they left out "i loved this book when i read it as a teenager, and only noticed the nationalism/sexism/racism when i grew up"
for me: alas, babylon
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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When I was a teenager, the Ender's Game series was about exceptionally smart children. As an adult, it's about eugenics and forgiving Hitler.
another book i loved when i was stupid(er).
doesn't help that orson scott card is still a raging homophobe. brandon sanderson is also a mormon, but (it looks like) he was able to grow the fuck up and stop being a bigot
I don't think this is fair. Even the concept of society labeling "thirds" is portrayed as something disturbing.
And the sociopath brother becomes the hegemon of the planet earth if I recall correctly, and this also is not a good thing, but more seen as a dystopia reality. The military isn't seen as good, but manipulative.
Are the children bred as soldiers or to be leaders in society ever portrayed as good? it reads as tragic.
Is Hitler the queen of the hive in your eyes or Peter? Because Peter definitely isn't seen as positive and the hive is a different form of existence that eventually leads to the message that different species despite all origins or existence in a hypothetical can eventually come to coexist if mutual understanding is somehow found.
(I'm queer and Card is a bigot who can eat it, but I don't think any of it really shows in his writing.)
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I thought it was about empathy and humanity. Kids are abused into committing what would be considered war crimes if they were against other humans. At the end, if I recall, Ender finds and saves the last queen of the species and feels a profound empathetic connection.
The dynamic between his brother and sister, a sociopath and an empath, indicate the balance between both being a major theme.
Oh. Oh that's makes sense thinking back on it.
Sword of Truth series for me.
Oh this one is really something. Even as a clueless teen I still had WTF moments, and I don't even want to read it now, I just know I will be cringing the whole time.
If I had read that series a few years earlier I probably would have liked it. It felt like the author just hated women, and I was just old enough to go “What the hell?”
Edit: It’s been a while, can’t remember if this is the one I’m thinking of or if I read a similar series at the same time.
No, I think you're thinking of the correct one. There's a lot of weird sexual hangups about women in there that seem odd as a teen, and disqualifyingly gross as an adult.
I remember trying this series out in my teens, having already gone trough quite a few, and I remember it being the first book I just dropped under a half trough, but I couldn't remember why until know. I just remembered it as shallow and depressing to read.
About half way through is the weird sex torture that just comes out of nowhere. That could be why.
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Enid Blyton. Lovely concepts, but there was a bit of racism that crept in, just from the time that it was written. Even if a lot of it was largely relegated to stereotypes.
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That last one hits home. In high school in the early 2000's I had to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was awful and clunky and boring.
Smash cut up a few years ago when I turned 40 - I thought, "maybe I've got a different view now and this will be better".
Nope, it's all boomer you shit about "kids these days".
Thank you!
I was recommended Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a dozen times and every attempt to read it was just boring. And I thought it was me, like am I supposed to find metaphors for any of these things to enrich my life? Because it's not working.
I never read it, but I've read similar pop-enlightenment literature. I think it requires that you be in this particular narrow phase of spiritual maturity where you're open to the message, but you haven't really learned much yet. Once you get into anything meatier, the pop stuff seems trite.
Pop spirituality ripens like an avocado
I'm very sad about the Harry Potter series, and i loved reading it the first time around (that was shortly before the last 2 movies came out).
On the one hand, I loved reading the books - I devoured them in record time and lost quite a few hours of sleep because i just couldn't drop them after starting with Order of the Phoenix.
On the other hand, I learned afterwards what a foul human being JKR is. I'm someone who can split the art from the artist, and normally i would just do that as long as JKR doesn't see a penny from me, not even as PR (i borrowed the books, but i was in the cinema for the last 2 movies - can't undo that).
But the reevaluation of the books after JKR's twitter tirades made some themes obvious for me that are not that visible if you don't look for them - or don't want to. The treatment of the elves, the nearly all-white-school, the only black teacher called Shacklebolt, the using of jewish stereotypes for goblins... I am pretty angry at JKR for souring something I enjoyed, and I was pretty angry at myself for not noticing many things earlier simply because i let my guard down.
Looks like i fall into the first group, even tho i was around 30 when i read the books. Only defense i have is that i am not a native speaker and read them in english.
Thanks, i have to fully agree with the content of this video. It really looks like JKR didn't write this stuff with the strict intention to spread horrible ideas, but it seems she is simply not able to think of a world without horrible ideas and shows a complete lack of desire to change something about horrible ideas - only cementing the status quo is worthwhile.
Yeah I'm reading them to my son, and right now we're on book 5. Could have easily been titled "order of the toxic men"
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The books definitely have many problematic elements, but IMO they're still good. But separating the art from the artist is really fucking hard when that artist is right now a prominent political activist with (some) actual sway with her national government, and she's also still earning money and producing new content based on that book series. And it's not even like the books are completely unpolitical, the plot features governments, fascist takeovers and resistance fighters - it's very apparent that she has opinions on these kinds of things and probably genuinely thinks that she's one of the good guys, despite so clearly working against her stated cause of women's rights and supporting straight-up fascists.
The stories are entertaining but the messaging and world building are lazy and inconsistent. And then yeah the books are filled to the brim with the sort of casual racism borne not only of ignorance but from a lack of interest in educating yourself in the first place. It's just full of holes which is fine for kids books, but the belligerence is grating.
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I've come into the view over the years that Harry Potter is bad writing both in terms of ethics presented and in terms of worldbuilding. Ethically, it plays off date rape drugs as comedic, and in terms of worldbuilding too much for me to even know where to begin.
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Just cause you only liked something when you were young doesn't mean it isn't good. Everyone talks about the perspective you gain as an adult, but people don't talk enough about the perspective you lose along the way.
It's also possible that it's genuinely good for people of all ages, yet you just obsessed over it in your teens and made yourself sick of it. Like I did with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Which I admit appeals to the cynicism of youth, but it was recommended to me by a 50 year old, it's not just for teenagers dammit.
I was about to down vote you until I remembered the meme format. I commented elsewhere, but here's Shaun's video on harry potter
Yeah, I was afraid that it might not have been clear.
I relly liked them as a kid, but now I agree with Ursula K Le Guin:
I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the ‘incredible originality’ of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel’, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
My nieces and nephews are currently getting into Harry Potter (their parents enable them) and I really hope that the nostalgia-hype is over, once my child is in that age.
Damn that's a very accurate critique, mind you I find few adults care about the ethics of the fiction they consume (and I don't mean that as purity testing, but like if you're going to show ethics make them reasonable or interesting
I never could finish 1984. I got maybe halfway through it and was like 25% interesting world building, 25% a sad, bitter, sexist person lamenting the way of things (particularly that be can't just fuck every woman, but also the lying totalitarian goverment) but also having no spine to even consider doing anything about it, and 50% him sneaking around to fuck some horny manic pixie dream girl against the rules. Unfortunately, id have probably enjoyed it more if I had read it at 16
Idk, I likes that part. Ultimately Winston is flawed and weak and yet he thinks he's making a grand defiant gesture, only to find out the party knew it all. All his secrets and triumphs where plainly and obviously known.
Effectively he builds himself up as a dramatic hero in his mind, and in narrative. The reader gets swept along, but when he falls, when he is crushed, we remember all the gross parts of his personality. We see him as the broken, pathetic man he becomes at the end lf the novel. I enjoyed how the experience of reading the text, and the experience of remembering the text tell two very different stories.
But you see how if they immediately saw the base pathetic person Winston is beyond the curtain of his own narrative, none of that really works.
Then he's just an audience proxy, reflecting our own patheticness. :)
I'm not saying everyone has to like 1984, I'm not saying there is one concrete experience of it. I'm merely pointing out that unlikable protaganists are a choice, and there can be a strong narrative experience when that choice is made.
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A lot of old sci-fi books are like that, interesting world, boring (maybe not the best word for this) story.
Starship troopers. The movie has a story, unlike the book.
Dune. I have read it 6 times.
The first time was rough. When I was 15.
The 6th time was still difficult.
But it fucking does something to my mind every single time
blushes in 4th read through of wheel of time
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There's also re-reading books you read as a child and going "Oh, this influencing my development makes a lot of sense"
I'm pretty sure either Black Beauty or White Fang turned me into whatever the hell I am now
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It's like reading the bible when you're an adult and realizing the evil character is God.
I wasn’t enjoying Blood Meridian. What life experience do I need to enjoy it?
No, no, you’ve got it right, that is not a book you should enjoy, just understand. If you ever meet someone who got enjoyment out of that book then you need to kill them before they kill you.
I read Catcher in the Rye pre-high school and thought Holden was great because he recognized everyone for being fake, then I read it in HS and decided Holden was a whiny brat that needed to STFU. Then I read it as an adult and realized he was just a traumatized kid trying to cope.
This was the book I consistently hated at every age.
I could see that he was a traumatised, lonely child. At the same time, he continuously engages in self destructive behaviour while having a superiority complex.
I guess for the time this sort of story may have been groundbreaking, but the fact that Holden never faces any sort of reckoning makes it boring and infuriating. It needed something legendary, like the "it's you" moment from Bojack Horseman.
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The first ever book I read in a foreign language, turned out to be a lot different from what I remembered when I picked it up and re-read it maybe 2 decades later after having mastered that language.
Reverend Insanity.
Reading it now feels slightly like a dnd lonewolf murder-hobo campaign but protagonist is obsessed with telling you he is 500 years old.
Tho I do like the world still.
When I was a kid I absolutely loved the Narnia series, to the extent that I was depressed when I finished the last one. As a young adult I tried to reread the books and was stunned at how heavy handed the Christian propaganda was.
First time I read Lord of the Rings I believe I was 11. And I hated it. Because I was 11. Also I think it was just the first part, Fellowship . Thankfully I've read it maybe half a dozen times since then and I've loved it more and more each time and it's been an entirely different book every single time.
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