Spiritual Antithesis

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Spiritual Successor's Evil Twin, Spiritual Antithesis is referencing an earlier work by using similar characters and themes, but going in a completely different direction. Often set at the opposite end of Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. May serve as a Deconstruction (or Reconstruction if the original work was a deconstruction itself) or Stealth Parody of the original work.

Generally seen as a Take That against the original work, and closely related to Satire. May involve Whole-Plot Reference.

Of course, nothing prevents a work from being the Spiritual Antithesis of one work and the Spiritual Successor of another at the same time, which may often result in said work being X Meets Y or This Is Your Premise on Drugs.

Genres that play this role to each other:

Examples of Spiritual Antithesis include:

Anime and Manga

  • Tiger and Bunny might be this for Darker than Black - both are takes on Superhero genre that have superhumans glowing blue while using their powers, but former has much more idealistic take than latter, which is much more cynical and prefers Not Wearing Tights and antiheroic variety. Neither works go into extremes - just like Darker than Black stays on the cynical side but acknowledges existence of idealism, Tiger and Bunny is very optimistic, but has few shades of cynicism on it.
  • Code Geass and Gundam 00 are this towards Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny - directors of both didn't liked how SEED and Destiny turned out and dedicated their series to deconstruct several elements that annoyed them.
  • Yoshiyuki Tomino likes to follow up his dark and depressing series with their opposites - Zambot 3 was followed by Daitarn 3, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam by Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, and Space Runaway Ideon by Combat Mecha Xabungle.
  • Gurren Lagann was this to Neon Genesis Evangelion (bonus points for being made by the same people) and its own Spiritual Predecessor Space Runaway Ideon.
    • FLCL is another Spiritual Antithesis to Evangelion, also created by the same people - according to rumors, many people who just finished working on End of Evangelion felt down and wanted to create something crazy and optimistic to cheer themselves up.
    • You may also say that GaoGaiGar, the first reconstruction of the Super Robot genre after Evangelion, was another one of these for it - it celebrated and embraced the same tropes Evangelion criticized or outright rejected.
  • Some of Makoto Shinkai's works have strong contrast with previous ones:
    • Voices of a Distant Star and 5 Centimeters Per Second - while former is about love, that survives despite great (as in, cosmic) distance between two people, latter says that not every love can be that strong and sometimes separated people grow apart from each other.
    • The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below - former says that love can prevail and unite people against all odds, but latter reminds you that there is one barrier that nothing can break - death.
    • Your Name in turn affirms the optimistic views and rejects the pessimistic ones; love will come through in the end, and distance, time and death will not stop it. Emphasising this are two scenes of Mitsuha and Taki passing each other that are clearly meant to remind longtime fans of how Centimeters ended, only this time things actually work out.
    • Weathering with You then proceeds to flip the script on its immediate predecessor. A number of beats are similar, including the main premise of having a Tokyo-based and a rural lead, the latter who wants to run away to Tokyo but finds the big city not as glamorous as hoped. However, things get twisted as the action rises; Taki falls in love not only with Mitsuha but also Itomori and its people, and therefore tries to save everyone from the impact event instead of merely taking those closest to her and running. Hodaka, meanwhile, has no love for the city that is apathetic at best towards him and Hina, and chooses to let Tokyo get flooded to get her back.

Comic Books

Fan Works

Film

Literature

  • His Dark Materials is this to Narnia. Pullman isn't trying to hide his hate for Lewis' series, so it was probably intentional.
  • Lord of the Flies is this towards the children's book Coral Island. Coral Island has young boys living on an island after their ship's catastrophe and working together to fight "the savages". Godling, having an issue with racist undertones and savagery being presented as an outside threat and not something that lies in human nature, wrote a book in which young boys end up abandoning their civilized ways and trying to kill each other. Ironically, another writer, Robert A. Heinlein, took issue with that portrayal and wrote Tunnel In The Sky, which served as an opposite to Lord of the Flies - boys end up on an alien world and work together for their survival. Some try to go the same way as characters from Golding's book, but end up quickly killed. Insu-Pu is another spiritual opposite to Lord of the Flies.
  • Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in response to the old classic, Heart of Darkness. He found the latter to be one of the most racist things he'd ever read and wanted to show that native Africans were not, as previously believed, total savages.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None as an opposite philosophical story to the New Testament.
  • The Black Company is this for High Fantasy genre - if one assumes that typical works of High Fantasy are the propaganda of the winners, then this is closer to how those events really looked like.
  • Starship Troopers gets this treatment a lot, especially in the 1970s and 80s, with works like Haldemann's Forever War and Steakley's Armor being the two most blatant. Even Drake's Hammer's Slammers could probably be listed.
  • John Sladek's satirical Roderick series features a robot who views a corrupt world through innocent eyes. Sladek then turned the idea on its head in the novel Tik-Tok: the world is just as corrupt, so its robot Anti-Hero decides to exploit it by being even more corrupt.
  • Richard K. Morgan intends A Land Fit for Heroes to be this to The Lord of the Rings.

Live Action TV

  • Blake's 7 was meant to be Star Trek turned on its head: the symbol of the fascist Terran Federation was even the symbol of the Federation Starfleet turned 90 degrees to the right.
    • Farscape is another anti-Star Trek space opera - like Blakes Seven, it featured a group of scruffy fugitives as the main characters, alternately fighting or fleeing the clean, well-dressed military.
    • Also, with the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore was pretty much able to do everything he had ever wanted to do on Star Trek but wasn't allowed.
  • The Quantum Leap episode "Lee Harvey Oswald" (demonstrating that Oswald could have and most likely did act alone) was made in response to the Oliver Stone film JFK.
  • Firefly‍'‍s setting is a deliberate change of pace from the standard Space Western or Wagon Train to the Stars where the main characters are backed by The Federation or some other major organization.

Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer 40,000 is this for the idealistic Space Opera genre as a whole, especially Star Trek, following the principle that Humans Are Special and showing them living peacefully with other races and defeating various space evils. In contrast, the Imperium of Man is utterly racist, and its position at the galactic power table was paid for with the blood of millions if not billions of humans and aliens.
  • Paranoia is this for the more common type of game in which the PCs are generally expected to work together toward common goals.

Video Games

  • The Iranian students who made Rescue Nuke Scientist (in which the player controls Iranian soldiers rescuing captured nuclear engineers from Israel) said it was meant as a response to Assault On Iran (in which the player controls American soldiers attacking an Iranian nuclear weapons facility). The makers of Assault On Iran responded to that with Payback In Iraq, which even includes characters and events from Rescue. And said they hoped the makers of Rescue Nuke Scientist would respond again.
  • Gears of War and Call of Duty are different ways of taking the shooter genre (Gears being about taking cover and COD making both sides weak to bullets), seemingly as a counterpart to the radical influence of Halo.
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