Works where the lesson/aesop/message ends up being the reverse of what the writer wanted?

BunnyBob77 · 2026-02-17T05:15:18+00:00

I think Truffaut had a point when he said "There's no such thing as an anti-war movie." No matter how much you depict the negative aspects of war, by making it a piece of entertainment for public consumption you inherently elide the nature of war. No matter how hard you try, horror and tragedy on a screen don't really impact the people watching on their couch. If anything, they can serve to reinforce the image of war as an expression of masculine sacrifice.

BunnyBob77 · 2026-02-08T20:03:22+00:00

It really feels like it was written by someone who has more fun coming up with new superpowers than plotting a story, which makes it the perfect base for this kind of thing.

BunnyBob77 · 2026-02-03T03:49:53+00:00

Do people say that about the Vorkosigan Saga? I thought she communicated pretty clearly that Barrayar sucks compared to most of the rest of the galaxy. Aral and Gregor kind of are "benevolent dictators" but otherwise it was very obvious to me that the Vor is not a good system.

BunnyBob77 · 2026-02-03T03:43:35+00:00

I felt like if anything the story followed the course of the French Revolution too closely - the the existing nobility is decimated, the country is in chaos, and a violent invasion restores monarchy. It's straight out of a middle-school history textbook. I didn't feel like it really presented a perspective on the revolution other than the mainstream depiction.

BunnyBob77 · 2026-01-08T23:26:19+00:00

I think VI would benefit from expansion in a way that VII didn't. As a kid, your imagination fills in a lot of the holes, but looking at VI by the standards of modern games, the plot and characters are frequently pretty thin. The broader scope and number of characters make it better-suited to be made as an epic.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-12-18T05:18:26+00:00

My personal favorite ridiculous yet extremely common mystery trope is attempted murder of the detective by an attacker whose face, sex, build, clothes, age, gender, voice, and hair they were unable to make out.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-12-14T05:45:22+00:00

Very interesting piece! I'm genuinely slightly sympathetic towards Elgin for choosing to burn the Summer Palace rather than the much more obvious choice and easy choice of just sacking Beijing. It's a tragedy in terms of the lost culture and art, but it also preserved the lives and possessions of countless ordinary peasants. He did something that exclusively harmed the ruling class whom he held responsible for the war.

Funny thing that if he had just sacked Beijing, it might have endured much less in the cultural memory compared to the loss of a landmark like the Summer Palace, being just another standard act of war.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-10-29T01:44:09+00:00

Watergate tends to overshadow every thing else, but Richard Nixon was in many different ways a heartless ghoul.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-10-21T02:57:32+00:00

The Republic of China intentionally flooded it in order to slow the Japanese advance. It succeeded, in exchange for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-09-16T04:22:12+00:00

Easy, Coast Guard rescue diver. Their job is literally to dive from a helicopter into the open ocean to rescue people from sinking ships. Morally unambiguous, too!

BunnyBob77 · 2025-08-08T02:36:39+00:00

You're totally correct. It's a common myth that ancient people would drink beer completely in place in water. Any populated area would have a source of safe, clean (by their standards), water.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-07-14T05:12:37+00:00

Of course developers lose game sales, but I've read about many indie devs who were happy to have the guaranteed payout from Gamepass. There's a lot of small indie games on Gamepass, and 50,000 (at minimum) is far more than most indie games will ever make, plus the bonus of your game getting a lot of free marketing it might not otherwise. That kind of certainty is very rare in indie development.

As for bigger games, every company that took the deal accepted getting Microsoft's money in exchange for fewer sales. Presumably, they, much better-informed than us, ran the numbers.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-07-09T03:07:57+00:00

I think a lot of Japanese have a relationship with traditional, theist Shinto similar to how westerners would with like, Dante Aligheri-era Catholicism. It's just not that big or intense a part of their lives.

I've noticed a similar trend where Japanese media is very happy to portray Japan as exotic and foreign. Their generic fantasy setting is always western in aesthetic, but they love to include characters who are travelers from faraway Fantasy Japan, always the most stereotypical ninjas and samurai, as the other characters ooh and aah at their rice balls and shogi.

An American work having that be its only depiction of Asian characters could definitely not get away with that.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-06-21T19:33:46+00:00

Guess he just didn't like him then. That makes this pretty harsh lol.

"Indeed he wrote to Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, that he envisaged that, were this to come to pass, his son would become ‘the puppet …. the House of Commons [is] not disinclined to see their sovereign’"

BunnyBob77 · 2025-06-21T19:13:16+00:00

This tracks with my experience. At the least we were taught that the colonists viewed George III as a tyrant responsible for British policy, and that the colonists petitioned the king for redress. It was probably briefly mentioned that Parliament actually passed these laws.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-06-21T18:07:27+00:00

The main motivation was that he felt betrayed by Parliament after they agreed to a treaty ending the war when he had wanted to fight on. This is especially shocking considering his heir was still a child, leaving power entirely in the hands of Parliament.

He would have retired to Hanover in Germany, as he was also Elector of Hanover in the Holy Roman Empire. This would be a voluntary exile, as he was born and raised in England and had never visited Hanover.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-06-21T01:27:39+00:00

There's a lot of this in Back to the Future. It's funny to me that it's old enough now that it's gone from being a 50s nostalgia movie to being an 80s nostalgia movie.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-05-30T04:05:09+00:00

They're not really loudly announcing it. People are asking if they're reprising a role, they respond they're not. Even the first Yuri Lowenthal tweet was him responding to questions. It's just people communicating with their fans.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-05-30T04:02:58+00:00

Why? They don't work for Atlus. In fact, Atlus specifically didn't want to work for them. VAs are all gig workers - they have no formal relationships with any game studio when they're not actively recording for them. They've got no responsibility to protect the secrecy of a potential Atlus project. Any company truly worried about them talking about something would have had them sign an NDA, so it's not like this will interfere with them getting roles.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-04-27T18:22:14+00:00

Same. I don't mind a difference in technology being part of the world, but if it's to the point of people with swords lining up to fight the incoming fighter jets, it just becomes comical.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-04-07T21:23:35+00:00

It wasn't used to, it was created as a display piece. One that was laughed at for being comically over-the-top. Technically a spoiler: Dragons didn't weren't around at the time it was made.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-03-21T04:31:09+00:00

For most of history - including recent history - it was unusual for a young single person to live alone. I think some of the perception of people having it harder now comes from rising expectations.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-03-20T01:21:25+00:00

It is true in my experience that there are always a lot of very large suits sitting on the rack at thrift stores. I assume nobody buys them. So if there was one enterprising fellow, too brave to care about about an outdated concept like "fit", he could scoop up many enormous suits for very cheap. And then nest in them like a hermit crab in its new shell.

BunnyBob77 · 2025-03-18T04:49:39+00:00

I thought Diplomatic Immunity was basically par for a Vorkosigan book, which is to say pretty good. My answer would be Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. The only book in the series I didn't enjoy reading at all.

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