fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3050 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3050 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Michael Keaton, Eddie Redmayne]

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03.

[Touken Ranbu (DMM)]

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04.

(Watership Down)

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05.

[Republique]

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06.

[Cardcaptor Sakura]

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07.

[Donkey Kong Country (TV series)]

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08.

[Türkisch für Anfänger]

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09.

[Tom Waits (left), Mark Lanegan (right)]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #436.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Considering 1984 was a rip off of a novel written by a Russian expatriate who was a revolutionary during the Soviet rise to power who was later ousted by the political party he supported...

/coolRuslitfacts

Wild guess here, but Darkness at Noon?

Zamyatin's 'We', I assume.

Although mentioning Koestler does get to one of the things that's always slightly annoyed me about dystopian fiction, which is that the 20th century supplied plenty of examples of incredibly awful political shit happening in real life. It's always been a bit odd to me that we've needed to turn to fiction for our stories about that kind of thing.

I think it's partly to do with censorship and partly to do with human psychology. People tend to turn away when oppression is happening, because as long as it's not happening to them, it's not happening, right? ("First they came..." etc.) But write a fictional story that only barely conceals its connection to real events and you're more likely to get attention.

At least, that's my completely off-the-top-of-my-head guess.

Well, with We it was more about the inner struggle of someone who was forced out of his homeland but still loved it and loved the revolution. It was a depiction of simultaneous love and hate for the future he had idealized whilst calling himself a Bolshevik, and at the same time it was also something of an expose to the world concerning the real situation in Russia (the book was smuggled out of the country and printed in the United States some 30 years before it ever even saw underground distribution in Russia).

So by all rights that particular example was something of a personal account of the feelings of an excommunicated man toward the people in power.

Yep. We by Yvgeny Zamyatin.

I can never go along with people accusing one book of being a rip off of another. My mind just completely rejects the idea and and focuses on the different things I got out of each book. I did prefer We though.

There's some, uh, fairly solid evidence for this one. But if it doesn't matter to you it doesn't matter, I suppose.

It's the derogatory connotations of the term "rip off" that I have trouble going along with. The idea that originality is one of if not the most important criteria for judging the worth of a book seems implicit and I disagree with it. And then there's my feeling, which is probably at least a little contradictory, that no matter how similar two books are, each one will automatically contain a more subtle kind of originality as the same story is filtered through each individual writer's world view. You're right that this is really not the best example for me to be making this argument with but a lot of the similarities that have people shouting "rip off!" are just so shallow and I was reminded of that.

I don't know if I'm making sense. I'm sick.

I term it a rip off because there was very little changed when you compare 1984 and We, and nothing improved. The same characters exist, the motivations are nearly identical, the scenes even play out in much the same way... If anything, 1984 is just a shallower copy of Zamyatin's novel. Having read them both, I see it as a personal and impassioned allegory of a man's real life experience being reduced to a pithy metaphor by a less talented author.

But really my major problem here is that despite evidence, Orwell denied having prior knowledge of the existence of We until very late in his career (not long before his death) when he admitted to "having heard of it" before. There were no acknowledgements, and as a result of his status as an author compared to Zamyatin's, 1984 got the recognition that We deserved.

You're right to say that all work is derivative, but there's derivative and then there's what Orwell did.

agreed

also orwell was a dumb idiot fuckhead and i don't like him

[ SECRET POST #3050 ]

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