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You nailed it. Scott Adams, too, to a certain degree. It's a bit of frame breaking when one finds out a creator has an outsized personality. There's a bit of pr
by throwaway5752 5y ago
You nailed it. Scott Adams, too, to a certain degree. It's a bit of frame breaking when one finds out a creator has an outsized personality. There's a bit of projection involved in taking in art, and finding there is a great differenced between the imagined creator of a work and the actual creator forces a reinterpretation. It's unavoidable. Maybe Jane Fonda and people with Barberella posters who disagreed with her real life views, for an older example.
I think it's particular painful with Frank Miller because the work becomes much less interesting than how a number of us had read it initially.
- tptacek 5y agoI think that's probably the big idea behind this critique, right? It's not that Frank Miller has bad ideas (though...) --- it's that when you realize he wasn't really kidding, he's much less interesting. His work isn't thoughtful; it's just id.
- technothrasher 5y agoNot a comic, but I had this reaction to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". When I read it as a teenager, I was blown away by the subtle and brilliant satire. When I read it again as an adult and realized he was actually just a fascist, it was deflating.
- tptacek 5y agoThe great thing about this is how many people first experienced "Starship Troopers" through the Verhoeven movie, which was, in retrospect, incredibly subversive; like, he actually reclaimed the work from its author. A neat trick!
- filoleg 5y agoThat was quite a "one-of-a-kind" experience for me with Starship Troopers. The movie was straight up taking the entirely predictable "Atlas Shrugged, but with commie space insect alien warfare" book source and turned it into a satire on the original material. And not just that, they executed it masterfully. I've never encountered anything like that since then, and if someone has suggestions of a similar "source material => adaptation" experience, those recommendations would be heavily appreciated.
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoVerhoeven famously gave up on reading Starship Troopers after a few chapters, calling it “boring and depressing.”[0] He was a kid during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands and couldn’t stomach the pro-war, pro-military, openly jingoistic messaging. He had to be talked into making the movie, and only then when he was allowed to put a satirical twist on it. It’s quite a good trick he pulled! [0] https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-troopers-director-never-read-the-book/ https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-t...
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI don't think Heinlein per se was a fascist, he was a man strongly attracted to fascist style thought, which I think was a common feature of many reasonably intelligent people of his generation (hence the great upflarings of fascism they lived through) but I don't think he ever succumbed fully to the attraction in the same way I believe Miller has - probably because he lived through a war against a fascist country.
- watwut 5y agoThe most disturbing thing about Starship Troopers are people who quote characters to make point about real world. (I have seen that multiple times on HN) It is just ... not an argument. It is all made up!
- tomcatfish 5y agoSome people name this as a fallacy: "The fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence". It's not very catchy, but it's nice to have some concept-handle for this oddly common mistake.
- boppo1 5y agoThanks for this one.
- robotresearcher 5y agoOf all the books to choose to complain about that phenomenon, Starship Troopers would not be my first choice.
- HideousKojima 5y agoGenerally Harry Potter and Star Wars (and recently Marvel movies) are the biggest culprits. There's a subreddit dedicated to making fun of the phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/ https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 5y agoThe biggest culprits are rather more ambitious.
- watwut 5y agoWhich one would be?
- throwaway5752 5y agoI had edited out parts my earlier post before submitting it, and one thing I removed was how I was more replying to you about Cerebus and David Sim. At least Dark Knight Returns was a miniseries and non-canon. Cerebus hurt because of the re-evaluation of the work, but also because I didn't really know much about Sim's beliefs for a while and had more invested in the project.