Analogies backfiring in literature.
- From the Discworld book Pyramids: "I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire." Screams, flames, people running for safety...
- The same gag is reused in Men at Arms ("Dwarfs and trolls get on like a house on fire. Ever been in a burning house, miss?") and The Wee Free Men ("I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire. There may be no survivors.")
- Another commonly-reused Pratchett joke is the backfire of "the light at the end of the tunnel". Usually "the light is an oncoming train", but there have been variations, including (appropriately enough) "the end of the tunnel is on fire."
- All of these are really examples of deliberate reversal of the analogy. This one actually seemed like an error by a character: "Light a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
- In The Truth, on being told he and his fellow beggars will be paid a dollar a day for selling newspapers, the Duck Man remarks that by their standards, "We could live like kings on a dollar a day." Arnold Sideways starts rattling off a number of unpleasant ways that famous kings have met their end, to which Duck Man patiently replies "No, Arnold, that's dying like kings."
- In Sourcery, the monarch of Al-Khali is fond of romantic poetry, comparing women's features to goats on a mountainside (a Shout-Out to the Song of Songs) and other Purple Prose analogies. He's left a bit speechless when a woman actually makes him stop and explain just what it is, exactly, that he finds goat-like about her.
- In Hogfather, Teatime threatens a security guard by claiming to be the man's worst nightmare. The guard immediately starts recounting several bizarre nightmares he's suffered, none of which have anything to do with an assassin threatening to stab him. Which the guard doesn't think is too frightening of a dream, although he might've changed his mind when it actually happens to him.
- In the same book, Ridcully claims to be as honest as the day is long. He is not impressed when Ponder reminds him it's the shortest day of the year.Ridcully: However, this does not undermine the point that I just made, although I thank my colleague for his invaluable support and constant readiness to correct minor if not downright trivial errors.
- Men at Arms has Sam Vimes getting gleeful when an Assassin complains about him walking through their guild like he owns the place. Vimes had just found out that his marriage to Lady Sybil means that he does.note
- Feet of Clay has Sam Vimes tell Cheery that the Watch is like one big family - and once the new recruit has responded to a few Domestic Disturbance calls, he's sure Cheery will see the resemblance.
- Good Omens: The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have messed up the world's computer systems and the world is about to end. The text notes that it's often been said that civilization is two meals away from barbarism, and what's going to happen next will make barbarism look like a picnic: hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
- In Dragon Bones, Tosten admits to his brother Ward that he was acting like a jerk because he was jealous about Ward caring more about Oreg than about him. Ward forgives him and points out that Tosten was just scared of being left alone, and, with a frightened horse, you don't punish it, but try to ease its distress. Tosten then counters with "And sometimes, you slit its throat". Ward jokingly replies that "there have been times ...", and the both of them laugh about it.
- The "tragic lovers metaphor" is a running gag in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. The guy using them doesn't get that particular girl in the end (and both parties are clearly better off for it).
- One Russian story tells of a dog who told another dog that he was going to be famous like Laika. For those unfamiliar with the history, Laika was the first dog in space... and died up there. Sure enough, the dog dies at the end of the story while saving a young boy.
- Margaret Atwood:
- The Ogden Nash poem "The Romantic Age," about a lovestruck teenage girl who:Presses lips and tosses head,
Declares she's not too young to wed.
Informs you pertly you forget
Romeo and Juliet.
Do not argue, do not shout;
Remind her how that one turned out. - In a scene in Gone with the Wind, Dr. Meade argues that General Johnston cannot be dislodged from the Kennesaw Mountain.Dr. Meade: The mountain fastnesses has always been the refuge and the strong forts of people since the ancient times. Think of - think of Thermopylae!Rhett: They died to the last man at Thermopylae, didn't they, Doctor?
- In Dave Barry's second novel, Tricky Business, a series of events lead up to an ordinary band member named Wally deciding to go after a group of dangerous drug dealers with nothing other than a bottle opener to save some other passengers. He explains that it's like when the passengers on one of the 9/11 planes who refused to stand by and let the terrorists win. His friend points out that all of the passengers on that plane also died. On the other hand, it was implied that Wally did remember the fates of the passengers and was just being brave.
- When Brystal in The Tale Of Magic fires Lucy from the Fairy Council, Lucy uses an example from her past as a Circus Brat as to why she shouldn’t. She says a troll in a music group kept eating the fans, so they kicked him out. But without him, the music suffered, and people stopped showing up. Brystal then points out an alternative Lucy hadn’t considered: maybe people stopping showing up because they were being eaten.
- The Twilight Saga.
- Edward quotes lines of Romeo and Juliet into Bella's ear. Remember what happened to them? note
- Bella also constantly broods over Romeo and Juliet and compares it to her own problems. She compares Jacob to Paris even though Jacob is her friend whereas Paris was some random business associate of Juliet's father. Her problems pale in comparison but neither her nor the author sees that.
- Edward also mentions how magically wonderful imprinting is, comparing it to A Midsummer Night's Dream and apparently missing the
Unfortunate Implications in the play — namely the rape/threats of rape and the fact that Demetrius would spend the rest of his life brainwashed into loving Helena. - In Eclipse, Bella compares herself to Cathy of Wuthering Heights and her love for Edward to Cathy's love for Heathcliff, seemingly forgetting that there is actually an Isabella in the same novel who does marry Heathcliff to disastrous results.
- In the same book, Bella claims that she's fascinated with Catherine's and Heathcliff's romance because "nothing can keep them apart — not her selfishness, or his evil, or even death" when just the opposite actually happens in the novel. Everything especially her selfishness and his evil, keeps them apart in life — and it is death that unites them. Edward and Heathcliff are also as different as chalk and cheese. Heathcliff never wants to be apart from his love and is driven to insanity by her seeming rejection of him... more like Bella than the I Want My Beloved to Be Happy Edward.
- It is quite amusing though how Bella, and therefore S. Meyer both completely miss the points of the texts they compare them to. Whereas Twilight asserts finding true love in your teens with a stranger is possible, Romeo and Juliet may be a satire of this notion.
- A particularly justified example of this in Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series; when Victor Helios (the now-warped Victor Frankenstein) creates a fifth version of his wife Erika, he programs her with only basic literary analogies because he feels that reading too much was the reason her predecessor developed too much independence. As a result, at one point Erika muses to herself that she and Victor will be like Romeo and Juliet when she reflects on her desire for them to have a happy relationship, because she only knows of Romeo and Juliet’s reputation as famous lovers without knowing their full story.
- Anastasia does this twice in Fifty Shades of Grey:
- She likes comparing herself to Tess of the D'Urbervilles and ignoring Tess' death.
- She also compared herself and Christian to Icarus and the sun, using it as a comparison to how she longs to be close to the sun (Christian) like Icarus. Backfires, as Icarus didn't long to be close to the sun out of any romantic reason, but that was prideful and wanted to show-off, which ultimately led to his death.
- A once famous one analyzed in Vanity Fair. There was an old metaphor of romantic love describing a guy as a strong, solid tree, and a woman as a vine clinging to it. Since this actually means that the vine is slowly killing the tree, Thackeray refers to the heroine as a "tender little parasite" to add to the idea that the heroic Dobbin finally marrying her is a Bittersweet Ending at best, Downer Ending at worst.
- Happens to Otto von Bismarck (of all people) in George MacDonald Fraser's Royal Flash when he explains his visions for Germany's future to Flashman:Bismarck: Germany must have its Napoleon, if it is to have its...Flashman: ...Waterloo?
- In Betrayed, when Zoey meets with her boyfriend Erik after he returns from a trip, he greets her as his "Desdemona". Aphrodite quickly comments that if she's his Desdemona, she'd better not cheat on him or he'll strangle her at night. Given that Zoey was seeing her human boyfriend on the side while flirting with a teacher and that like Othello and Desdemona, Erik and Zoey are in an interracial relationship... yeah.
- "Zlata's diary" is a diary written by a girl called Zlata, who lived in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and was 11 in 1991, when the war started. As her diary became known, people began to compare her with Anne Frank, who also had a diary. This was not reassuring to her, because:Zlata: People compare me to Anne Frank. That scares me, I don't want to suffer her fate.
- She's being disingenuous, then, because she compares herself to Anne Frank in the context of the diary, before anyone knows about it, and gives the diary a name, in imitation of Anne Frank. She began writing it, she notes at the outset, in the hope that someone would eventually publish it, just like Anne Frank's diary was published — although she does hope she will live to see it published.
- This is part Be Careful What You Wish For, part bad translation. In original the second sentence sounds like: "And this fact [comparison with Anne Frank] now instills fear in me, fear to suffer her fate." The point is precisely that when she started her diary (before the war), she willfully compared herself with Anne, meaning the "published diary" part — and now the "didn't survive the war" part sounds more relevant.
- The title of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged gets the entire point of the myth of Atlas wrong. In the book, Atlas is compared to the ostensible heroes as the figure holding up the earth, through whose efforts all life is possible. If Atlas is not rewarded as he should, according to Rand, he should simply shrug and let the world perish. However the mythical Atlas doesn't hold up the earth (as is pictured in popular culture), he holds up the sky. Meaning that if he shrugged or dropped it, the sky would crush him along with the rest of the world. Instead of Rand's belief that the chosen few creators could withdraw from society and survive without them, the analogy is more that any attempt to destroy society would also destroy them.
- Harry Potter:
- During the events of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, while Harry attends his career consultation meeting with McGonagall in which Umbridge (after having Dumbledore ousted from the school) is also present, Umbridge makes more than one attempt to disparage Harry's desire to become an Auror, eventually stating he "has as much chance of becoming an Auror as Dumbledore has of ever returning to this school", to which McGonagall responds, "A very good chance, then." Sure enough, Dumbledore returns to the school and Harry, according to Word of God, ends up as Head of the Auror Office.
- Also in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: When Sirius suspects that Snape will use Occlumency lessons to give Harry a hard time, Snape says that Harry is very like his father. Sirius takes this as a compliment to Harry, until Snape says that like his father, Harry is so arrogant that criticism simply bounces off him.
- During Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Ron and Hermione try to assuage Harry’s disillusionment with Dumbledore when he found out he had a very brief flirtation with the Dark Arts/ dark Wizard Grindelwald as a teenager. They tell him that his mother had just died and he had to put his plans on hold to stay home to be the breadwinner and take care of his mentally ill sister so his brother didn’t have to quit school. Basically that he’d had a really rough go of it at that point and was so frustrated being alone that, of course he’d be susceptible to something like that. He fought for good for the rest of his days, why should he hold something that happened 100 years ago over his head after he changed? Harry won’t hear it and tells them that he was their age and they’re off fighting Voldemort and that he wasn’t alone because he had siblings. Harry, being an only child because he was only a toddler when his parents were murdered, more or less tells them he’d love to have had siblings to “have to” take care of. He does come to forgive him, though.
- In Richard Armour's "Twisted Tales of Shakespeare", a satire on high-school and college lit textbooks, Armour plays with this trope in a chapter on Shakespeare's sonnets: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Hot? Sweaty? Fly-infested?" Which is done in the original sonnet; the point of it is that the love interest is better than a summer's day, because while a day in summer sounds lovely, many things, like heat and poor weather, ruin the experience.
- Referenced in Yendi, when Vlad observes that Kragar's analogy that life is like an onion doesn't work for him. Kragar says it's because you can peel layers from an onion, but they're all the same until there's nothing left. This notion didn't work for Vlad, because he grew up working in a restaurant and knows you chop onions, you don't peel them. A zigzagged example, because Vlad then explains how he thinks life is like an onion because sometimes there's a bad spot on one, but you can cut it out and the rest is fine.
- In Q-in-Law, a Star Trek novel, Picard is entrusted to perform a wedding of Keran and Sehira, a son and daughter, respectively, of the leaders of two rivaling clans. He is very pleased with the task, and compares the pair with Romeo and Juliet. Guinan points out that there was a tragic ending. Sure enough, Keran ends up blowing up a fighter that Sehira flies. She is just fine, though, thanks to Q.
- The classic Romeo/Juliet failure is subverted in the novelization of Robotech. The comparison with Max and Myria is surprisingly apt: They came into it from separate sides of a war/feud, fell for each other on serious impulses, and were definitely rushing into it (they met only three times before: A Humongous Mecha battle, an arcade competition, and a knife fight, all against each other). The snippet ends with the declaration that everyone was definitely going to do their best to change the ending.
- The spoof Doctor Who Universe Concordance The Complete(ly Useless) Encyclopedia has some fun with the Take That, Audience! character of Whizzkid in "The Greatest Show In The Galaxy" and his fan-baiting line "Although I never saw it in the early days, I know it's not as good as it used to be".Funny thing is, he was right. The circus had, after all, fallen into the hands of malign entities that caused it to become stagnant, employed unsuitable acts, refused to let it go, and eventually caused its destruction.
- Alex Rider: In Stormbreaker, Herod Sayle says he keeps his pet Jellyfish because it reminds him of himself. Alex points out that "it's 99% water, it has no brain, no guts, and no anus". Sayle clarifies: "...it's an outsider".
- In Ghost Story, Harry criticizes Lea's teaching methods by reminding Lea that her previous student died. Lea replies that she transformed said student from a terrified child into a One-Man Army, and by that standard her training was very successful.
- From A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Oberyn explains to Tyrion how much he loved his sister Elia and how close they were as children. To make it more understandable, Oberyn compares the two of them to someone Tyrion actually knows: Tyrion's own siblings. Tyrion internally cringes.
- Tyrion enjoys this trope so much he even does it to himself. When he's sentenced to death, he muses that he had "put his life in Oberyn's hands, and he dropped it". Then he remembers that Oberyn's nickname is 'The Viper' and vipers don't have hands, and starts laughing hysterically.
- A comment made to Cersei herself about feeling "as pure as a maid on the morning of her wedding". On the morning of her wedding, Cersei fucked her brother.
- Nimble Dick assures Brienne that's he's honest as the day is long. Brienne points out that as winter is coming, the days are getting shorter.
- Tyrion promises to drown Ser Jorah Mormont in gold if he lets him go. Mormont is not impressed, having seen someone murdered by pouring molten gold over them.
- Melisandre makes a speech at one point to argue for her Black-and-White Morality view of the world that if you find an onion that is only half-covered in rot, "it is a rotten onion" and you throw it away. In a scene in the same book, Sam Tarly finds a partially rotten onion while the Watch is at Craster's keep, but being more practical than Melisandre he just cuts off the rotten part and eats the rest.
- In The Fall of Hyperion, the TechnoCore representative tells Meina Gladstone that people declaring war on the AI would be rather like a person attacking his car due to news of an accident. Meina simply states her grandfather once did shoot a car that didn't start.
- Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: Klingon Captain Lokog gets into an argument with his lover about killing the Klingons who still have forehead crests. She uses the old Klingon phrase "a thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man." Lokog points out the flaw that she just failed to kill him, while they're naked.
- The Last Adventure of Constance Verity: Arthur Arcane tries to explain that Connie's wish to be "normal" isn't as simple or quantifiable as she thinks it is by referring to it as "flipping a switch." Connie then remarks that she knows several individuals with Time Machines. He then remarks that no "normal person" solves their problems with time travel.
