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Gulliver's Travels: Difference between revisions
Added trope, added crosslink, corrected an "above" to "below".
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Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (Added trope, added crosslink, corrected an "above" to "below".) |
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* [[Floating Continent]]: Laputa is probably the [[Trope Maker]].
* [[For Science!]]: Seems to be the main motivation in the Academy of Lagado, with predictably poor results.
* [[Forgotten Trope]]: The book is a [[Parody]] of the now mostly-forgotten genre of "traveler's tales".
* [[Gag Boobs]]: An encounter with some of the young ladies of Brobdingnag has probably turned Gulliver off breasts for life, as every single imperfection in the skin texture is magnified to the same degree.
* [[Getting Crap Past the Radar]]: By the bucketful, beginning with the opening paragraphs in which Gulliver describes his apprenticeship under "My Good [[Stealth Pun|Master]] [[A Date with Rosie Palms|Bates]]".
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* [[The Longitude Problem]]: On the one hand, Gulliver carefully reports both the latitude and longitude of all the various fictional places he visits. On the other, when he's in Laputa fantasizing about what he could do if he were immortal, one of the problems he imagines being able to solve is "the discovery of the longitude". The effect is to create the impression that either Gulliver or Swift himself isn't entirely clear on what "the discovery of longitudes" actually means.
* [[Meaningful Name]]: [[Bilingual Bonus|La Puta]]. Also Lindalino, which is a pun on Swift's [[In Dublin's Fair City|hometown]] - it has [[Incredibly Lame Pun|double 'lin's']]. Get it?
** As noted
* [[Monkeys on a Typewriter]]: One of the absurd inventions created by the [[Cloudcuckoolander|Laputan]] [[TV Genius|intellectuals]] is a device for randomly combining words so that "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study".
* [[Moral Dissonance]]: The Houyhnhnms preach of their own superiority but have incredibly hypocritical beliefs about the Yahoos and refuse to be persuaded otherwise when presented evidence to the contrary. Whether the reader is supposed to acknowledge this or not has been debated for centuries.
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* [[Nobody Poops]]: Very much averted, with frequent incidents mostly being used for [[Toilet Humor]].
* [[Omniglot]]: Gulliver learns the languages of the places he visits with remarkable (and convenient) speed.
* [[Parody]]: Of the now [[Forgotten Trope|mostly-forgotten genre]] of "traveler's tales", of which Daniel Defoe's ''[[Robinson Crusoe]]'' is the most famous example today.
* [[Person of Mass Destruction]]: Gulliver becomes this in Lilliput, in which the inhabitants attempt to use him as a superweapon in their war against their bitter rival Blefuscu.
* [[Planet of Hats]]: All the countries Gulliver visits, but especially Laputa.
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* [[Science Is Bad]]: Balnibarbi.
* [[Science Marches On]]
* [[Serious Business]]: The Lilliputians are at war... over which end of an egg to break open. This was meant to satirize religious disputes over seemingly petty differences like the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, which had caused (and continued to cause) vast amounts of war and bloodshed in Swift's day.
* [[Small Town Rivalry]]: Lilliput and Blefuscu are at war with each other over which end of an egg one should open.
* [[Significant Anagram]]: Many critics have pointed out that the Lilliputian capital "Mildendo" is an anagram of "dildo men."
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* [[Sterility Plague]]: The Houyhnhnms decide the best way of wiping out the Yahoos is to castrate them all. They got the inspiration for this from Gulliver's description of how horses are treated in England (male horses were castrated to break their spirits and control the population.)
* [[Superior Species]]: The Houyhnhnms.
* [[Take That]]: It's [[Signature Style|Johnathan Swift.]] The book is a giant [[Take That]] at various aspects of English society and, by extension, pretty much all of humanity. Much of Part IV even reaches into [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|"The Reason You Suck"]] territory as he [[Author Filibuster|explains war, law, alcohol, politics and so on]] to his master Houyhnhnm.
** He was also not what you'd call fond of Humanism and other enlightenment values.
* [[Toilet Humor]]: In addition to all the high-minded satire, the book has plenty of this as well; Swift likely would have gotten along well with [[South Park|Matt Stone]] and [[Team America: World Police|Trey Parker]].
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