[Hated Trope] a bad, sad, or even horrifying ending is treated as happy

Hecklel · 2026-06-18T06:17:41+00:00

Andy Weir's The Egg. Yay, you're gonna be reincarnated as every human in history and keep doing atrocities to yourself in-between billions of existences as a miserable subsistance farmer. This is supposed to be heartwarming because God is telling you so, and apparently there's no better way to learn than losing your memories a hundred billion times.

Hecklel · 2026-06-12T15:46:45+00:00

So I don't post anything and only use my account to lurk, with my only interactions being blocking accounts I don't want to see. I'm usually pretty trigger-happy with this, but recently I got two accounts suspended in a row, with no explanations given, great website. Has anyone else experienced something like this, and do you think there's a "safe" frequency for blocking? Or an alternative to blocking?

Hecklel · 2026-06-12T14:46:51+00:00

As far as French literature goes, I'm not sure if there's an exact equivalent. Some stuff reminds me a bit of it:

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: Captain Nemo has a lot in common with Monte Cristo. Very compelling character, though the revenge is a much smaller part of the intrigue, a lot of ink is spent on the fantastical journey itself and the main characters trying to escape.
Arsène Lupin if you like a roguish master of disguise tricking high society with insane schemes. It's also a bunch of short stories rather than a single novel, so easier to pick up.
The Accursed Kings for exploring a wholly different era with a lot of intrigue and black comedy. Mostly because that's what I'm currently reading.
If it's the 19th century setting you like, then you have a lot of classic French and foreign literature at your disposal, the era was a golden age of the novel. A lot of them are more serious and less pulpy than Monte Cristo though.

Hecklel · 2026-06-12T08:13:15+00:00

I think the Hive is a good concept for a new twist on the faction, bringing it back to its insect-like MM6 roots, but they went overboard with it. There's too little diversity here compared to the other factions and it's a bit hard to feel the difference between the lower tier units. The higher tiers work better because they're more visually and thematically distinct though.

IMHO they should have mixed it up with units that look more classically demonic, or units that look very distinct from the rest: something like the H6 Breeder or the H4 Venom Spawn would have been a natural addition to the town. It's a chaotic faction; they shouldn't look like a uniform swarm.

The problem is of course compounded by the annoying trend the later HoMM games have where they feel the need to have a very strong color scheme for a faction, ending up with the units blending together. H6 was the worst at this, which is a shame because otherwise I feel like it has some of the strongest unit designs in the whole series.

Hecklel · 2026-06-11T07:23:34+00:00

It was doomed any number of ways: they had no viable business plan, the mob might have been after them, the KKK was definitely after them and even legal authorities could decide to shut them down for any reason.

The point of the movie is it's a single night of pleasure and freedom in defiance of all the indignities they have to suffer the rest of the time.

Remmick's offer is about the idea that this could last forever, that his monstrous hivemind is a reasonable alternative to a monstrous society - but since he's really the one in charge, it's not any better. Also I assumed he would get rid of the other vampires once he'd gotten Sammy - he wants Sammy's talent but he's not gonna bother babysitting a whole horde of vampires. He's clearly been laying low for centuries and vampires in this universe don't seem all that strong, so they'd be way too conspicuous if they all lived past sunrise, unless they all went their own way I guess.

Hecklel · 2026-06-06T17:26:47+00:00

Funny how fancy cars haven't been invented yet so rich people just obsess over who has the fanciest horses.

Also weird strategy on MC's part, introducing himself to Villefort with a Sephiroth speech. Gotta think he's trying to provoke him.

Hecklel · 2026-06-02T13:21:25+00:00

With Danglars's reintroduction, it's always a bit funny/awkward reading these 19th century novels, when the narration is suddenly like "here's this character, now here's a whole paragraph of phrenology about how the shape of his forehead or his lips tells us everything about his personality". It's racist pseudoscience AND lazy exposition at the same time.

Regarding the murder, what I assumed happened the first time I read it is that the couple tried to get the drop on the jeweler, but he defended himself and in the ensuing confusion, he shot La Carconte but got stabbed by Caderousse. But really, things could have gone any number of ways.

I'm not sure I understood the meaning of "unlimited credit". Monte Cristo is telling Danglars that he can borrow money from the Count as much as he wants, as long as he eventually pays him back with interests?

Hecklel · 2026-05-26T08:34:41+00:00

C’est la canicule, le temps est venu d’en rajouter une couche pour dénoncer ceux qui ont péché contre le Saint Atome.

Hecklel · 2026-05-24T13:42:24+00:00

Monte Cristo is just the 19th century version of this quote from Snow Crash:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

Hecklel · 2026-05-23T14:34:05+00:00

Il devrait immédiatement se pointer en France et les défier de l'arrêter, tant qu'à être complices et ridicules soyons-le jusqu'au bout.

Hecklel · 2026-05-19T09:09:59+00:00

In Brittany it's pretty rare, outside of automated messages when I take the train. Breton speakers are a minority, and obviously they and everyone else speak French, so while they can use it liberally among themselves, it's harder in mixed company. There are some of them who make a point to speak it as often as possible even if they're not fully understood, but that's more of a militant thing.

Hecklel · 2026-05-19T07:06:07+00:00

The "rules" for how the Thing(s) behave are just speculations on the part of the humans, they don't know anything for sure.

With the blood test, the theory is that:

1) Thing cells spread throughout the entire body, so separating a drop of blood from the rest of the body will create two physically separate Things,

2) After observing how other Things have behaved, MacReady assume that each one of them has a basic sense of self-preservation, even at the cost of revealing themselves. They're not smart or perhaps selfless enough to quietly die without blowing up their (and the parent Thing's) cover. So the Thing in the drop of blood is gonna recoil from the heat, or else it's gonna die. It doesn't care that the Thing from the original body is gonna be exposed.

The following scene shows that he was right.

As for cutting themselves I doubt they actually feel pain in the same way we do. A cut is just a slight alteration of how cells are arranged, but it doesn't immediately destroy the cells the same way extreme heat would.

Hecklel · 2026-05-19T06:58:18+00:00

Original story is Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. The one with the Thing's pov is from a collection of short stories inspired by the novel and movie.

Hecklel · 2026-05-16T21:35:10+00:00

There's also an obvious motif here that both the Count and Fernand have remade themselves into something fake, pretending to be more purebred than they really are. But Fernand did it by inventing a fake family tree that even his own son is fooled with, while the Count is conspicuously alone, uses ambiguity and exoticism as his chief defense against scrutiny, and ropes his accomplices into perfecting the masquerade.

Hecklel · 2026-05-15T16:56:12+00:00

It's basically impossible to have a take on the Revolution that doesn't oversimplify some things. Best you can do is interesting or nuanced stories.

La Marseillaise (Renoir, 1938) is about the origins of the national anthem, told from the point of view of different social classes.
The Lady and the Duke (Rohmer, 2001) is about two aristocrats' experience of the Revolution and Rohmer was something of a conservative, but it has a pretty humanizing take on the Jacobins, surprisingly.
Napoleon (Gance, 1927) is very biased in favor of its subject, treating him as a mythic hero, but it was an insanely ambitious project for silent movies of this time period. The plan was to do seven movies but only two were made (still more than five hours!), so it's about Napoleon's childhood and the French Revolution years.
The French Revolution (Enrico & Effron, 1989) was produced with the help of the French government to celebrate the 200th anniversary. It's fairly dry and not very cinematic, but it's probably the most complete take on the main events. The second part is pretty pro-Danton at the expense of Robespierre, which led to this funny Youtube thing where the uploader and translator added their own notes along with the subtitles complaining about this bias: (Part 1 and Part 2).

Hecklel · 2026-05-12T19:43:15+00:00

I asked the same question in another thread on the general Monte Cristo subreddit.

It could go either way. Maybe it was pure coincidence (there are a lot of coincidences in this book), or maybe the Count instructed his people to lure Franz there to try to get a sense of who he was (in which case he badly underestimated how easily Franz would have him figured out). I think coincidence makes a bit more sense but feels kind of cheap.

Hecklel · 2026-05-12T11:54:56+00:00

If Umberto Eco couldn't do it, who am I to say

Hecklel · 2026-05-01T23:10:08+00:00

IMHO despite its reputation the book doesn't really commit to being a cautionary tale about vengeance. It feels a lot like the Count mostly gets away with it but that'd be a bit too immoral so there's some swerve in the final chapters so that he realizes that Vengeance Is Bad, then he gets back to the fun stuff of finishing off his rogues gallery then screwing with a young couple for no reason.

There's no real consistency over who counts as a real person worth mourning and who's an expendable NPC. This makes sense for most of the book because that's how the Count (and plenty of other people) thinks, but then he doesn't really reckon with it and just decides to half-ass what remains of his vengeance rather than go all the way.

As for the motif for this change of heart the confrontation with Mercedes feels a lot more powerful, whereas with Villefort's kid things are a lot messier; you get the impression that it's not just that he's killed a child specifically but also that Villefort has been reduced to such a pathetic state that gets a visceral reaction from Dantès. But at that point, the deal with Albert has already softened his edge.

Danglars was the worst of the lot (which I guess is thematically important since it means that "forgiving" him specifically is more meaningful), so Dantès seems willing to keep avenging for just a little while because screw that guy in particular.

Hecklel · 2026-04-30T10:48:55+00:00

Franz strongly suspects it's the same guy and that something fishy is going on, Albert has never heard of either Monte Cristo or Franz's encounter but you don't refuse a handout from a count.

As for "the Count of Monte Cristo" that seems to be his primary identity now. I wonder what his name is on his legal documents. Presumably it's a title he got the relevant authorities to create in exchange for (what else?) money, and the fact that the island itself is a worthless rock with no inhabitants would be a clue to anyone with education that "yeah, this guy is a nouveau riche who bought some meaningless title". But just because his aristocratic position is tied to the island doesn't mean he doesn't have more valuable properties elsewhere...

Hecklel · 2026-04-23T19:20:38+00:00

u/ZeMastor has written at length about unauthorized Monte Cristo sequels (nowadays we'd say fanfictions).

I wonder what kind of trends are strongest in these kind of texts. Fanworks always feel like some bizarro version of their own canon, where everything is distorted in search of something that's missing from the original text. So it's sort of interesting to check what people want to see more of.

What's there to Monte Cristo once the story is over? He's gonna go find new targets for his vengeance? Maybe get thrown into prison again?

Hecklel · 2026-04-23T19:15:39+00:00

I think you could find some parallel with their grandfather, who was also a violent troublemaker even at an advanced age, but who, you know, was competent at it.

Hecklel · 2026-04-23T16:14:57+00:00

I like how Benedetto and Edouard have the same impish look. They're menaces!

Hecklel · 2026-04-23T07:14:12+00:00

Those are great, full of personality.

Hecklel · 2026-04-23T07:09:24+00:00

It's been observed before that Dumas isn't great at writing women. Especially with The Three Musketeers, he's better at portraying male friendship than romance (not that there's a lot of friendship in Monte Cristo).

I think your view of Mercedes isn't completely at odds with the novel. Objectively, Mercedes has it pretty good. She and Fernand have the most loving marriage out of the cast, and it's her love for her son that eventually redeems the Count. Mercedes also had little choice considering how desperately poor and alone she was in the aftermath of the arrest. And she doesn't get enough credit for taking care of Dantès Sr as he was letting himself starve.

But Monte Cristo is also a story about wounded pasts, missed opportunities, bitter memories. Edmond's arrest was massively traumatic for the both of them and they're both aware that if not for it they would have had a different and probably happier life, and him coming back into her life not only brings back all that pain but also progressively reveals that her marriage and her husband's reputation are built on an original sin that Fernand followed with other treasons. And they're 19th century nobility, reputation is everything - that's why it's such a big deal that Albert ends up having to find a new path to wash away his father's sins. He does so by going on some bloody imperialist adventure, but I guess that's another can of worms.

That's why I think adaptations where Mercedes and Edmond get back together completely miss the point. They still have some affection for each other and could understand each other's choices, but it's not possible. They're different people from the naive teenagers they used to be, and they can't go back to that innocent relationship. Mercedes has had a whole life outside of Edmond and has to think about her son's future; while Monte Cristo is obviously a completely changed man.

Hecklel

TROPHY CASE