Unfortunate Implications/Literature: Difference between revisions

* [[JRR Tolkien (Creator)|J.R.R. Tolkien]] struggled for his entire life with how to reconcile his strict Catholicism (which viewed evil as an inherently uncreative force, and emphasized personal free will) with a race that was [[Always Chaotic Evil]] - namely the Orcs. He never found an answer that satisfied him and apparently [[Hand Wave|Hand Waved]] the issue by saying that the halfway-decent Orcs are just not the ones we see.

* An example from ''[[Harry Potter (Literature)|Harry Potter]]'' would be that the only canonically gay love is also the only time in the series when the [[The Power of Love]] - as opposed to an infatuation like Merope's - is a destructive force rather than a positive. In a series about how [[The Power of Love]] is the most powerful magic of all, this comes off as quite an oversight.

* There are the extensive, mind-boggling implications of Bella and Edward's "romance". Girl sees guy, instantly falls in love with him for some reason and won't leave him alone despite quickly revealing that she is, you know, ''his food''. Guy sees girl, becomes obsessed with her for some reason and won't leave ''her'' alone, despite knowing that she is his food. Girl abandons everything she cares for and everyone who cares for her, becoming self-destructive without guy, but that's okay because she loves him. Guy does nothing less than stalk and abuse girl, but that's okay because he loves her. Girl would rather become a soulless, bloodsucking monster than grow old, because nothing is more important than being beautiful forever (that becomes moot however, as Bella's [[Mary Sue]] powers are beyond equal). ''None'' of this is ever presented as anything other than wonderful, beautiful love, and it's even compared to ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' and ''[[Wuthering Heights (Literature)|Wuthering Heights]]'' '''as a compliment'''.<br /><br />To expand on the "abuse" mentioned above, we have Edward ''sneaking into Bella's room'' without her knowledge or permission to "watch her sleep." He belittles her and blames it on her clumsiness; at one point he suggests she can't even do laundry for fear of injury. He tells her where she can go and who she can see (by the end of the first book, she no longer has any friends outside the Cullens), and has her babysat by his family when he can't be with her. At one point, he mentions he would have disabled her car to prevent her from going somewhere. He is constantly reminding her that it's only his sheer will that keeps him from killing her. In the second book, he tells her that if they were ever to be permanently separated, he'd kill himself. And then he leaves her, without any thought to her feelings at all. He also has a tendency in the books to use sex as a bargaining tool (for marriage and college), and makes Bella feel bad for ''wanting'' that amount of intimacy with him. He basically manipulates her into marriage, which she had said explicitly that she didn't want, especially at 18. And when she gets pregnant, he conspires to kill the baby ''against her wishes'' and pimps her out to Jacob for future baby-making...without her knowledge. And why does he do all of this? Because he "loves her." However, 99.9% of his actions are considered interpersonal abuse by pretty much every mental health professional.

* The Shadow series (a spin-off series from [[Ender's Game]]) has ''tons'' of sexist undertones. For one thing every single relationship outside of Bean and Petra's always has the woman as a [[Strangled By the Red String]] [[Shallow Love Interest]] for the more well-developed male characters and literally every couple has to have babies. LOTS and LOTS of babies! It gets really ridiculous with Graff whose love interest doesn't even get a name or a single line of dialogue or make an actual appearance

* A good argument can be made that [[HP Lovecraft]]'s entire body of work can be traced back to a combined fear of sex, foreigners, and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|seafood]]. All this made doubly ironic by the fact that his wife was ''Jewish''. His later work tones down the racism, and now our "genetically inferior" villains are just deformed or inbred.

* ''[[The Legend of Rah and The Muggles (Literature)|The Legend of Rah and The Muggles]]''. Not only does the intro casually drop the phrase "ethnically impure" in a book [[What Do You Mean It's for Kids?|intended to be read by six-year-olds]], but the stunted, deformed eponymous creatures are supposed to have [[Hollywood Evolution|evolved]] from the various "ethnically impure" people left behind [[After the End]]. Not to mention the barely touched-upon [[After the End|inferred nuclear apocalypse]].

** Another story, ''[[wikipedia:Sixth Column|The Sixth Column]]'', which describes the Unites States under occupation by [[Yellow Peril|Pan-Asians]] (real-world mutual enemies Japan and China), also has some issues. The heroes save the day by creating a [[Weapon of Mass Destruction|race-selective weapon]] that kills all yellow people. However, that story idea was from [[John W Campbell]], and Heinlein supposedly [[wikipedia:Sixth Column|tried to tone down the racism]]. He was still unhappy with the lingering racist themes.

* ''[[Gone With the Wind]]'':

* ''[[Inheritance Cycle (Literature)|Inheritance Cycle]]'':

** You could fill a book with all the unfortunate implications that crop up in Christopher Paolini's books. Most, but not all, of them are related to the elves [[Can't Argue With Elves|with whom one cannot argue]].

* S.L. Viehl's [[Proud Warrior Race Guy|Jorenians]] are [[Mindlink Mates|monogamous]] (and invariably heterosexual) enough to make the [[Moral Guardians]] weep with shame. {{spoiler|In the second book of the ''[[Stardoc]]'' series, the vengeful Ktarka -- who's not allowed to marry, because she proposed to someone who turned out to already be engaged -- is [[Psycho Lesbian|making advances on the heroine]] in between attempts to destroy her.}} Another Jorenian character seems nearly as shocked at the fact that {{spoiler|Ktarka was putting the moves on another woman}} as at {{spoiler|the fact that she had ''already'' killed several characters and was ''planning'' on killing at least three more, one of them a ''[[Would Hurt a Child|little kid]]''}}. (Someone must have called Viehl on it: Later in the series, she {{spoiler|paired up the gay secondary character Hawk with a male Jorenian... and}} tossed in an [[Anvilicious]] [[Author Tract|message about how same-sex marriage is okay]].) And that's not even taking [[Rape Is Love|Duncan's]] [[It's Not Rape If You Enjoyed It|behavior]]—the [[Aliens Made Them Do It|various]] [[Raised By Orcs|karmic]] "[[Freudian Excuse|outs]]" he's [[Karma Houdini|given]] aside—into account.

* In ''[[Invisible Man (Literature)|Invisible Man]]'' by Ralph Ellison, ''everything'' is a [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|symbol relating to an overall point about race relations]]. More than once a character who expresses a view different from Ellison's is revealed to be blind -- because they don't see the truth, get it? One can't help but wonder whether the book's ever been printed in Braille...

* TV series ''[[Red Dwarf (TV)|Red Dwarf]]'' releases a few tie-in novels. So far so good. First two are published as a single book in America. Also good. What's not good is that, in the cover illustration, the two black characters, Lister and the Cat, are replaced by a white guy and an actual cat, respectively...

** Particularly ''[[Live and Let Die (Literature)|Live and Let Die]]'' and ''[[Goldfinger]]''. In this case, most of this is not "unfortunate" implications but straight out racism and sexism. Ian Fleming was openly racist and sexist, which was not uncommon for Britons of his era, making it [[Values Dissonance]] as well.

** ''[[Live and Let Die (Literature)|Live and Let Die]]'' features a [[Scary Black Man]] as the [[Big Bad]]. Acceptable. (He is NOT the Dictator of his own Caribbean island, populated entirely by black people all of whom are apparently in on his evil plot, that's the movie.) The fact that all the black characters except the [[Big Bad]] (who's part white and Russian-trained), are depicted as superstitious voodoo believers is unfortunate, as are some of Bond's typical 1950s white guy opinions. However, the book was [[Fair for Its Day]], in that M concedes that black people "Have plenty of brains, ability and guts", at a time when blacks in films were represented by Steppin Fetchitt, that's quite liberal!

** And the Rastafarians who worship the ''white'' villain in ''[[The Man With the Golden Gun]]'' (facepalm).

** It contains dead straight-up uses of [[Rape Is Love]], [[Rape As Redemption]], [[Stalker With a Crush]], [[Stockholm Syndrome]] played as a ''good thing'' (though unintentional, as the term didn't exist at the time of the book's writing). The heroine starts out unusually liberated for her time, a sport-and-hunting-loving tomboy unafraid to travel on her own, with no use for those who would put her in a traditionally feminine box. She's then kidnapped by an almost fetishized stereotype of an Arabic Sheik (who {{spoiler|turns out to not even be Arabic, because of course our white heroine could never ''actually'' wind up with someone who wasn't really white himself}}), and raped on a daily basis for around a month. The result of the entire novel is that all that rape not only "tamed" her, it somehow "cured" her cold lack of femininity. The Sheik falls in love with her and decides he needs to send her away so he won't ''hurt'' her anymore, and only relents when she decides she would rather ''shoot herself in the head'' than be apart from him. Because them thar's some healthy foundations for a stable relationship.

** R.A. Salvatore's novel ''Gauntlgrym'' contains one of the first, if not ''the'' first openly bisexual character in the ''Forgotten Realms'' novels. The character, Dahlia Sin'felle, was the [[Rape As Backstory|victim of rape when she was a child]], is a sexual sadist, a serial killer, and a rapist in her own right.

* In ''[[Animorphs (Literature)|Animorphs]]'', near the end, many disabled teenagers are recruited by the (teenage) main cast (that's not the bad part. The team didn't have ''days'' to surveil every single prospective member of the new recruits they needed, but they knew [[The Puppet Masters]] wanted fully functional bodies.) What's bad is (a) the fact that the ones who were healed by morphing were immediately made leaders (so in the [[Very Special Episode]] about the disabled being worth as much as anyone else... ''legs, not brains, are the '''only''' criteria used to decide who leads.'') Then, there's (b) the way they're used later, in the last two books: they're all [[Kill Sat|shot from above]] by the main villain when used as a distraction by the main heroes. We don't even get a headcount of which of the (few) named members who are left, either, just a mention of how "not many of them made it."

* ''[[Skulduggery Pleasant (Literature)|Skulduggery Pleasant]]'' has the threat of The Americans coming in and "helping out" the Irish magical community when they show weakness, and never leaving. While this could be based on common fears/stereotype of [[White Man's Burden|American Imperialism]], one of the two American characters in the series is Billy-Ray Sanguine, a Texan with a stereotypical accent, who just happens to be a complete sociopath who works for the highest bidder. His dad, Dreylan Scarab<ref>who is hinted to have been released by the Americans early in order to cause a crisis among the Irish</ref>, is even worse, and tries to {{spoiler|blow up an entire stadium with tens of thousands of people in it to break [[The Masquerade]].}} Just for comparison, Sanguine's counterpart, Tesseract, is a massive, stoic Russian assassin with a twisted sense of honor, and, as we find out in the end of the Mortal Coil, {{spoiler|he [[Pet the Dog|has a cat]].}} Sanguine and Scarab have ''no'' redeeming qualities whatsoever.

* ''Love in the Time of Cholera'' has Florentino Ariza get raped on a boat by an unknown woman. This just turns him into a [[Loveable Sex Maniac]] and doesn't appear to have any negative effects. Add to that the lighthearted tone of the book and you'll have at least one person feeling incredibly uncomfortable with [[Double Standard Rape (Female On Male)|the implications]].