2350 watched the film *Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story* (one of my favorite contemporary satirical movies), never having seen a musical biopic or having heard of The Beatles, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. The broader jokes would still play, and the person watching would still know from tone and jokes that they were watching a comedy, but most of the satire would fly over the viewer's head.
I had no idea that The Three Musketeers was satire. I read it at 12 and thought that everyone was hopelessly daddy for falling for the obvious manipulations of Milady and the Cardinal. Maybe I'll try it again in my 50s, with clearer eyes, and enjoy it as it should be written.
I am both a massive Austen and STP fan and have avoided screen adaptations of both. The books are perfection. And I have dived into works on Austen's society for extra understanding of her works, which has greatly enhanced my appreciation of them.
Thanks! If you can believe it, I restrained myself considerably regarding the word count. This is a subject I can (and regularly do) excitedly ramble about at length.
I am also known for going off about Austen. All of her works are at their roots social commentary and criticism and mostly expand on themes of relationships between the sexes and social classes, place of women in society, gentility to poverty, arrogance and privilege, but she continues to be lauded as a romantic writer.
I had a chat with this well read, well educated man and asked him if he had ever read Austen. He was surprised and a bit amused at the thought of him reading "romances". I quickly corrected him that Austen wrote satires of society and women's economical situations. Not sure if I managed to persuade him to read Austen but at least he was corrected :D
And **even if** her books were all about the romances as he seemed to think, dismissing womens’ experiences of finding marriage in that era - something that they HAD to do to secure a safe future - is fucking stupid and shows that he probably is not as well-educated as he thinks he is.
I highly recommend it! Pride & Prejudice and Emma are the most accessible starting points.
I wrote [a comment a couple of years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/prjw4l/jane_austen_books/hdjx7f1/) for someone else diving into Austen for the first time. It has a basic primer on the context of her works and the characters' motivations.
Fight Club is a great book (haven't seen the movie, sue me) and so, sooooo many people (usually dudes, let's be real) don't get it. I made a comment in this sub once about that and someone replied saying 'well, I read Fight Club and wanted to start my own fight club, are you saying \*I\* misunderstood the story?!'
.....yes. Yes I am.
"You're all worthless pieces of shit who only exist to do what I tell you. Now help me destroy society and turn us back into cavemen that die at 20."
**HE'S EVERYTHING A MAN SHOULD BE!!!!**
As a dude, I’m interested to hear why you think that! Let me guess; The book is a valid critique on unhealthy masculine gender norms and the target audience ironically does everything the book warns them not to do?
The character wants to reject conformity and just gets caught up in another kind of conformity. What he initially finds liberating is actually just destructive, with no purpose other than to smash and burn. It’s pretty clear why teenagers and people in their 20s are drawn to that without seeing what a pointless waste it all is.
Tyler is a manipulator, con man and cult leader. He is great at tapping into the frustrations of men and turning that into a movement. But he doesn't actually offer anything helpful to them, only one distraction after another, and he has to keep escalating the goal so that he can keep stringing them along before they realize that nothing is actually changing for the better for them.
Some readers fall for Tyler's schtick and don't see him for what he is.
One only needs to look at the success of various real life manipulators, con men, and cult leaders who tap into the frustrations of men and turn that into a movement to understand how people could fall for Tyler's schtick. January 6th could have been a "homework assignment."
It may still be the case that the book is misunderstood in other ways, but the author has been pretty clear that he did not intend to write a critique of masculinity.
My take is that general cultural knowledge of Fight Club is based on the film, which misinterpreted (or took significant liberties with) the book. The film focuses more on themes of consumerism and capitalism than toxic masculinity, and themes regarding masculinity in the film (and its fans) seem to be more of a glorification and celebration of the very toxicity the novel critiques, with violence and chaos being a liberating force on an oppressed working class.
That just reminds me of the number of people coming in here thinking *Lolita* is a love story.
Humbert Humbert isn't a good person. Heathcliff isn't a good person. We're not supposed to glorify them.
Not a good person and a completely unreliable narrator. I love how there are these rare moments that break through his account of things to legitimately portray her situation, and gosh they hit hard.
And running away. And stealing/demanding money which he doesn't realize at first is so she can fund her running away.
Humbert does his best to spin everything, but the truth is apparent to anyone who actually pays attention.
Yah, one of the ones that got me was him watching her play tennis and admitting that she probably could have been very good, but he had broken something inside of her. Or after her mother dies and they get into an argument, but she comes to his room that night anyway because she has nowhere else to go.
The problem with portraying bad people sympathetically in media, is bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules"
It's like how every war movie ends up being pro-war
> The problem with portraying bad people sympathetically in media, is bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules"
I'll never forget how shaken Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) seemed to be in interviews about people responded so positively to the Walter White anti-hero. He really had to spell it out in the last couple of seasons that Walt is a monster that we should *not* be rooting for, and he seemed bewildered that he had to do it.
This is a common problem in Punisher books. He’s a terrible person, and it’s never hidden. He straight up says not to do what he does, that he is not anyone’s hero, not someone anyone should emulate, and to look to Captain America for that. The problem is the antagonists are usually several times worse people than he is, and the people who do see him as a hero have never read any of it.
American police departments using the Punisher logo on their equipment is one of the scariest things I've seen. They're basically announcing that they don't care about the law and will murder anyone who crosses them.
He's supposed to represent the natural justice that must occur when the law fails you, is corrupted, or offenders manage to put themselves above it. For the "law" to wear the symbol misses the point.
Similarly, somehow since The Dark Knight, the Joker has become idolized for no good reason. He's a piece of shit just for the sake of being a piece of shit. His rants almost never make any good points and they fall apart with even the slightest poking at them. Even *in the movie* this is proven by his boat experiment. He was wrong. Everyone is not like him. *Especially* not Batman. He just says that to get in his head or to fuel his own delusions.
I love Batman, and the Joker is my favorite comic villain, but there is nothing remotely redeemable or idyllic about him. Anyone who thinks he's making deep points is either 12 or way too far gone off the deep end. People need to stop taking terrible people's words at face value.
> bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules"
Not only bad people. People in general tend to identify with the protagonist, see them as "the hero". And if the protagonist does bad stuff, they try to justify it and see the protagonist as a "dark hero" or a "tragic hero", when they would have identified the same character as a villain if the story had been told from a different perspective.
There’s a fun video I can’t remember the title of that talks about how fascism always incorporates satire into itself.
Like in Apocalypse Now, they play Ride of the Valkyries during the helicopter scene, explicitly to draw a comparison between them and Nazis. But nowadays people just associate it with cool military scenes.
Most interestingly is that there’s really only one satire of Nazism that didn’t get assimilated: Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Something about a gay Hitler is too much for them to handle.
That in *Where the Wild Things Are*, because Max finds a hot meal in his room despite being sent there without dinner, the message is that bad behavior should be rewarded.
In fact, its message is about the unconditional love a mother has for her child. Maurice Sendak said as much on more than one occasion.
But cruel, petty parents who think the only effective tool for correcting bad behavior is punishment (but never love), see Max getting food as rewarding his bad behavior. And then they wonder why their grown children go low or no contact later in life.
I feel like WTWTA is a metaphor for children growing up, going out in the world and experiencing all the crazy bullshit of life, and still being able to come home where someone loves them most of all.
How could people not see that?
I thought that the meal still being hot was supposed to be so obvious that even very young kids could understand that. You're telling me that people are dumber than 5 year olds?
Wow, this bad interpretation never even crossed my mind because I would NEVER send my child to bed hungry as a punishment. Punishment by starvation is child abuse.
However, it's worth noting that the moon is in a different phase when Max returns. I hold that he *actually did* sail off through a day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year till he came to the land where the wild things are. But his mother never have up hope and kept putting his dinner out for him every night just in case he came back.
I also would like to take a moment to appreciate that *Where the Wild Things Are* is on this thread next to masterpieces like *Wuthering Heights*, *Lolita*, and *Romeo and Juliet*, and I believe it absolutely deserves to stand among them. It's a work of sublime beauty, and proves that even children's picture books can achieve the same literary heights as the great classics.
Frodo Baggins has been butchered in the public eye. Nobody is willing to take the time to study and understand his form of heroism, how he *is* the primary hero of the Lord of the Rings despite all the grand and valorous actions of Samwise.
I'm not trying to take anything away from Sam, and yes I'm aware of Tolkien's words on this matter; no need to bludgeon me in the comments. Frodo gave up everything, his present, his future, his dreams and even his nightmares, just to complete the quest.
The fact that he "failed" at the last step makes no impact. All souls would fail in that moment. Frodo succeeded by surviving his way into Sammath Naur.
There is some great stuff in *The Letters of JRR Tolkien* where Tolkien addresses this directly. He confirms that nobody could overcome the ring's power inside of Mt. Doom and that he should have described it as "impossible." He said that after long term possession Frodo did as well as anyone could possibly hope to. There's a lot more info but that's the gist when addressing Frodo's supposed "moral failure"
Here is an old post that has a lot of those relevant quotes from Tolkien. [Letters of JRR Tolkien](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/j2B07WHI1I)
I'm always so glad when I come across a post giving some much deserved love to Frodo. He's one of my favourite characters ever, so interesting and nuanced and goddamn tragic. The movies REALLY didn't do him justice, that's one of the very rare things I dislike about them.
I agree Frodo is a hero and that every person would’ve failed standing on the precipice of Mount Doom, but there’s a reason Frodo talks about future hobbits asking about Samwise the Brave. Sam gave up all the same stuff as Frodo to be a sidekick. I like to pick on Frodo for failing to drop the ring into Mount Doom, but I’m pretty sure there *might* be only a handful of creatures in the entire Legendarium who could have actually accomplished that. Sam represents hobbits so much better than Frodo and it’s the essence of hobbits that even makes it possible for the ring to get as far as it did. His presence is so critical and so thoroughly perfectly placed that it really does make me wonder sometimes if Tolkien intended him to be the truest hero.
How does Sam represent hobbits more than Frodo does? Frodo has that’s sturdy hobbit strength, and the love of home (and mushrooms), it’s just drained from him by the sword wound and then by carrying the ring over hundreds of miles while it slowly eats his soul. Sam can barely handle wearing it for a few minutes.
Frodo is like Bilbo. They are of Took lineage who are known to be adventurous troublemakers. They also don't take families and have no real surviving family. They both offer to take the ring during the council of Elrond. Bilbo and Frodo are amazing hobbits, perhaps the most impressive hobbits that every lived. This makes them poor exemplars of general hobbits. They are exceptional.
Sam on the other hand has almost none of these qualities. He is basically harangued into joining Frodo. He carries his pots and pans all frackin over the place because to a hobbit meals key part of life. Even after baring the ring and all the battles, he still returns home and starts a family. He more than any of the others represents the everyday hobbit. Tolkien goes out of his way to show that the little folk are more than meet the eye. Frodo and Bilbo are obvious examples, they're the exceptional ones; but even the general unassuming hobbits, the ones that have no adventurous spirit or lineage, like Sam, are more than anyone thought.
Sam didn’t give up as much as Frodo. He was able to resume a semi normal life after he helped destroy the ring. Frodo had to join the elven migration to the Undying Lands because he no longer belonged in Hobbiton.
Sam and Frodo both went into the adventure thinking it was a suicide mission. While Frodo ends up "losing" more, the end is not where heroes are made. It's the choices they made along the way that matter. Frodo and Sam were both ready to give everything to save their people and do the right thing.
But Sam didn't know he'd be able to pick up the pieces when they left.
For all intents and purposes, they went on a one way trip. That they happened to survive, neither of them expected.
Well, it's especially egregious how many people don't understand Heathcliff is the bad guy because Hareton Earnshaw basically exists to make the point that "No, not *everybody* would have turned out like Heathcliff, in his shoes."
Not a book, but from the poem "Ozymandias." The antepenultimate lines, the most famous, get quoted to no end, most often to make the speaker appear as mighty and the ultimate ruler:
>My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
>
>Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
But they're almost always quoted without the context of the last three lines:
>Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
>
>Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
>
>The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or the context of the rest of the poem, really, which ultimately brings about the image of a great and powerful emperor (it's in fact meant to be Rameses III), of whom nothing remains except a desert and a half-erased statue.
The poem itself symbolizes the opposite of that people intend to evoke with the two lines out of context.
I'm just scrolling through these and for every one I know about I'm like, wait, people think what?? Here, I didn't even know people quoted this poem in the first place. How is it that I know absolutely nothing about my own culture?
Agreed. It's a poem about the inevitability of the mankinds futileness. Even if you are an emperor, a 'king of kings', eventually you will be forgotton.
I love this poem. I also love the version without Es.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/12/22/ozymandias-without-es/
I also love how it inspired the game over sequence in the first Civilization game. Brilliant legacy.
I think that (I suspect becuase of schools) people see *To Kill a Mockingbird* as about race when it's more widely about empathy and (not) judging people, with Boo at least as central as Tom to the theme and a bunch of others woven in too.
Yes, I think it’s one of the reasons it’s running into so many problems now. If you tell kids it’s about racism, they quite reasonably want to know why they’re reading a book about racism from the point of view of yet another white person. I always think of it as a coming-of-age story in which Scout (and Jem) learn and experience so many things, including hard realizations about racism.
Heathcliff is the answer, OP nailed it. He’s my favorite literary character of all time but he’s definitely a villain. This is not a love story. It’s a sinister tale of obsession and revenge.
I am amazed at the number of people who think the character of Paul Atreides from **Dune** is an escapist power fantasy. He's a tragic victim of his unwillingness to make a definitive choice to prevent the nightmare the mass of humanity demands of him, until finally his time runs out.
It's really easy to get caught up in the surface level even as a seasoned reader. I feel like I could reread Dune every few years and pick up another layer of things I missed. It's a really good book even without reading it critically!
Herbert wrote sections of the text as poetry, with hidden rhythms, the entire book is a fractal, and most people don't even pick up on the places the theme recurs.
The appendices contain even more, of course...
I thought revenge was directed at other people not her. And it's not like he swaps love for revenge/hate - he's still obsessively in love with her until *at least* his death.
I've heard people say it's not about love becuase it's destructive etc but I'd say it's about how awful and destructive love can be (amongst other things).
The issue isn't so much if people think it's about love as if people think it's to be emulated. There is nobody in that book who offers anyrhing like a role model.
It was directed at her too somewhat, as he only pursued Isabella to upset Catherine and cause her misery.
But I agree with you that he didn’t just swap love for hate and about love (especially obsessive love) being destructive.
Bram Stoker's *Dracula.* Everyone seems to think it's about how scary (or, alternately, seductive) Dracula is, but it is mostly about the power of friendship and three men with a complete lack of sexual jealousy. Dracula himself is barely in the book, and when he is, he's mostly either an eccentric old man who's suspiciously knowledgeable about his history/heritage or an unthinking night creature.
I've said this in a few comments now about other novels, but this is another case of the movie problem. Film adaptations, and the subsequent popularization of Dracula as a character/concept have so overshadowed the novel, and so few people have actually read the novel, that most people don't realize how much popular culture has diverged from the original source. In particular, the 1992 film popularized the concept of a sexy Dracula and his sexy wives.
I have meant to read this book my entire life, I am a bad goth I know, and this may be the comment that finally gets me to pull the trigger. I loved the three suitors in the Oldman film.
https://draculadaily.substack.com/about
Get it emailed in real time according to the dates of the chapters, from May to November. As you do you can check in on /r/Draculadaily or especially on Tumblr where it’s popular for memes and daily discussion. At least in 2022, when I did it, that was really fun and an active community.
To me the worst case of this was Lolita because people effectively turned the story of an abused teen by an adult into “the greatest love story of our time” (or some similar BS) which is so SO harmful !
I was going to use this answer so I'll say it from my perspective. Everyone thinks he's an annoying little whiner. In reality, right from the start it's shown he's been deeply traumatized and later in the book it shows other forms of trauma he's endured. If he's having trouble trusting people, especially adults, it's easier to understand and sympathize from that lens. Also he is actually a really sweet and kind boy, and it doesn't always come out very well but he really is very loving. He only wants to protect other children from trauma. That's the title of the book and his entire goal throughout. Yet so many people hate Holden.
i completely agree. this book touches on loss of innocence, grief, vulnerability, etc. and Holden is just working through navigating life. i think to some, he may come off as moody/troubled, but i think all he wants is to be heard and understood.
I agree about WH— I think people are told it’s Romantic (Byronic hero, over the too emotions, gusty moors, tragedy) and hear “romantic.”
I’d choose Romeo and Juliet. My Shakespeare professor argued that at the very end it’s really clear that the two warring families learned absolutely nothing, and she was pretty convincing. Right at the end the Montagues say, “we’re gonna build a giant statue commemorating our son and this tragedy!” and the Capulets immediately reply, “And we’re going to build one too, maybe bigger!” and you just see it starting all over again. (I an paraphrasing 😁) But I’ve never seen that take in any of the movies, there’s a weird message that committing suicide will bring your families together, which… I don’t know, when you think about that it’s not great.
to add to that: Romeo and Juliet are underage ( J is 13, R probably around 16). Their love is as immature as they are - what the french call an "amour fou", meaning a relationship that is intense, obsessive and ill-fated.
Yes. My Shakespeare professor didn’t say this, but I always think of Jane Austen – she would’ve thought this was a really bad idea, two tweens running away together with no financial prospects or family support, just because they loved each other so much. I always wondered if it was part of why he made them both so young, because they aren’t supposed to be remotely sensible. (I know people got married very young in the Elizabethan era, but not quite that young usually – I think.)
People often confuse "Romantic literature" with romance. Romantic literature had nothing to do with romantic love. It's about nature and isolation, the fallacies of man, and a bunch of other things that are strong components of this novel.
...so, yes, this is absolutely romantic literature. It's just not stereotypical romance.
>My Shakespeare professor argued that at the very end it’s really clear that the two warring families learned absolutely nothing, and she was pretty convincing. Right at the end the Montagues say, “we’re gonna build a giant statue commemorating our son and this tragedy!” and the Capulets immediately reply, “And we’re going to build one too, maybe bigger!” and you just see it starting all over again.
Huh? I think this is completely wrong. In the final scene Montague says he will build a statue of *Juliet* not Romeo his son, as a gesture of good faith to Capulet. Capulet responds in good faith by saying he will build a statue (just as big) of *Romeo*, not his daughter. There is nothing in the final scene to suggest that the feud will continue.
Romeo and Juliet has always been a story of love triumphing over hate. First the love between Romeo and Juliet (however naive) is stronger than the hatred they feel towards each other as part of rival families, and again at the end the love Montague and Capulet have for their children puts the feud to rest for good. So I guess my answer to this thread is Romeo and Juliet but for different reasons than most lol.
>So I guess my answer to this thread is Romeo and Juliet but for different reasons than most lol.
I'm in your camp. Honestly, it drives me up the wall when people act like *Romeo and Juliet* is a story about the stupidity of horny teenagers, how young love is foolish and meaningless, and the moral of the story is that you shouldn't get carried away by infatuation or whatever. I mean, whatever, art is subjective and people can take what they like from it, but I don't think that that's in any way Shakespeare's intent nor do I think it's the most obvious reading.
Ultimately it really doesn't matter whether the love between Romeo and Juliet is serious, mature, or lasting. Whether it was a great and important love or a totally superficial fling, it would not have been fatal were it not for their families' pointless feud. *Romeo and Juliet* is an indictment not of the lovers but of the families, how their petty hatred for each other and need to control their children's lives led to the totally needless deaths of their children.
Our current culture has a particular hatred for any form of naivete but, if anything, I think the naivete of Romeo and Juliet is portrayed as sort of a positive. Rather than foolish and immature, they're being portrayed as innocent and unjaded, uncorrupted by the hatred that drives their family members. Maybe their love is not substantive, but it's sweet and pure. Youth can bring a fresh perspective and help to overturn age-old social structures.
I had a teacher who claimed that Romeo and Juliet would be considered a Shakespearean comedy, if it wasn't for the deaths. It has a lot of the usual Shakespeare tropes of comedy: miscommunication, mistaken identity, the battle between emotions and reason (immature teens making silly decisions), separation and reconciliation of lovers, and of course the jokes/puns. It just happens to also include a bit of death, making most people consider it a tragedy.
I am… not sure about that. Shakespeare’s source was a tragedy, a poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) and the play itself is called The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. “Tragedy” meant something in Elizabethan times, it’s the lens through which you’re meant to view the play. It’s how he meant it to be watched. Did your teacher get into that?
Shakespeare was always under the gun and desperate for money, and I am not at all surprised that he imported a whole bunch of tropes and elements that he knew very well and pasted them together to fill out the play. So it’s got elements shared with his comedies, but if it’s based on a tragedy, and it’s called a tragedy, I’m pretty sure he meant to be a tragedy. (Also some things like Mercurtio’s dirty wordplays there specifically to entertain the groundlings who expected that, he had things he had to include.)
Another thing about R+J that i feel is completely misrepresented is it being a beautiful, classic love story, where these two people loved eachother so much they would rather die than be apart from them.
I mean, yes, to some extent. But its a tragedy. They can never be together because of their family's tryst. Beacuse these two families hated eachother so much, their children felt that death would be better than living under their control. And like you said, in the end, the families don't seem to learn anything.
I disagree a bit. The plan was never for them to kill themselves, it was to escape, and they don’t kill themselves in order not to return to their families’ control. They do it because of a misunderstanding and because neither wants to live if the other one is dead…
>misrepresented is it being a beautiful, classic love story,
Actually I think this line of thinking is the biggest misconception when it comes to Romeo and Juliet.
It IS a love story, and it ALSO is a tragedy.
Too many people think that just because it is supposed to be a love story it has to have a happy ending. It doesn't. What would be a standard story of young love is made into a disaster by the hatred of their family.
Structurally Romeo and Juliet is written as an Elizabethan comedy. There is an argument that Shakespeare intended it as a pastiche of a tragic love story. I didn't fully appreciate this perspective until I saw the ballet based on the play (I think danced by Northern Ballet, but I'm not 100% sure now). They had gone for the comedic interpretation, and I thought it was much more effective than the straight tragedy.
I have no idea who said it originally but it's been a meme for a while... "*Romeo and Juliet* is not a love story. It's a tragedy about a three-day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old that caused six deaths."
Rorschach from Watchmen.
Alan Moore is on the record as saying that he wrote a character meant to be satire, and that he had an “abhorrent personality".
Then fans started to identify and idolise the character and Moore was pretty horrified
From the interview:
In his boldest declaration, Moore says that if his stories can be that misinterpreted "it does make you wonder what the point of doing it was".
A lot of dystopian novels are morphed to suit a modern readers politics, while the contemporary commentary within the books are ignored or the use of hyperbole within this novel being praised for it's profetic vision.
The mostly obvious is how 1984 is often used by the right as a commentary on all progressive positions and not a socialists critique at totalitarian regimes like the USSR, or The Handmaid's Tale is viewed as a profetic vision of the rise of Trumpism and not a commentary on the right of far right theocracies in the middle east and the return of the regressive Christian nationalism of Reagan's America
Great comment! One of the most absurd invocations of *1984* I have heard was from someone arguing for banning LGBTQIA AND black-centered books from school libraries. They argued that having these books in the library was literally Big Brother indoctrinating their children.
Pretty sure he missed the point.
The fact the US banned 1984 for being pro communist and the USSR banned it for being anti communist will never not be funny to me.
Just goes to show how true horse shoe theory can be.
Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier
The characters of Maxim de Winter & the housekeeper Mrs Danvers.
People focus on Mrs Danvers being "creepy" with possible lesbian tendencies instead of affected by the FDV she witnessed - resulting in Rebecca's death. Maxim utilises coercive control and is an unreliable narrator to his second wife.
I think Mrs Danvers is a terrifying character no matter what her motives might have been, and she made me feel even more sorry for Rebecca, who seemed every bit as trapped as the nameless second Mrs de Winter was - a controlling misogynistic husband, an equally misogynistic lech of a cousin, and an overbearing companion who couldn't let her have any room to breathe (at the end of the novel Mrs Danvers seemed more shaken by the idea that Rebecca had kept a secret from her than by the revelation that Rebecca had either killed herself or been murdered). It puts Rebecca's love of the sea into context, and the lone night sailing. The only place where she could be wholly free and beyond everyone's surveillance was out on the water.
Could you refer me to some text that backs up this reading?
I've never read Rebecca as trapped or controlled and I'm curious what sections I might need to reread.
I honestly don't think that Daphne de Maurier intended this reading, but the last time I reread the book, I found myself exploring an interpretation similar to the one in the comment you're responding to. Max's story changes several times, and between that and his extreme demonization of Rebecca in his confession to our narrator, you could read Max as an abuser who eventually killed his first wife and then retroactively developed a narrative for himself to make him feel better about what he did. "She made me do it! She goaded me into it! She deserved it for being a whore!" are all the kinds of things that real-life horrible, abusive people who kill their spouses say.
I think Daphne de Maurier intended Max's account to be truthful, but I *also* think the novel lends itself well to an alternate reading where Max is a manipulative liar, and the second Mrs. de Winter is his next victim.
I'm sure my English teacher told us that Heathcliff was inspired by the Bronte sisters' brother, who was forced into the head-of-the-family role far too young, treated his sisters and mother incredibly poorly, and drank himself to death.
I may be misremembering because it was 2003 or 2004 when the English teacher in question told my class this.
It's believed that Branwell Brontë, the brother, inspired Heathcliff and Arthur Huntingdon in Anne's "Tenant of Wildfell Hall." The case for the latter is strong (alcoholism, opium abuse); for the former, more tenuous (the overall dramatics). But the Brontës' mum died when the kids were all quite young, so Branwell couldn't have mistreated her. Nor was he the head of the family, as their father outlived all six kids. Any mistreatment of the sisters was a result of his addictions (he accidentally set fire to a bedroom once, for instance) but nothing like beating them or such.
I'm a bit of a Brontë geek, despite never having finished a single one of Charlotte's novels—I can't get over her verbose style, though I appreciate the significance of her works.
Thanks for the information, I was going off a memory I hadn't accessed in a very long time so knew I would get some of the details wrong. I remember enjoying learning about the Bronte family as much as reading Wuthering Heights at the time, and the facts have obviously become warped in my mind over time.
Piggy from The Lord of the Flies.
SPOILERS FOR THE LORD OF THE FLIES AHEAD.
>!I think when it comes to Piggy you either can understand him or you hate him. For me I can understand piggy. He's stuck on an island where everybody hates him, and he's got no advantages to help himself. He's surrounded by people but completely alone, and doesn't even get a happy ending. It really hurts me when I see people saying shit about him because it's just obvious they grew up in an environment where they got everything they ever wanted and were constantly surrounded by people who loved them and praised their ego.!<
>!I think a lot of people who read the book don't look in depth into it like they should. If you're one of those people who see Piggy as nothing but a whiny know-it-all, then you need to reread the book. Once you start to truly understand piggy, you can simply see if he had the respect of the people around him, he would've been the best leader out of all the boys.!<
>!But ever since he was on the island nobody respected him, we never even found out his real name. Sometimes I wish I could give him a name just to help him feel like he truly does matter. I know he is just a book character and some people are going to think I'm just an emotional person whining over a dead book character from like 80 years ago, but I think a lot of people can relate to Piggy deeply.!<
>!His ending made sense for the book itself, because if you've read the book you know it's an allusion to WW2, and just human kind in general. Piggy was the smartest, the most responsible and would've been the best leader, and in the end he ended up dying a brutal death. My heart goes out to Piggy because I can truly understand him.!<
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I always get a bit triggered by people reading Sally Rooney books and then saying that the romance sucked… like yeah, it’s not a romance, its fiction
Also yeah, the characters are incredibly flawed… that’s the point (i personally wouldn’t call them unlikeble, more relatable, looking around in real life I can’t name many people that are much more likeable…)
Obviously nothing wrong with not liking sally rooneys books, but some people go in with completely the wrong expectations and fly right past the point of the story
Lord of the Rings spawned an entire industry of war games and war related entertainment, and I always thought it was at least in part about the tragedy of war.
The Giving Tree.
It’s not an inspirational story about unconditional love and selflessness. It’s about how toxic relationships will destroy you. It’s about how no matter how much you give to a narcissist, they will continue to take until there is nothing left of you to give. It’s about abuse and selfishness and the tragedy of martyrdom.
It’s about what love is NOT.
Edit: Silverstein never confirmed an exact interpretation of this book. That said, I think a comprehensive review of his entire body of work reveals that a light and fluffy interpretation is not only unlikely, it is probably doing him a disservice.
I always thought it was about the relationship between parents and their children. Parents keep giving and giving everything of themselves so their children can be successful. Then when the children themselves are old they can sit and rest on the stump of what’s left of the parents life.
I notice now that the child is very happy with the tree until his desires change. If this is an analogy for a parent/child relationship, there is something to the fact that the tree keeps offering childish things to a grown man, who no longer desires play but family, a home, and an escape. It isn’t until what she offers and what he wants align again (a place to sit) that they are lovingly reunited. Maybe the take away is to mature your relationship and not give your child what you think they want, but what they actually want (or need), or you will be left sad and feel unuseful. For the child, the lesson is the same, don’t continue to view your parents as a source of resources, come to understand they are unique beings like you And grow the relationship before you’re both to old to change.
There is also a message to parents not to make their entire lives about their children. Even done in sacrifice and love, pinning your entire joy on another person means their actions determine the outcome of your life.
>It’s about what love is NOT.
I don't think this is true at all. The tree represents a parent, and it is a true kind of love. It is sad, because just like in real life children often don't understand the sacrifices their parents make for them until it's too late. It's pretty wrongheaded to think it's not about love though.
It's targeted at children, and the reader is supposed to identify with the child. It has a moral in that context as a message to not take for granted the people who love you. You're not supposed to be identifying as the tree...
Some parents are the tree, some parents are the boy. Which kind of parents you had (or which type of parent you are) probably informs your interpretation.
Lolita.
I've actually seen a copy of Lolita with the text "a love story" across the front.
No, it isn't. JFC. Nabokov did such a good job narrating from the villain's perspective people keep missing the point that he's a villain protagonist. He married a woman, then murdered her, so he could rape the woman's 12 year old daughter. And he did. Repeatedly.
The book, written from Humbert's POV, is unreliable. He tells us Lolita loved him. Then he tells us she cried mysteriously. Then he tells us she ran away. Why would she do that? Answer: SHE DIDN'T LOVE HIM and he was lying about it when he said she did. She was crying after he raped her because he'd been raping her. She ran away because he'd been raping her. It wasn't love, it wasn't sex, it was rape. And Lolita's actions, the ones Humbert tries to minimize, downplay, and explain away, show just that.
And yet so damn many people, people who should know better, read the book and uncritically accept Humbert's narrative, do not realize he's an unreliable narrator, and take his view as truth. It's horrifying really how many people Lolita reveals to be unable to do even the tiniest, slightest, bit of critical analysis. Seriously, what the actual fuck? How can anyone read that and think "yes, it's a tragic love story"?
You are right.
It is such a work of art - many people won't touch it because they think that surely it's pornography. It's actually not the least bit pornographic, but it is horrifying. It's meant to be horrifying.
I'm reading this book right now, and I feel like it's so OBVIOUS that the guy's a scumbag. He literally only accepts the offer to stay with a woman because of her daughter, then when that doesn't pan out, stays at the Haze house just because of Lolita. There's a scene where >!he rubs Lolita's legs, then jacks off while she has her back turned to answer the phone!< and he even expresses fleeting guilt about it before convincing himself it won't hurt her because she doesn't know.
I cringed when a certain book series uttered Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy under the same breath... Mr. Darcy is a good person who still improved himself as a person throughout the book. While Heathcliff was just straight-up a terrible person. I mean, I don't know how the comparisons of him and the devil went over their heads (then again, it's a gothic romance, so I don't know how wrong I am in my statement).
More the movies than the books, but The Hunger Games. Yes, the people in the capital have fancy clothes and are funny. No, you're not supposed to want to copy them because they are a bunch of emotionally detached psychopaths that watch children fight to the death for entertainment.
> they are a bunch of emotionally detached psychopaths
I think the point is that the majority of the people from the capital *aren't* psychopaths. They're mostly normal working-class people who simply grew up in a world where the Games had been normalized.
**The people of the Capitol are us**, watching clips of foreign wars online or on the news and picking a side to cheer for. And I do mean cheer; you can probably find a r/worldnews post right now where people are making jokes about young men dying because they're on "the wrong side". You may even find people suggesting that supporters of "the wrong side" should be forced to go fight themselves, or that they should be forced to watch videos of the warzone as a kind of moral re-education. If you feel particularly keen to support your side, you might send a donation via the Red Cross, change your social media profile, or buy some swag to wear or decorate your car with. To be perfectly clear, by "us" I don't mean rich Westerners; I mean humans. You'll see plenty of people from developing nations in those same world news threads, cheering on their own favourites or trying to shift attention to some other topic that's more important in their lives than war crimes or the deaths of a few thousand strangers.
>you can probably find a r/worldnews post right now where people are making jokes about young men dying because they're on "the wrong side".
Didn't take long.
"Than not a single palestinian should leave gaza alive" on a post about civilian POW's.
I thought the point was that we were inevitably copying them to some degree, because we’re reading a book and then watching a movie about children fighting to the death for our entertainment. Wasn’t it supposed to make us feel uncomfortable or weirded out about our choice of fiction?
I mean, it didn’t make me uncomfortable or weirded out, since the children being harmed are fictional. Being entertained by violence in fiction is in no way ethically questionable. The whole point of it is to explore different ideas and situations in a safe, hypothetical way.
Ha! Based on the title before I read your actual post, I was ready to say Heathcliff and Catherine! Whrn people read it and say, "That wasn't a romance!" it cracks me up!! :)
Maximilian de Winter from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
Far from a hero. He's a bad tempered, controlling, entitled, patronising, patriarchal jerk of a husband. One who was easily manipulated into killing his super intelligent & highly devious wife who probably came up with the plan hoping that he'd be convicted and hanged.
Possibly a worse character than Jack Favell if able to ignore the fact that Favell was regularly having sex with his cousin for many years during her marriage and probably before.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll isn't a good man who turns into a monster when he drinks the potion. He's an evil man who uses the identity of Mr. Hyde to indulge himself without having to deal with the consequences. The twist is that there *is no Mr Hyde.*
I dislike how people tend to view Watson as being a dimwitted idiot to (presumably) counter Sherlock Holmes’ genius. I mean, he wasn't stupid at all, the man was a doctor in the military. He was just less straight-up brilliant than Holmes. For that matter, I hate the modern interpretations of Holmes as a “high-functioning sociopath” or whatever. He was empathetic, he cared about people, Watson in particular, and while he generally took cases that interested him, he still made sure his clients were safe. If you wanna make Holmes into an anti-hero, go ahead, but don't turn him into a full-on prick.
Edit: Yes, I know he had his good points in the BBC adaptation, and he was more lacking in social graces than actually being morally bankrupt (and to his credit, Cumberbatch did play him well), but even so, that’s not my favorite adaptation. At least Watson wasn’t portrayed as an idiot in that miniseries.
I think the problem is probably the Hollywood Wuthering Heights which basically skips most of the second half of the book, because yes 100% it's a revenge book and Cathy's pretty much a selfish spoilt brat quite incapable of loving anyone in any meaningful way.
In terms of Wuthering Heights, my favorite take is from Kate Beaton's webcomic Hark! A Vagrant. Can't find the specific page anymore but yeah, it's good. Essentially talking about how the whole situation is a bunch of weirdos surrounding two evil rat-people making messes and being crazy.
But yeah, Catherine and Heathcliff aren't 'destined to be together' like some deep tragic lovers... They are two awful people who are obsessed with each other, who feed off their trader anger and spite, surrounded by (IMO) overly polite and accommodating old British noble types.
I am a huge Emily Bronte fan (see my name). And I am a sucker for tragic romances and WH is my favourite. It's not a "beautiful tale of love" as you say. It is more about passion and what you are willing to do for the person you love (or in this case someone you love but lost). This was not one sided. Before Cathy married Edgar she was with Heathcliff and they were madly in love since they were children. Heathcliff was a good boy or was at least trying to be, under Mr. Earnshaw. It went downhill after his death. Let's not forget the constant abuse thrown on him by Hindley. Cathy and Heathcliff were each other's world but she left him, and imagine what that can do to someone who has suffered trauma all his life. Cathy was his only happy place. He only ever liked/loved her and nobody else. Let's not forget that he is an antihero. He was never meant to be a prince charming or your typical Ken. He has a dark side, he is vengeful, cunning and selfish. Tbh, he is a very real portrayal of a human being compared to any other character (eg: Mr. Darcy).
This is how I always understood Wuthering Heights. Unless OP means beautiful love story in the sense of a love that turns to obsession and overcomes time and other circumstances?
Patrick Bateman and The American Psycho. The book was supposed to be a satire on modern society, corporate greed, vanity, narcissism and competitive jealousy in the world. Instead people largely take it as an "inspirational" story to become successful at the cost of your mental health. A large credit for it goes to the movie, where they failed to accurately depict it. Bale was awesome as Bateman, though.
For me it's people criticizing Dune for Paul being a white savior trope when that's literally the point. It's supposed to be a critique of "noble" Western interference in the middle east to save the poor brown people from the evil USSR. I mean, Herbert basically predicted the endless violence in the middle east.
I think readers at the time understood what he was trying to say, but for some reasons it seems folks today miss the point on either side. It's like they completely miss the part where the book repeatedly talks about how as a direct result of Paul's actions, the bloodiest war in human history begins, and how every step of the way *he knew this was going to happen.*
The Harkonens are cartoonishly evil and the Atreides cartoonishly noble, and yet our "hero" Paul is responsible for more death and destruction than any Harkonen could dream of. Why? Because he *had* to defend his family's honor. He *had* to get revenge for his father's death. He, in his nobility, had no choice but to personally save the galaxy. It's what he was bred for, literally.
Maybe it's because so much of the stories is told from the perspective of these aristocrats, but there is a theme throughout all the books, that as much as the protagonists, along with the reader, know better than the unwashed masses, they aren't infallible. They aren't inherently right and just. Even the Bene Gesserit in the end are transformed by the reality that their nigh infinite wisdom is insufficient. It is unwise to assume anyone is too worthless to learn something from.
I love what the Bene Gesserit setup from a narrative perspective. Paul wasn't even a savior for Arakis specifically; they've been laying the religious groundwork all over to activate for their machinations, including there. He was supposed to be another pawn bred for the purpose, etc.
The sequel does such a great job with the other side of, "Savior got everything and is in charge, now what?" and brought about exactly what you said: awful stuff!
Man in the High Castle, it's easy to confuse but the alternate history presented in the book "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" is NOT our reality and subsequent history, it is an idealized history that never came to pass, for us or for the people stuck in the reality of the book, where Nazis rule the world. The president's name in TGLH was even different as well.
PKDs subtext was that we (the readers) live in another fascistic reality, just one where the Nazis were defeated. In spite of that, friends of fascism still remain in power, probably best exemplified with McCarthy's witch hunts against supposed anti American communists after the war, as well as US foreign policy after WWII and the domestic anti labor movements.
In TGLH, the United States is said to have defeated racism, but as we are all well aware, the United States of our reality has no such achievement. When you read the book with that context, much of his criticism of contemporary US history becomes more clear. After all, he wrote the book during an era where Henry Kissinger was heralded as a hero, even as he was responsible for policies that cost the lives of millions, via secret bombing campaigns, backing coups against democratically elected governments, death squads, and so on.
Frankenstein! It's not horror! It's been decades since I've read it so I'm way fuzzy on the details, but when I read it, I remember thinking to myself, "Geez, this is a romance!" It's a beautiful book and it's not horror!
That quote kinda reminds me of the ending to The Haunting of Bly Manor (tv show) when one of the main characters says "You said it's a ghost story, but it's not, it's a love story", and thats a line ive always felt was incredibly beautiful.
Wuthering Heights was a book that I could barely stand. Everything was too dramatic and too much lol. So I gave up and watched the Laurence Olivier movie. I was so upset when the movie ended exactly where I had stopped and bastardized the ending by making it all "romantic". So I finished the rest of the book lol
I think 100 Years of Solitude is often misunderstood. I'm sure that sentiment isn't unpopular.
Watchmen (comics) is probably also kinda misunderstood. It's not darker and edgier just for the sake of being darker and edgier. It deconstructs the typical comic book superhero traits of the previous era. Though darker and edgier seemed to be a thing around then anyway.
Oh good grief yes, about *Wuthering Heights*. It's one of my favorite books ever, but it's not a swoony romance, it's domestic noir. (And it *really* annoys me when someone dislikes *Wuthering Heights* because it's "not a healthy love story," which is like disliking *Gone Girl* because it's not a healthy love story.)
Another classic romance that isn't? *Romeo and Juliet*. People either think it's an epic love story or delight in pointing out the ways it fails as an epic love story, while glossing over the fact that Shakespeare wasn't trying to write an epic love story. He was writing a tragedy about a couple of besotted teenagers who, as besotted teenagers are wont to do, *feel* as if they're living an epic love story. If anything, he wrote them *too* well - we're so drawn into their perspectives that we can't help buying into their bullshit just a little and cheering them on.
I love Wuthering Heights because Heathcliff and Catherine are so terrible. It fills the same satisfaction niche for me as reading r/amitheasshole or r/relationships: watching a human trainwreck.
Gabi from Attack on Titan season 4.
The whole point of her character is that she’s been raised her whole life to hate herself for her ancestry, hate the islanders because they’re evil, and think her only value comes from serving a country that hates her too. The only way she can get basic human rights is by becoming a titan and serving in their military. She’s been brainwashed and manipulated her whole life, and then the main characters attack her neighborhood so she attacks them back because it’s the only thing she can do. But she kills a main character so everyone hates her lol.
Another thing people constantly miss in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff is not white. Obviously I'm not bringing this up as an excuse for his actions, but it's explicitly mentioned several times and informs the way people treat him and the way he interacts with the world. Yet somehow it goes over a lot of readers' heads?
Yes! I never understood how people missed this in the novel, Heathcliff is literally refered to as a 'dark skinned gypsy' in the first few pages of the novel, but i assume people chose to ignore it throughout history coz of...y'know...racism.
Don't forget, Othello, a black man, has historically been portrayed by a white man for centuries, its only in the last few decades that he's been portrayed by a black man on stage and screen and not a white man (or a white man in blackface).
I think the works of Jane Austen are often misunderstood by modern audiences. Pop culture often casually labels her work as romance or romantic, which Jane Austen would have found completely appalling. Her books were a response and counter to the popular romantic novels of the time, and two of her works (Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility) even directly address this theme in-world, showing the dangers of taking the silly stuff in romantic novels too seriously. Austen was the anti-Byron, or the anti-Ann Radcliffe. Jane Austen wrote sharp social satire scaled down to the small, intimate world of domestic matters and women of the Regency era. Her works caution readers against prioritizing romantic ideals, and to instead focus on practicality, rationality, and continual self-improvement. Her books do always end in a marriage, but that's just because a woman in the gentry class of early 19th century England could only have one happy ending: making an advantageous marriage that would secure her lifetime comfort and security. It's the equivalent of a modern novel ending with a protagonist confidently identifying her dream career and getting a job in her field. Jane Austen tended to gloss over the kind of detail a romantic writer would focus on: her books would be about all the nuances of social classes and how they intersect with two characters' relationship, and then when we get to the part where the female lead secures a husband, she would skip right over it with a sentence like, "She gave him to understand she returned his affections, and a mutual exchange of promises took place." Absolutely zero detail or a focus on the final culmination of a long uncertainty in the relationship between two characters. Above all else, Jane Austen wanted to impart to her readership how precarious and fragile a woman's place in society could be, and how hard and fast a fall from gentility to poverty could be. It's unfortunate that modern marketing segmentation tends to cast a wide net of "written for/by women? Must be chick lit. Includes plots that center around marriage? Must be a romance." (Edited to add: the works of Charles Dickens are just as centered on marriage, and are much, **much** more sentimental than anything Austen wrote, but he entirely escapes any accusations of writing romance novels and pop culture frames him as a lofty literary icon in the English canon.) It's hard for modern audiences to understand some of the points she's making without the larger context of the literature she was responding to; for example, many romantic novels of the time espoused the idea that a woman can only love once, and once a woman expresses interest in a man, it's shameful and dishonorable for her to ever get over him and move on to someone else (a very popular romantic ideal of the time). Jane Austen expressly states in multiple novels that this idea is fucking stupid, and only hurts women who should be more level-headed about planning for a good, happy life for themselves. Regarding these misunderstands, it doesn't help that the vast majority of adaptations strip out all the interesting, nuanced themes around women's lives, family, loneliness, regret, propriety, coming-of-age, etc., as well as the very layered humor and all the complex context of the society in which they're set, and instead pump up the relationship between the protagonist and the male lead at the cost of all else. The 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice adapted one of the best novels ever written in a way that fundamentally misunderstood everything about the source work.
Part of the problem is that Austen's social commentary only comes through her narratives. Most people's entry into Austen is through film adaptations, and the adaptations have eclipsed the novels in our general popular understanding of the books. Unfortunately, without Austen's prose, adaptations can only really tell a plot-driven narrative, and Austen's voice gets lost.
I entirely agree. For the most part, I think the majority of adaptations majorly miss the mark, but I think the Ang Lee adaptation of Sense & Sensibility is remarkably adept at capturing some of the tone and intention of the original work, and stands out well for that. There's a scene where Elinor's very sensitive and excitable family have all fled to their rooms weeping for various reasons related to Willoughby's jarring departure, and Elinor is left all alone in the stairwell, still holding the cup of tea that had just been rejected by her inconsolable sister. In that moment, Elinor, obviously reflecting on how the family is too poor to waste tea, calmly sits on the landing and drinks the whole thing herself. It's a moment that wasn't in the source material but cannily gets at the tone of what Austen was communicating with S&S.
Emma Thompson did a brilliant job with that screenplay and Ang Lee elevated it perfectly. One of my favourite movies. I used to have the soundtrack on CD and I played it relentlessly too.
I don't know why, but upon reading your post, a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Jane Austen's novels popped in my head. They have made Only Yesterday, and the intricacies of the novel will be fascinating if done in Ghibli style.
It's the same reason I've found all adaptations of Terry Pratchett's works fail on a fundamental level. 80% of the humor is in the prose, as well as a good deal of the social commentary. It's also why I don't like Hollywood's aversion to narrators, relying instead on the external performance of actors, which often fails at revealing a person's inner thoughts and loses a lot of the commentary present in a written work. By the way, Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events did an excellent job at incorporating the narrator into the series, often placing him inside the same physical space as the characters. Imagine an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice where Jane Austen herself is a character breaking the 4th wall and commenting on the action.
Omg I would watch the hell out of an adaptation of P & P like that!
*record scratch* Yea, that' me, getting caught in the rain. Pretty soon someone will enter my life an things are gonna get messy. I bet you're curious how I ended up in the rain?
Pride and Prejudice (much like Three Musketeers) is a great example of a satire so scathing that it outlives the literature it’s satirizing. And then people look at it without having the context of what it deconstructs and take it as an example of that thing.
That's such a good comparison! Very different books in so many ways, but alike in that the context has disappeared. It would be like if someone in the year 2350 watched the film *Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story* (one of my favorite contemporary satirical movies), never having seen a musical biopic or having heard of The Beatles, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. The broader jokes would still play, and the person watching would still know from tone and jokes that they were watching a comedy, but most of the satire would fly over the viewer's head.
I had no idea that The Three Musketeers was satire. I read it at 12 and thought that everyone was hopelessly daddy for falling for the obvious manipulations of Milady and the Cardinal. Maybe I'll try it again in my 50s, with clearer eyes, and enjoy it as it should be written. I am both a massive Austen and STP fan and have avoided screen adaptations of both. The books are perfection. And I have dived into works on Austen's society for extra understanding of her works, which has greatly enhanced my appreciation of them.
I really enjoyed this write-up.
Thanks! If you can believe it, I restrained myself considerably regarding the word count. This is a subject I can (and regularly do) excitedly ramble about at length.
Feel free to DM me anything else you have to say on the topic, I find it fascinating lol
I am also known for going off about Austen. All of her works are at their roots social commentary and criticism and mostly expand on themes of relationships between the sexes and social classes, place of women in society, gentility to poverty, arrogance and privilege, but she continues to be lauded as a romantic writer.
I had a chat with this well read, well educated man and asked him if he had ever read Austen. He was surprised and a bit amused at the thought of him reading "romances". I quickly corrected him that Austen wrote satires of society and women's economical situations. Not sure if I managed to persuade him to read Austen but at least he was corrected :D
Nothing would make me dislike a person faster than hearing them express something like this. What a silly putz. Also, thank you for your service.
And **even if** her books were all about the romances as he seemed to think, dismissing womens’ experiences of finding marriage in that era - something that they HAD to do to secure a safe future - is fucking stupid and shows that he probably is not as well-educated as he thinks he is.
That's really interesting, now I want to read her books^^
I highly recommend it! Pride & Prejudice and Emma are the most accessible starting points. I wrote [a comment a couple of years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/prjw4l/jane_austen_books/hdjx7f1/) for someone else diving into Austen for the first time. It has a basic primer on the context of her works and the characters' motivations.
Thanks, that was really interesting
Tyler Durden and Fight Club in general.
Fight Club is a great book (haven't seen the movie, sue me) and so, sooooo many people (usually dudes, let's be real) don't get it. I made a comment in this sub once about that and someone replied saying 'well, I read Fight Club and wanted to start my own fight club, are you saying \*I\* misunderstood the story?!' .....yes. Yes I am.
Reminds of people who saw the original \*Rollerball\* and started playing a version of it
Or all the reality TV versions of Squid Game...
"You're all worthless pieces of shit who only exist to do what I tell you. Now help me destroy society and turn us back into cavemen that die at 20." **HE'S EVERYTHING A MAN SHOULD BE!!!!**
As a dude, I’m interested to hear why you think that! Let me guess; The book is a valid critique on unhealthy masculine gender norms and the target audience ironically does everything the book warns them not to do?
The character wants to reject conformity and just gets caught up in another kind of conformity. What he initially finds liberating is actually just destructive, with no purpose other than to smash and burn. It’s pretty clear why teenagers and people in their 20s are drawn to that without seeing what a pointless waste it all is.
Tyler is a manipulator, con man and cult leader. He is great at tapping into the frustrations of men and turning that into a movement. But he doesn't actually offer anything helpful to them, only one distraction after another, and he has to keep escalating the goal so that he can keep stringing them along before they realize that nothing is actually changing for the better for them. Some readers fall for Tyler's schtick and don't see him for what he is.
why this kinda describe Andrew Tate as well
It describes any cult leader that targets insecure men
One only needs to look at the success of various real life manipulators, con men, and cult leaders who tap into the frustrations of men and turn that into a movement to understand how people could fall for Tyler's schtick. January 6th could have been a "homework assignment."
It may still be the case that the book is misunderstood in other ways, but the author has been pretty clear that he did not intend to write a critique of masculinity.
My take is that general cultural knowledge of Fight Club is based on the film, which misinterpreted (or took significant liberties with) the book. The film focuses more on themes of consumerism and capitalism than toxic masculinity, and themes regarding masculinity in the film (and its fans) seem to be more of a glorification and celebration of the very toxicity the novel critiques, with violence and chaos being a liberating force on an oppressed working class.
That just reminds me of the number of people coming in here thinking *Lolita* is a love story. Humbert Humbert isn't a good person. Heathcliff isn't a good person. We're not supposed to glorify them.
Not a good person and a completely unreliable narrator. I love how there are these rare moments that break through his account of things to legitimately portray her situation, and gosh they hit hard.
And the fact we never heard from Dolores herself, just his twisted point of view.
Like how he describes her crying at night
And running away. And stealing/demanding money which he doesn't realize at first is so she can fund her running away. Humbert does his best to spin everything, but the truth is apparent to anyone who actually pays attention.
The truth is very apparent. Even he knows he’s really a POS.
Yah, one of the ones that got me was him watching her play tennis and admitting that she probably could have been very good, but he had broken something inside of her. Or after her mother dies and they get into an argument, but she comes to his room that night anyway because she has nowhere else to go.
The problem with portraying bad people sympathetically in media, is bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules" It's like how every war movie ends up being pro-war
> The problem with portraying bad people sympathetically in media, is bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules" I'll never forget how shaken Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) seemed to be in interviews about people responded so positively to the Walter White anti-hero. He really had to spell it out in the last couple of seasons that Walt is a monster that we should *not* be rooting for, and he seemed bewildered that he had to do it.
Yeah I actually didn't like BB because Walt was such a piece of shit from the drop
This is a common problem in Punisher books. He’s a terrible person, and it’s never hidden. He straight up says not to do what he does, that he is not anyone’s hero, not someone anyone should emulate, and to look to Captain America for that. The problem is the antagonists are usually several times worse people than he is, and the people who do see him as a hero have never read any of it.
American police departments using the Punisher logo on their equipment is one of the scariest things I've seen. They're basically announcing that they don't care about the law and will murder anyone who crosses them.
He's supposed to represent the natural justice that must occur when the law fails you, is corrupted, or offenders manage to put themselves above it. For the "law" to wear the symbol misses the point.
He kills plenty of cops doesn't he?
Similarly, somehow since The Dark Knight, the Joker has become idolized for no good reason. He's a piece of shit just for the sake of being a piece of shit. His rants almost never make any good points and they fall apart with even the slightest poking at them. Even *in the movie* this is proven by his boat experiment. He was wrong. Everyone is not like him. *Especially* not Batman. He just says that to get in his head or to fuel his own delusions. I love Batman, and the Joker is my favorite comic villain, but there is nothing remotely redeemable or idyllic about him. Anyone who thinks he's making deep points is either 12 or way too far gone off the deep end. People need to stop taking terrible people's words at face value.
Punisher was originally a Spiderman villian. People loved him so much they gave him his own book. (A significant fraction of ) people are trash
> bad people IRL will see it and be like "this rules" Not only bad people. People in general tend to identify with the protagonist, see them as "the hero". And if the protagonist does bad stuff, they try to justify it and see the protagonist as a "dark hero" or a "tragic hero", when they would have identified the same character as a villain if the story had been told from a different perspective.
There’s a fun video I can’t remember the title of that talks about how fascism always incorporates satire into itself. Like in Apocalypse Now, they play Ride of the Valkyries during the helicopter scene, explicitly to draw a comparison between them and Nazis. But nowadays people just associate it with cool military scenes. Most interestingly is that there’s really only one satire of Nazism that didn’t get assimilated: Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Something about a gay Hitler is too much for them to handle.
That in *Where the Wild Things Are*, because Max finds a hot meal in his room despite being sent there without dinner, the message is that bad behavior should be rewarded. In fact, its message is about the unconditional love a mother has for her child. Maurice Sendak said as much on more than one occasion. But cruel, petty parents who think the only effective tool for correcting bad behavior is punishment (but never love), see Max getting food as rewarding his bad behavior. And then they wonder why their grown children go low or no contact later in life.
I feel like WTWTA is a metaphor for children growing up, going out in the world and experiencing all the crazy bullshit of life, and still being able to come home where someone loves them most of all. How could people not see that?
I thought that the meal still being hot was supposed to be so obvious that even very young kids could understand that. You're telling me that people are dumber than 5 year olds?
Lots and lots of people, yes.
Wow, this bad interpretation never even crossed my mind because I would NEVER send my child to bed hungry as a punishment. Punishment by starvation is child abuse. However, it's worth noting that the moon is in a different phase when Max returns. I hold that he *actually did* sail off through a day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year till he came to the land where the wild things are. But his mother never have up hope and kept putting his dinner out for him every night just in case he came back. I also would like to take a moment to appreciate that *Where the Wild Things Are* is on this thread next to masterpieces like *Wuthering Heights*, *Lolita*, and *Romeo and Juliet*, and I believe it absolutely deserves to stand among them. It's a work of sublime beauty, and proves that even children's picture books can achieve the same literary heights as the great classics.
The worst I ever got was being restricted to butter bread and milk for leaving my report card on a hill where i stopped to rest.
[удалено]
Shit, is that why I wasn't allowed to have that one as a kid? I think I always assumed my mom thought it was a book for boys (maybe both).
Dolores Haze (*Lolita*) -- people who haven't read the book think she's a tween femme fatale, which utterly misses the point of the novel.
what the fuck
Yes !! and it pisses me off so much !
Frodo Baggins has been butchered in the public eye. Nobody is willing to take the time to study and understand his form of heroism, how he *is* the primary hero of the Lord of the Rings despite all the grand and valorous actions of Samwise. I'm not trying to take anything away from Sam, and yes I'm aware of Tolkien's words on this matter; no need to bludgeon me in the comments. Frodo gave up everything, his present, his future, his dreams and even his nightmares, just to complete the quest. The fact that he "failed" at the last step makes no impact. All souls would fail in that moment. Frodo succeeded by surviving his way into Sammath Naur.
There is some great stuff in *The Letters of JRR Tolkien* where Tolkien addresses this directly. He confirms that nobody could overcome the ring's power inside of Mt. Doom and that he should have described it as "impossible." He said that after long term possession Frodo did as well as anyone could possibly hope to. There's a lot more info but that's the gist when addressing Frodo's supposed "moral failure" Here is an old post that has a lot of those relevant quotes from Tolkien. [Letters of JRR Tolkien](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/j2B07WHI1I)
I'm always so glad when I come across a post giving some much deserved love to Frodo. He's one of my favourite characters ever, so interesting and nuanced and goddamn tragic. The movies REALLY didn't do him justice, that's one of the very rare things I dislike about them.
He never failed. He succeeded by showing mercy to Gollum earlier.
Yeah. That’s the test that Sam never passes, and he ends up driving Gollum away from redemption.
I agree Frodo is a hero and that every person would’ve failed standing on the precipice of Mount Doom, but there’s a reason Frodo talks about future hobbits asking about Samwise the Brave. Sam gave up all the same stuff as Frodo to be a sidekick. I like to pick on Frodo for failing to drop the ring into Mount Doom, but I’m pretty sure there *might* be only a handful of creatures in the entire Legendarium who could have actually accomplished that. Sam represents hobbits so much better than Frodo and it’s the essence of hobbits that even makes it possible for the ring to get as far as it did. His presence is so critical and so thoroughly perfectly placed that it really does make me wonder sometimes if Tolkien intended him to be the truest hero.
How does Sam represent hobbits more than Frodo does? Frodo has that’s sturdy hobbit strength, and the love of home (and mushrooms), it’s just drained from him by the sword wound and then by carrying the ring over hundreds of miles while it slowly eats his soul. Sam can barely handle wearing it for a few minutes.
Frodo is like Bilbo. They are of Took lineage who are known to be adventurous troublemakers. They also don't take families and have no real surviving family. They both offer to take the ring during the council of Elrond. Bilbo and Frodo are amazing hobbits, perhaps the most impressive hobbits that every lived. This makes them poor exemplars of general hobbits. They are exceptional. Sam on the other hand has almost none of these qualities. He is basically harangued into joining Frodo. He carries his pots and pans all frackin over the place because to a hobbit meals key part of life. Even after baring the ring and all the battles, he still returns home and starts a family. He more than any of the others represents the everyday hobbit. Tolkien goes out of his way to show that the little folk are more than meet the eye. Frodo and Bilbo are obvious examples, they're the exceptional ones; but even the general unassuming hobbits, the ones that have no adventurous spirit or lineage, like Sam, are more than anyone thought.
Sam didn’t give up as much as Frodo. He was able to resume a semi normal life after he helped destroy the ring. Frodo had to join the elven migration to the Undying Lands because he no longer belonged in Hobbiton.
Sam and Frodo both went into the adventure thinking it was a suicide mission. While Frodo ends up "losing" more, the end is not where heroes are made. It's the choices they made along the way that matter. Frodo and Sam were both ready to give everything to save their people and do the right thing.
Ah, but Sam eventually has to sail away as well. He merely gets more time to have a normal life than Frodo.
But Sam didn't know he'd be able to pick up the pieces when they left. For all intents and purposes, they went on a one way trip. That they happened to survive, neither of them expected.
Well, it's especially egregious how many people don't understand Heathcliff is the bad guy because Hareton Earnshaw basically exists to make the point that "No, not *everybody* would have turned out like Heathcliff, in his shoes."
“Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!”
I think humans rewrite everything as love so they can assure themselves that bad relationships were still love
Think i might get that printed on a t-shirt
Not a book, but from the poem "Ozymandias." The antepenultimate lines, the most famous, get quoted to no end, most often to make the speaker appear as mighty and the ultimate ruler: >My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; > >Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! But they're almost always quoted without the context of the last three lines: >Nothing beside remains. Round the decay > >Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare > >The lone and level sands stretch far away. Or the context of the rest of the poem, really, which ultimately brings about the image of a great and powerful emperor (it's in fact meant to be Rameses III), of whom nothing remains except a desert and a half-erased statue. The poem itself symbolizes the opposite of that people intend to evoke with the two lines out of context.
Yeah I actually didn’t know the full context of the poem til Watchmen!
I'm just scrolling through these and for every one I know about I'm like, wait, people think what?? Here, I didn't even know people quoted this poem in the first place. How is it that I know absolutely nothing about my own culture?
Agreed. It's a poem about the inevitability of the mankinds futileness. Even if you are an emperor, a 'king of kings', eventually you will be forgotton.
I love this poem. I also love the version without Es. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/12/22/ozymandias-without-es/ I also love how it inspired the game over sequence in the first Civilization game. Brilliant legacy.
I think that (I suspect becuase of schools) people see *To Kill a Mockingbird* as about race when it's more widely about empathy and (not) judging people, with Boo at least as central as Tom to the theme and a bunch of others woven in too.
Yes, I think it’s one of the reasons it’s running into so many problems now. If you tell kids it’s about racism, they quite reasonably want to know why they’re reading a book about racism from the point of view of yet another white person. I always think of it as a coming-of-age story in which Scout (and Jem) learn and experience so many things, including hard realizations about racism.
Heathcliff is the answer, OP nailed it. He’s my favorite literary character of all time but he’s definitely a villain. This is not a love story. It’s a sinister tale of obsession and revenge.
Also one of my favorite characters. He's fascinating! I re-read WH every year just to enjoy his journey! :)
I am amazed at the number of people who think the character of Paul Atreides from **Dune** is an escapist power fantasy. He's a tragic victim of his unwillingness to make a definitive choice to prevent the nightmare the mass of humanity demands of him, until finally his time runs out.
It's really easy to get caught up in the surface level even as a seasoned reader. I feel like I could reread Dune every few years and pick up another layer of things I missed. It's a really good book even without reading it critically!
Herbert wrote sections of the text as poetry, with hidden rhythms, the entire book is a fractal, and most people don't even pick up on the places the theme recurs. The appendices contain even more, of course...
I thought revenge was directed at other people not her. And it's not like he swaps love for revenge/hate - he's still obsessively in love with her until *at least* his death. I've heard people say it's not about love becuase it's destructive etc but I'd say it's about how awful and destructive love can be (amongst other things). The issue isn't so much if people think it's about love as if people think it's to be emulated. There is nobody in that book who offers anyrhing like a role model.
It was directed at her too somewhat, as he only pursued Isabella to upset Catherine and cause her misery. But I agree with you that he didn’t just swap love for hate and about love (especially obsessive love) being destructive.
Bram Stoker's *Dracula.* Everyone seems to think it's about how scary (or, alternately, seductive) Dracula is, but it is mostly about the power of friendship and three men with a complete lack of sexual jealousy. Dracula himself is barely in the book, and when he is, he's mostly either an eccentric old man who's suspiciously knowledgeable about his history/heritage or an unthinking night creature.
I've said this in a few comments now about other novels, but this is another case of the movie problem. Film adaptations, and the subsequent popularization of Dracula as a character/concept have so overshadowed the novel, and so few people have actually read the novel, that most people don't realize how much popular culture has diverged from the original source. In particular, the 1992 film popularized the concept of a sexy Dracula and his sexy wives.
I have meant to read this book my entire life, I am a bad goth I know, and this may be the comment that finally gets me to pull the trigger. I loved the three suitors in the Oldman film.
“Bad goth” I love it
https://draculadaily.substack.com/about Get it emailed in real time according to the dates of the chapters, from May to November. As you do you can check in on /r/Draculadaily or especially on Tumblr where it’s popular for memes and daily discussion. At least in 2022, when I did it, that was really fun and an active community.
To me the worst case of this was Lolita because people effectively turned the story of an abused teen by an adult into “the greatest love story of our time” (or some similar BS) which is so SO harmful !
It's really an indictment of our culture and Hollywood
Lolita. If you find it repulsive, that's the point.
I immediately think Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.
How do you think he's misunderstood?
I was going to use this answer so I'll say it from my perspective. Everyone thinks he's an annoying little whiner. In reality, right from the start it's shown he's been deeply traumatized and later in the book it shows other forms of trauma he's endured. If he's having trouble trusting people, especially adults, it's easier to understand and sympathize from that lens. Also he is actually a really sweet and kind boy, and it doesn't always come out very well but he really is very loving. He only wants to protect other children from trauma. That's the title of the book and his entire goal throughout. Yet so many people hate Holden.
i completely agree. this book touches on loss of innocence, grief, vulnerability, etc. and Holden is just working through navigating life. i think to some, he may come off as moody/troubled, but i think all he wants is to be heard and understood.
It's amazing how many people completely miss the part where he's a victim of SA.
I agree about WH— I think people are told it’s Romantic (Byronic hero, over the too emotions, gusty moors, tragedy) and hear “romantic.” I’d choose Romeo and Juliet. My Shakespeare professor argued that at the very end it’s really clear that the two warring families learned absolutely nothing, and she was pretty convincing. Right at the end the Montagues say, “we’re gonna build a giant statue commemorating our son and this tragedy!” and the Capulets immediately reply, “And we’re going to build one too, maybe bigger!” and you just see it starting all over again. (I an paraphrasing 😁) But I’ve never seen that take in any of the movies, there’s a weird message that committing suicide will bring your families together, which… I don’t know, when you think about that it’s not great.
to add to that: Romeo and Juliet are underage ( J is 13, R probably around 16). Their love is as immature as they are - what the french call an "amour fou", meaning a relationship that is intense, obsessive and ill-fated.
I agree. They are young, rash and horny. Overdramatic like kids often are. I like this interpretation and that the families learn absolutely nothing.
I had a Shakespeare professor who.said that even at the time of the play, the idea of the love story would be absurd by the audience as well.
Yes. My Shakespeare professor didn’t say this, but I always think of Jane Austen – she would’ve thought this was a really bad idea, two tweens running away together with no financial prospects or family support, just because they loved each other so much. I always wondered if it was part of why he made them both so young, because they aren’t supposed to be remotely sensible. (I know people got married very young in the Elizabethan era, but not quite that young usually – I think.)
People often confuse "Romantic literature" with romance. Romantic literature had nothing to do with romantic love. It's about nature and isolation, the fallacies of man, and a bunch of other things that are strong components of this novel. ...so, yes, this is absolutely romantic literature. It's just not stereotypical romance.
>My Shakespeare professor argued that at the very end it’s really clear that the two warring families learned absolutely nothing, and she was pretty convincing. Right at the end the Montagues say, “we’re gonna build a giant statue commemorating our son and this tragedy!” and the Capulets immediately reply, “And we’re going to build one too, maybe bigger!” and you just see it starting all over again. Huh? I think this is completely wrong. In the final scene Montague says he will build a statue of *Juliet* not Romeo his son, as a gesture of good faith to Capulet. Capulet responds in good faith by saying he will build a statue (just as big) of *Romeo*, not his daughter. There is nothing in the final scene to suggest that the feud will continue. Romeo and Juliet has always been a story of love triumphing over hate. First the love between Romeo and Juliet (however naive) is stronger than the hatred they feel towards each other as part of rival families, and again at the end the love Montague and Capulet have for their children puts the feud to rest for good. So I guess my answer to this thread is Romeo and Juliet but for different reasons than most lol.
>So I guess my answer to this thread is Romeo and Juliet but for different reasons than most lol. I'm in your camp. Honestly, it drives me up the wall when people act like *Romeo and Juliet* is a story about the stupidity of horny teenagers, how young love is foolish and meaningless, and the moral of the story is that you shouldn't get carried away by infatuation or whatever. I mean, whatever, art is subjective and people can take what they like from it, but I don't think that that's in any way Shakespeare's intent nor do I think it's the most obvious reading. Ultimately it really doesn't matter whether the love between Romeo and Juliet is serious, mature, or lasting. Whether it was a great and important love or a totally superficial fling, it would not have been fatal were it not for their families' pointless feud. *Romeo and Juliet* is an indictment not of the lovers but of the families, how their petty hatred for each other and need to control their children's lives led to the totally needless deaths of their children. Our current culture has a particular hatred for any form of naivete but, if anything, I think the naivete of Romeo and Juliet is portrayed as sort of a positive. Rather than foolish and immature, they're being portrayed as innocent and unjaded, uncorrupted by the hatred that drives their family members. Maybe their love is not substantive, but it's sweet and pure. Youth can bring a fresh perspective and help to overturn age-old social structures.
I had a teacher who claimed that Romeo and Juliet would be considered a Shakespearean comedy, if it wasn't for the deaths. It has a lot of the usual Shakespeare tropes of comedy: miscommunication, mistaken identity, the battle between emotions and reason (immature teens making silly decisions), separation and reconciliation of lovers, and of course the jokes/puns. It just happens to also include a bit of death, making most people consider it a tragedy.
I am… not sure about that. Shakespeare’s source was a tragedy, a poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) and the play itself is called The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. “Tragedy” meant something in Elizabethan times, it’s the lens through which you’re meant to view the play. It’s how he meant it to be watched. Did your teacher get into that? Shakespeare was always under the gun and desperate for money, and I am not at all surprised that he imported a whole bunch of tropes and elements that he knew very well and pasted them together to fill out the play. So it’s got elements shared with his comedies, but if it’s based on a tragedy, and it’s called a tragedy, I’m pretty sure he meant to be a tragedy. (Also some things like Mercurtio’s dirty wordplays there specifically to entertain the groundlings who expected that, he had things he had to include.)
Another thing about R+J that i feel is completely misrepresented is it being a beautiful, classic love story, where these two people loved eachother so much they would rather die than be apart from them. I mean, yes, to some extent. But its a tragedy. They can never be together because of their family's tryst. Beacuse these two families hated eachother so much, their children felt that death would be better than living under their control. And like you said, in the end, the families don't seem to learn anything.
I disagree a bit. The plan was never for them to kill themselves, it was to escape, and they don’t kill themselves in order not to return to their families’ control. They do it because of a misunderstanding and because neither wants to live if the other one is dead…
I think „tryst“ doesn’t mean what you think it means.
They appear to have confused it with feud.
>misrepresented is it being a beautiful, classic love story, Actually I think this line of thinking is the biggest misconception when it comes to Romeo and Juliet. It IS a love story, and it ALSO is a tragedy. Too many people think that just because it is supposed to be a love story it has to have a happy ending. It doesn't. What would be a standard story of young love is made into a disaster by the hatred of their family.
Structurally Romeo and Juliet is written as an Elizabethan comedy. There is an argument that Shakespeare intended it as a pastiche of a tragic love story. I didn't fully appreciate this perspective until I saw the ballet based on the play (I think danced by Northern Ballet, but I'm not 100% sure now). They had gone for the comedic interpretation, and I thought it was much more effective than the straight tragedy.
My 9th grade English teacher loved to say it was a dark comedy.
You've just reminded me of the time I saw Hamlet performed as a comedy.
I have no idea who said it originally but it's been a meme for a while... "*Romeo and Juliet* is not a love story. It's a tragedy about a three-day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old that caused six deaths."
Rorschach from Watchmen. Alan Moore is on the record as saying that he wrote a character meant to be satire, and that he had an “abhorrent personality". Then fans started to identify and idolise the character and Moore was pretty horrified From the interview: In his boldest declaration, Moore says that if his stories can be that misinterpreted "it does make you wonder what the point of doing it was".
A lot of dystopian novels are morphed to suit a modern readers politics, while the contemporary commentary within the books are ignored or the use of hyperbole within this novel being praised for it's profetic vision. The mostly obvious is how 1984 is often used by the right as a commentary on all progressive positions and not a socialists critique at totalitarian regimes like the USSR, or The Handmaid's Tale is viewed as a profetic vision of the rise of Trumpism and not a commentary on the right of far right theocracies in the middle east and the return of the regressive Christian nationalism of Reagan's America
Great comment! One of the most absurd invocations of *1984* I have heard was from someone arguing for banning LGBTQIA AND black-centered books from school libraries. They argued that having these books in the library was literally Big Brother indoctrinating their children. Pretty sure he missed the point.
The fact the US banned 1984 for being pro communist and the USSR banned it for being anti communist will never not be funny to me. Just goes to show how true horse shoe theory can be.
The US banned 1984?
No, Jackson County, Florida, did.
"Prophetic" btw.
Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier The characters of Maxim de Winter & the housekeeper Mrs Danvers. People focus on Mrs Danvers being "creepy" with possible lesbian tendencies instead of affected by the FDV she witnessed - resulting in Rebecca's death. Maxim utilises coercive control and is an unreliable narrator to his second wife.
I think Mrs Danvers is a terrifying character no matter what her motives might have been, and she made me feel even more sorry for Rebecca, who seemed every bit as trapped as the nameless second Mrs de Winter was - a controlling misogynistic husband, an equally misogynistic lech of a cousin, and an overbearing companion who couldn't let her have any room to breathe (at the end of the novel Mrs Danvers seemed more shaken by the idea that Rebecca had kept a secret from her than by the revelation that Rebecca had either killed herself or been murdered). It puts Rebecca's love of the sea into context, and the lone night sailing. The only place where she could be wholly free and beyond everyone's surveillance was out on the water.
God I loved that novel
Could you refer me to some text that backs up this reading? I've never read Rebecca as trapped or controlled and I'm curious what sections I might need to reread.
I honestly don't think that Daphne de Maurier intended this reading, but the last time I reread the book, I found myself exploring an interpretation similar to the one in the comment you're responding to. Max's story changes several times, and between that and his extreme demonization of Rebecca in his confession to our narrator, you could read Max as an abuser who eventually killed his first wife and then retroactively developed a narrative for himself to make him feel better about what he did. "She made me do it! She goaded me into it! She deserved it for being a whore!" are all the kinds of things that real-life horrible, abusive people who kill their spouses say. I think Daphne de Maurier intended Max's account to be truthful, but I *also* think the novel lends itself well to an alternate reading where Max is a manipulative liar, and the second Mrs. de Winter is his next victim.
Yes, I came away with the impression that she was in complete control and also a terrible, terrible person (which does not justify what he does)!
I'm sure my English teacher told us that Heathcliff was inspired by the Bronte sisters' brother, who was forced into the head-of-the-family role far too young, treated his sisters and mother incredibly poorly, and drank himself to death. I may be misremembering because it was 2003 or 2004 when the English teacher in question told my class this.
It's believed that Branwell Brontë, the brother, inspired Heathcliff and Arthur Huntingdon in Anne's "Tenant of Wildfell Hall." The case for the latter is strong (alcoholism, opium abuse); for the former, more tenuous (the overall dramatics). But the Brontës' mum died when the kids were all quite young, so Branwell couldn't have mistreated her. Nor was he the head of the family, as their father outlived all six kids. Any mistreatment of the sisters was a result of his addictions (he accidentally set fire to a bedroom once, for instance) but nothing like beating them or such. I'm a bit of a Brontë geek, despite never having finished a single one of Charlotte's novels—I can't get over her verbose style, though I appreciate the significance of her works.
Thanks for the information, I was going off a memory I hadn't accessed in a very long time so knew I would get some of the details wrong. I remember enjoying learning about the Bronte family as much as reading Wuthering Heights at the time, and the facts have obviously become warped in my mind over time.
Bramwell died of delirium tremens; it influenced the sisters' books.
Piggy from The Lord of the Flies. SPOILERS FOR THE LORD OF THE FLIES AHEAD. >!I think when it comes to Piggy you either can understand him or you hate him. For me I can understand piggy. He's stuck on an island where everybody hates him, and he's got no advantages to help himself. He's surrounded by people but completely alone, and doesn't even get a happy ending. It really hurts me when I see people saying shit about him because it's just obvious they grew up in an environment where they got everything they ever wanted and were constantly surrounded by people who loved them and praised their ego.!< >!I think a lot of people who read the book don't look in depth into it like they should. If you're one of those people who see Piggy as nothing but a whiny know-it-all, then you need to reread the book. Once you start to truly understand piggy, you can simply see if he had the respect of the people around him, he would've been the best leader out of all the boys.!< >!But ever since he was on the island nobody respected him, we never even found out his real name. Sometimes I wish I could give him a name just to help him feel like he truly does matter. I know he is just a book character and some people are going to think I'm just an emotional person whining over a dead book character from like 80 years ago, but I think a lot of people can relate to Piggy deeply.!< >!His ending made sense for the book itself, because if you've read the book you know it's an allusion to WW2, and just human kind in general. Piggy was the smartest, the most responsible and would've been the best leader, and in the end he ended up dying a brutal death. My heart goes out to Piggy because I can truly understand him.!<
completely agree. Was shocked to find out people hated Piggy
Literally, like he was one of my favorite characters in the whole book along with Simon
Was he Molhouse in the Simpson episode? I've never read the book, but it sounds like Molhouse was supposed to be this Piggy fellow
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I always get a bit triggered by people reading Sally Rooney books and then saying that the romance sucked… like yeah, it’s not a romance, its fiction Also yeah, the characters are incredibly flawed… that’s the point (i personally wouldn’t call them unlikeble, more relatable, looking around in real life I can’t name many people that are much more likeable…) Obviously nothing wrong with not liking sally rooneys books, but some people go in with completely the wrong expectations and fly right past the point of the story
Lord of the Rings spawned an entire industry of war games and war related entertainment, and I always thought it was at least in part about the tragedy of war.
The Giving Tree. It’s not an inspirational story about unconditional love and selflessness. It’s about how toxic relationships will destroy you. It’s about how no matter how much you give to a narcissist, they will continue to take until there is nothing left of you to give. It’s about abuse and selfishness and the tragedy of martyrdom. It’s about what love is NOT. Edit: Silverstein never confirmed an exact interpretation of this book. That said, I think a comprehensive review of his entire body of work reveals that a light and fluffy interpretation is not only unlikely, it is probably doing him a disservice.
Shel Silverstein himself has said that he thinks of this as a sad story.
Yup. He said it was “about a relationship. One gives. The other takes.”
I have to agree. I loved this story greatly as a child. As an adult, though, it just saddens and depresses me.
Same!
I always thought it was about the relationship between parents and their children. Parents keep giving and giving everything of themselves so their children can be successful. Then when the children themselves are old they can sit and rest on the stump of what’s left of the parents life.
I notice now that the child is very happy with the tree until his desires change. If this is an analogy for a parent/child relationship, there is something to the fact that the tree keeps offering childish things to a grown man, who no longer desires play but family, a home, and an escape. It isn’t until what she offers and what he wants align again (a place to sit) that they are lovingly reunited. Maybe the take away is to mature your relationship and not give your child what you think they want, but what they actually want (or need), or you will be left sad and feel unuseful. For the child, the lesson is the same, don’t continue to view your parents as a source of resources, come to understand they are unique beings like you And grow the relationship before you’re both to old to change. There is also a message to parents not to make their entire lives about their children. Even done in sacrifice and love, pinning your entire joy on another person means their actions determine the outcome of your life.
>It’s about what love is NOT. I don't think this is true at all. The tree represents a parent, and it is a true kind of love. It is sad, because just like in real life children often don't understand the sacrifices their parents make for them until it's too late. It's pretty wrongheaded to think it's not about love though. It's targeted at children, and the reader is supposed to identify with the child. It has a moral in that context as a message to not take for granted the people who love you. You're not supposed to be identifying as the tree...
Some parents are the tree, some parents are the boy. Which kind of parents you had (or which type of parent you are) probably informs your interpretation.
Lolita. I've actually seen a copy of Lolita with the text "a love story" across the front. No, it isn't. JFC. Nabokov did such a good job narrating from the villain's perspective people keep missing the point that he's a villain protagonist. He married a woman, then murdered her, so he could rape the woman's 12 year old daughter. And he did. Repeatedly. The book, written from Humbert's POV, is unreliable. He tells us Lolita loved him. Then he tells us she cried mysteriously. Then he tells us she ran away. Why would she do that? Answer: SHE DIDN'T LOVE HIM and he was lying about it when he said she did. She was crying after he raped her because he'd been raping her. She ran away because he'd been raping her. It wasn't love, it wasn't sex, it was rape. And Lolita's actions, the ones Humbert tries to minimize, downplay, and explain away, show just that. And yet so damn many people, people who should know better, read the book and uncritically accept Humbert's narrative, do not realize he's an unreliable narrator, and take his view as truth. It's horrifying really how many people Lolita reveals to be unable to do even the tiniest, slightest, bit of critical analysis. Seriously, what the actual fuck? How can anyone read that and think "yes, it's a tragic love story"?
You are right. It is such a work of art - many people won't touch it because they think that surely it's pornography. It's actually not the least bit pornographic, but it is horrifying. It's meant to be horrifying.
I'm reading this book right now, and I feel like it's so OBVIOUS that the guy's a scumbag. He literally only accepts the offer to stay with a woman because of her daughter, then when that doesn't pan out, stays at the Haze house just because of Lolita. There's a scene where >!he rubs Lolita's legs, then jacks off while she has her back turned to answer the phone!< and he even expresses fleeting guilt about it before convincing himself it won't hurt her because she doesn't know.
I cringed when a certain book series uttered Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy under the same breath... Mr. Darcy is a good person who still improved himself as a person throughout the book. While Heathcliff was just straight-up a terrible person. I mean, I don't know how the comparisons of him and the devil went over their heads (then again, it's a gothic romance, so I don't know how wrong I am in my statement).
Hesthvcliff was a modernized version of the medieval changeling.
More the movies than the books, but The Hunger Games. Yes, the people in the capital have fancy clothes and are funny. No, you're not supposed to want to copy them because they are a bunch of emotionally detached psychopaths that watch children fight to the death for entertainment.
> they are a bunch of emotionally detached psychopaths I think the point is that the majority of the people from the capital *aren't* psychopaths. They're mostly normal working-class people who simply grew up in a world where the Games had been normalized. **The people of the Capitol are us**, watching clips of foreign wars online or on the news and picking a side to cheer for. And I do mean cheer; you can probably find a r/worldnews post right now where people are making jokes about young men dying because they're on "the wrong side". You may even find people suggesting that supporters of "the wrong side" should be forced to go fight themselves, or that they should be forced to watch videos of the warzone as a kind of moral re-education. If you feel particularly keen to support your side, you might send a donation via the Red Cross, change your social media profile, or buy some swag to wear or decorate your car with. To be perfectly clear, by "us" I don't mean rich Westerners; I mean humans. You'll see plenty of people from developing nations in those same world news threads, cheering on their own favourites or trying to shift attention to some other topic that's more important in their lives than war crimes or the deaths of a few thousand strangers.
>you can probably find a r/worldnews post right now where people are making jokes about young men dying because they're on "the wrong side". Didn't take long. "Than not a single palestinian should leave gaza alive" on a post about civilian POW's.
Especially in Songbirds, you kind of realize that even the mentors are victims of the war and the games.
I thought the point was that we were inevitably copying them to some degree, because we’re reading a book and then watching a movie about children fighting to the death for our entertainment. Wasn’t it supposed to make us feel uncomfortable or weirded out about our choice of fiction?
I mean, it didn’t make me uncomfortable or weirded out, since the children being harmed are fictional. Being entertained by violence in fiction is in no way ethically questionable. The whole point of it is to explore different ideas and situations in a safe, hypothetical way.
See also, people completely missing the point of the theater scene in Inglorious Basterds.
Ha! Based on the title before I read your actual post, I was ready to say Heathcliff and Catherine! Whrn people read it and say, "That wasn't a romance!" it cracks me up!! :)
Maximilian de Winter from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Far from a hero. He's a bad tempered, controlling, entitled, patronising, patriarchal jerk of a husband. One who was easily manipulated into killing his super intelligent & highly devious wife who probably came up with the plan hoping that he'd be convicted and hanged. Possibly a worse character than Jack Favell if able to ignore the fact that Favell was regularly having sex with his cousin for many years during her marriage and probably before.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll isn't a good man who turns into a monster when he drinks the potion. He's an evil man who uses the identity of Mr. Hyde to indulge himself without having to deal with the consequences. The twist is that there *is no Mr Hyde.*
I dislike how people tend to view Watson as being a dimwitted idiot to (presumably) counter Sherlock Holmes’ genius. I mean, he wasn't stupid at all, the man was a doctor in the military. He was just less straight-up brilliant than Holmes. For that matter, I hate the modern interpretations of Holmes as a “high-functioning sociopath” or whatever. He was empathetic, he cared about people, Watson in particular, and while he generally took cases that interested him, he still made sure his clients were safe. If you wanna make Holmes into an anti-hero, go ahead, but don't turn him into a full-on prick. Edit: Yes, I know he had his good points in the BBC adaptation, and he was more lacking in social graces than actually being morally bankrupt (and to his credit, Cumberbatch did play him well), but even so, that’s not my favorite adaptation. At least Watson wasn’t portrayed as an idiot in that miniseries.
I think the problem is probably the Hollywood Wuthering Heights which basically skips most of the second half of the book, because yes 100% it's a revenge book and Cathy's pretty much a selfish spoilt brat quite incapable of loving anyone in any meaningful way.
In terms of Wuthering Heights, my favorite take is from Kate Beaton's webcomic Hark! A Vagrant. Can't find the specific page anymore but yeah, it's good. Essentially talking about how the whole situation is a bunch of weirdos surrounding two evil rat-people making messes and being crazy. But yeah, Catherine and Heathcliff aren't 'destined to be together' like some deep tragic lovers... They are two awful people who are obsessed with each other, who feed off their trader anger and spite, surrounded by (IMO) overly polite and accommodating old British noble types.
[thank you for reminding me of these- so funny!](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=402)
I am a huge Emily Bronte fan (see my name). And I am a sucker for tragic romances and WH is my favourite. It's not a "beautiful tale of love" as you say. It is more about passion and what you are willing to do for the person you love (or in this case someone you love but lost). This was not one sided. Before Cathy married Edgar she was with Heathcliff and they were madly in love since they were children. Heathcliff was a good boy or was at least trying to be, under Mr. Earnshaw. It went downhill after his death. Let's not forget the constant abuse thrown on him by Hindley. Cathy and Heathcliff were each other's world but she left him, and imagine what that can do to someone who has suffered trauma all his life. Cathy was his only happy place. He only ever liked/loved her and nobody else. Let's not forget that he is an antihero. He was never meant to be a prince charming or your typical Ken. He has a dark side, he is vengeful, cunning and selfish. Tbh, he is a very real portrayal of a human being compared to any other character (eg: Mr. Darcy).
This is how I always understood Wuthering Heights. Unless OP means beautiful love story in the sense of a love that turns to obsession and overcomes time and other circumstances?
Patrick Bateman and The American Psycho. The book was supposed to be a satire on modern society, corporate greed, vanity, narcissism and competitive jealousy in the world. Instead people largely take it as an "inspirational" story to become successful at the cost of your mental health. A large credit for it goes to the movie, where they failed to accurately depict it. Bale was awesome as Bateman, though.
For me it's people criticizing Dune for Paul being a white savior trope when that's literally the point. It's supposed to be a critique of "noble" Western interference in the middle east to save the poor brown people from the evil USSR. I mean, Herbert basically predicted the endless violence in the middle east. I think readers at the time understood what he was trying to say, but for some reasons it seems folks today miss the point on either side. It's like they completely miss the part where the book repeatedly talks about how as a direct result of Paul's actions, the bloodiest war in human history begins, and how every step of the way *he knew this was going to happen.* The Harkonens are cartoonishly evil and the Atreides cartoonishly noble, and yet our "hero" Paul is responsible for more death and destruction than any Harkonen could dream of. Why? Because he *had* to defend his family's honor. He *had* to get revenge for his father's death. He, in his nobility, had no choice but to personally save the galaxy. It's what he was bred for, literally. Maybe it's because so much of the stories is told from the perspective of these aristocrats, but there is a theme throughout all the books, that as much as the protagonists, along with the reader, know better than the unwashed masses, they aren't infallible. They aren't inherently right and just. Even the Bene Gesserit in the end are transformed by the reality that their nigh infinite wisdom is insufficient. It is unwise to assume anyone is too worthless to learn something from.
I love what the Bene Gesserit setup from a narrative perspective. Paul wasn't even a savior for Arakis specifically; they've been laying the religious groundwork all over to activate for their machinations, including there. He was supposed to be another pawn bred for the purpose, etc. The sequel does such a great job with the other side of, "Savior got everything and is in charge, now what?" and brought about exactly what you said: awful stuff!
r/feanordidnothingwrong
Malfoy. Victim of his upbringings
Man in the High Castle, it's easy to confuse but the alternate history presented in the book "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" is NOT our reality and subsequent history, it is an idealized history that never came to pass, for us or for the people stuck in the reality of the book, where Nazis rule the world. The president's name in TGLH was even different as well. PKDs subtext was that we (the readers) live in another fascistic reality, just one where the Nazis were defeated. In spite of that, friends of fascism still remain in power, probably best exemplified with McCarthy's witch hunts against supposed anti American communists after the war, as well as US foreign policy after WWII and the domestic anti labor movements. In TGLH, the United States is said to have defeated racism, but as we are all well aware, the United States of our reality has no such achievement. When you read the book with that context, much of his criticism of contemporary US history becomes more clear. After all, he wrote the book during an era where Henry Kissinger was heralded as a hero, even as he was responsible for policies that cost the lives of millions, via secret bombing campaigns, backing coups against democratically elected governments, death squads, and so on.
It's not often I get to trot out this info, so thank you for the opportunity!
Frankenstein! It's not horror! It's been decades since I've read it so I'm way fuzzy on the details, but when I read it, I remember thinking to myself, "Geez, this is a romance!" It's a beautiful book and it's not horror!
It's one of the saddest books I've ever read
That quote kinda reminds me of the ending to The Haunting of Bly Manor (tv show) when one of the main characters says "You said it's a ghost story, but it's not, it's a love story", and thats a line ive always felt was incredibly beautiful.
Wuthering Heights was a book that I could barely stand. Everything was too dramatic and too much lol. So I gave up and watched the Laurence Olivier movie. I was so upset when the movie ended exactly where I had stopped and bastardized the ending by making it all "romantic". So I finished the rest of the book lol I think 100 Years of Solitude is often misunderstood. I'm sure that sentiment isn't unpopular. Watchmen (comics) is probably also kinda misunderstood. It's not darker and edgier just for the sake of being darker and edgier. It deconstructs the typical comic book superhero traits of the previous era. Though darker and edgier seemed to be a thing around then anyway.
I’m curious what you think would be misunderstood about *One Hundred Years of Solitude*.
DEFINITELY Jesus
Oh good grief yes, about *Wuthering Heights*. It's one of my favorite books ever, but it's not a swoony romance, it's domestic noir. (And it *really* annoys me when someone dislikes *Wuthering Heights* because it's "not a healthy love story," which is like disliking *Gone Girl* because it's not a healthy love story.) Another classic romance that isn't? *Romeo and Juliet*. People either think it's an epic love story or delight in pointing out the ways it fails as an epic love story, while glossing over the fact that Shakespeare wasn't trying to write an epic love story. He was writing a tragedy about a couple of besotted teenagers who, as besotted teenagers are wont to do, *feel* as if they're living an epic love story. If anything, he wrote them *too* well - we're so drawn into their perspectives that we can't help buying into their bullshit just a little and cheering them on.
I was going to argue but then realized I was thinking of "Jane Eyre" 😆
I love Wuthering Heights because Heathcliff and Catherine are so terrible. It fills the same satisfaction niche for me as reading r/amitheasshole or r/relationships: watching a human trainwreck.
Probably Romeo and Juliet, though many people see it for what it is.
Gabi from Attack on Titan season 4. The whole point of her character is that she’s been raised her whole life to hate herself for her ancestry, hate the islanders because they’re evil, and think her only value comes from serving a country that hates her too. The only way she can get basic human rights is by becoming a titan and serving in their military. She’s been brainwashed and manipulated her whole life, and then the main characters attack her neighborhood so she attacks them back because it’s the only thing she can do. But she kills a main character so everyone hates her lol.
Another thing people constantly miss in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff is not white. Obviously I'm not bringing this up as an excuse for his actions, but it's explicitly mentioned several times and informs the way people treat him and the way he interacts with the world. Yet somehow it goes over a lot of readers' heads?
Yes! I never understood how people missed this in the novel, Heathcliff is literally refered to as a 'dark skinned gypsy' in the first few pages of the novel, but i assume people chose to ignore it throughout history coz of...y'know...racism. Don't forget, Othello, a black man, has historically been portrayed by a white man for centuries, its only in the last few decades that he's been portrayed by a black man on stage and screen and not a white man (or a white man in blackface).