Animal Farm/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


All tropes are subjective... but some tropes are more subjective than others.


  • Animation Age Ghetto: Narrowly averted, as the film contains the same political allegories and violence present in the novel, and was marketed as an adult film when it was first released. Unfortunately, the BBFC reclassified the original rating of X (18 and over) to Universal, meaning that they consider it to be suitable for children.
  • Complete Monster: Napoleon, expected given that he's Joseph Stalin in pig form.
  • Ho Yay: Boxer and Benjamin for some.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Napoleon. Arguably even more so than his real life counterpart.
  • Misaimed Fandom: As with Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book is often a favorite of conservatives, who see it as purely an attack on the evils of socialism. Orwell himself was a Democratic Socialist whose aim was to rescue socialism from Soviet totalitarianism, and the portrayal of the human farmers makes his view of conservatism clear.
    • Evils of communism, actually. Sure, some conservatives don't know the difference. Some socialists don't either.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Napoleon's crossed the line several times, but when he gives Boxer, the most loyal and hardworking of all the animals, over to the knacker's because he is injured and no longer able to work near the end of the story, you know at that moment that Napoleon has become no better than Farmer Jones, the animals' original oppressor -- in the very first scene of the story, Old Major, the one who set this whole revolution in motion, cites man's penchant for callously slaughtering animals once their usefulness to him is at an end as one of his very worst evils.
    • Benjamin seems to agree with this, as until that point he had been apathetic towards the whole revolution thing.
    • Interestingly, Orwell himself stated that the turning point in the revolution comes much earlier, when the pigs take the lion's share of the milk and apples for themselves instead of sharing them equally with the other animals. That's the first time they put their own greed above their cause or their comrades, and from there on it's just a decline into more of the same, but worse.
  • Nightmare Fuel: A veritable well of it, the worst probably being the death of Boxer.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped
  • Tear Jerker: Poor Boxer...
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: Despite featuring talking animals, this is a high school level book.