Take That / Literature

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• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: The entry for Planet of the Apes says that it was a project that could have gone horribly wrong, and points to the 2001 remake as an example of how.
• 1066 and All That mentions Queen Anne passing an "Occasional Conformity Law" that people only had to follow once in a while, and goes on at how this was the only law of its kind... until the speed limit. The whole of 1066 and All That was a Take That aimed at the then fashionable 'Whig History' style of teaching, which saw the whole of history as a history of progress towards the unimprovable liberal democracy. The book satirises this by mentioning 'The Disillusionment of the Monasteries', Bloody Mary being wrong to bring Catholicism back to England because 'England was bound to become protestant' and history coming to an end when America became Top Nation.
• The 1632 series is filled with various historical Take Thats. In the first book, for instance, it's clearly stated that William Shakespeare was a nobody and that his plays were written by someone else. This was walked back a bit in later books, however.
• Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians parodies fantasy in general, books and authors in general, and anything else the author can think of, but there are at least two specific Take Thats. One mentions a dinosaur eating the C section of the Science Fiction books out of annoyance with a certain author keeping a character alive because he didn't die in the film version. The other occurs when Alcatraz's grandfather comes to pick him up from his Muggle Foster Parents and wonders aloud what sense it would make to leave Alcatraz to live in a place he doesn't even like, where no one appreciates his magical powers and his enemies know exactly where to find him. Sound familiar?
• America (The Book):
  • Mocks Mallard Fillmore's use of Strawman Political rants in lieu of humor by posting a satirical Fillmore strip that begins with Fillmore talking about something that bugs him, and ending on the last panel with "Oops! I forgot to tell a joke!" Bruce Tinsley, the comic's author, didn't take this well, and proceeded to make a follow-up strip specifically blasting Jon Stewart.
  • They also included a more generalized take that against the news media for exercising the Worst News Judgment Ever during the lead-up to the Iraq war.
• Animorphs:
  • An interesting application leveled at its own TV show. The series is based on an "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers"-style paranoia and the TV show decided to indicate the invading aliens by having them stick their finger in their ear. The author then had one character lament that it would be so much easier if the villains would go around sticking their fingers in their ears.
  • #48 The Return, on describing the prospect of dramatizing the morphing process, Rachel lists a handful of studios who she's convinced "wouldn't get it right." She explicitly lists Nickelodeon, who produced the Animorphs TV series, which K. A. Applegate has been vocal in her distaste for.
  • Also, the Andalites were originally supposed to resemble stereotypical Grey aliens. Scholastic vetoed the original design and asked Applegate to be a little more "creative" so that if an Animorphs TV series was ever produced, they would have an interesting-looking alien race to showcase. She then went ahead and made them as complex as possible — out of spite — to the point where they proved virtually impossible to properly dramatize when said TV series finally came into fruition. Take that, indeed.
  • One of the most hated books is #28 The Experiment, which is loaded with plot holes and only exists to voice the ghostwriter's opinions about eating meat. Then the last chapter features the Animorphs all eating hamburgers, which was later revealed to be because KA Applegate didn't think much of the ghostwritten book and added that final chapter herself. The book's ghostwriter, Amy Garvey, was one of only two ghostwriters who were never allowed to write another Animorphs book again.
  • From The Proposal:
    UPN Executive: "You want to put this lunatic on the air? Try Fox News Channel, I'm not interested.
• After a messy divorce from her first husband, Laurell K. Hamiliton, author of Anita Blake, had love interest Richard (heavily based on him) grow increasingly "Jerkass" in mannerisms, and was only allowed to have sex with Anita when no one else in her "Rotisserie of Dicks" was available, and implied with the weight of a 16 ton anvil that he lost out on a very good relationship by leaving her. It must be noted, however, that, for many readers, this was something of an Insult Backfire.
• John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise: Parodied with the Attack Ads segment, one of which accuses Jonathan Coulton of being a bad catsitter (Coulton has personally appeared in ads for the book and at signings, and even wrote a song to promote the book, so it looks like Hodgman meant nothing by it), and "has only masturbated out a window once". This is turned Up to Eleven in More Information Than You Require, in which Hodgman claims that Coulton was created in a lab to be the perfect cat-slayer and was then Raised by Wolves. Probably still a joke.
• Aristophanes spent a lot of his Comedies doing this. Euripides is one of the most frequent targets. Socrates is a close second - The Clouds is all about what a sleazy fellow Socrates is, and there are various references to him in other plays, none at all flattering. It's often argued that Aristophanes' daemon-ization of Socrates was one reason the Athenians eventually condemned the philosopher to death. At least one critic holds that the Socrates of The Clouds and the Socrates of Plato are so incompatible that he is using a famous local philosopher to critique the Sophists rather than Socrates in particular, whether he was a Sophist or not. The real Socrates, with whom Aristophanes apparently hands out and is friends with in many Platonic dialogues, is merely unfortunate collateral damage toward that end. (For the record, the Socrates of Plato denies being a Sophist and frequently critiques them.) Aeschylus despite being more-respected is also mocked in "The Frogs", which has the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides mock each other's style of verse, Euripides for having predictable and repetitive verse, Aeschylus for being monotonous.
  • Cleon, though an important figure in his own right, is well-known for being a target of Aristophanes' plays. This is partially due to Cleon being Nouveau Riche, coming from a tanner's family. However Cleon was well-known for being very supportive of continuing the war with Sparta, even convincing the Athenians to turn down the possibility of a very beneficial peace, to say nothing of undermining the city's civil rights with secret police and informers. Legend has it that in his first major success, The Knights, he played Cleon himself (who is never directly named, but the chorus assures the audience they'll know who it is) on the stage, because he didn't want any other actor to risk their lives being the man under the mask after the play was finished. "The Wasps" caricatures him as a dog who prosecutes another dog for stealing a cheese because the dog didn't give any of the stolen cheese, one of Cleon's nicknames was the Watchdog of Athens.
• In Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, the Eight Family of the People, the Demons, adapted a romance novel called Lady Heatherington Smythe's Hedgerow as their gospel. Minerva Paradizo's comments on the novel could be a Take That to Twilight. Since Twilight was published in 2005 and Lost Colony in 2006, it is possible.
  Minerva: You remember that one, Papa? The most ridiculous fluffy romance you are ever likely to avoid like the plague. I loved it when I was six. It's all about a nineteenth-century English aristocrat. [...] Oh, who's the author... Carter Cooper Harbison. The Canadian girl. She was eighteen when she wrote it. Did absolutely no research. She had nineteenth-century nobles speaking like they were from the fifteen hundreds. Absolute tosh, so obviously a worldwide hit. [...] Well, it seems our old friend Abbot brought it home with him. The cheeky devil has managed to sell it as gospel truth. It seems he has the rest of the demons spouting Cooper Harbison as though she were an evangelist.
• The Berenstain Bears and the Mad Mad Mad Toy Craze is one big Author Tract against Beanie Babies.
• In Dave Barry's Big Trouble, one of the villains fires a bullet into a TV showing Jerry Springer. "About time" is another character's comment.
  • In 1990, Dave Barry ran a survey polling his readers on what America's national insect should be. One of the choices he suggested, Senator Jesse Helms, placed fifth.
    In closing, let me stress one thing, because I don't want to get a lot of irate condescending mail from insect experts correcting me on my facts: I am well aware that Senator Helms is, technically, a member of the arachnid family.
• Black Tide Rising: The short story "Ex Fide Absurdo" has the characters talking about how disappointing it is that the Zombie Apocalypse prevented the release of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. They agree it would have been fun to see those movies unless the filmmakers did something completely stupid like bringing the Emperor back to life, having a Darth Vader Expy, or killing off Han Solo. They then proceed to laugh at the idea that any filmmaker would be stupid enough to alienate the fanbase by killing Han.
• Black Widowers: In "The Missing Item", Asimov delivers one to Erich von Daniken, as well as the Ancient Astronauts trope in general, having one of his characters state that belief in these ideas shows just how gullible people are.
• According to some historians, the apocalyptic Book of Revelation was one giant Take That against the Roman Empire and Emperor Nero, who had exiled and imprisoned its author.
• The Borrible Trilogy features as the Borribles' natural enemies the Rumbles — giant, technologically savvy rodents with a penchant for fascism, and whose scathing resemblance to long-time British children's favorite The Wombles is of course pure coincidence. In the first volume of the trilogy, the rag-and-bone man Dewdrop and his son Ernie are vicious caricatures of Steptoe and Son.
• James Hogg's "The Brownie of Bodsbeck" and John Galt's Ringan Gilhaize both include Take That to Scott's Old Mortality. Hogg, Galt, and quite a few other people took offense at Scott's not-too-positive account of the Scottish Covenanters.
• Agatha Christie: It's been suggested that Captain Hastings was based on Agatha Christie's first husband. After the divorce, Hastings suffered galloping Flanderization, before being written out.
• In The Chronicles of Steve Stollberg, Miss Jackson asks her class what the company Disney has given them, and Harrison answers "A probably-crappy upcoming Star Wars sequel", referencing the Star Wars film The Force Awakens which is upcoming as of the story’s publishing. Miss Jackson says that he’s right, which is meant to voice the author’s opinion of the movie.
• In Constance Verity Saves the World, Connie considers enduring a commercial flight with screaming babies and a yapping shih tzu to be one of the most triumphant moments in her life, and she's endured more impossible odds on a weekly basis.
• Coraline is also a Take That at Down the Rabbit Hole fantasy. The whole Magical Land is just one evil Trap to lure children from our world and feed on them. The "Adventure" consists mostly of making it out alive, and with your eyes intact. And saving your parents.
• Roald Dahl:
  • The song for Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pretty much a two-page rant against television and in favor of books. Real subtle, Mr. Dahl.
    The most important thing we've learned
    As far as children are concerned
    Is never, never, ever let
    Them near a television set
    Or better yet, just don't install
    The idiotic thing at all
  • Tim Burton's film of the book reproduces a good chunk of the song word-for-word... which is a Broken Aesop, because Mike Teavee in the movie is addicted to video games, not TV, and his biggest problem is that he's an obnoxious know-it-all.
  • Note that in Charlie, Willy Wonka notes that that he thinks TV is okay "in small doses"; it's just that "children don't seem to take it in small doses."
  • The same kind of anti-TV sentiment appears in Matilda, too, albeit much more subtly. The heroine is a brilliant child who loves reading, while the parents are shallow, petty, and mean, spending all their free time watching TV.
• In Anne Ursu's Cronus Chronicles series, the incompetent, egomaniacal head god Zeus describes himself as "The Decider". You may remember former president George Bush calling himself the same thing.
• The character of Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is said to be based on Dickens' experience with Hans Christian Andersen, who mooched off him for over a month. In addition to remaining oblivious to Dicken's increasingly constant hints that it was time to go, Andersen often complained about the tea being cold, and remained confused when Dickens never replied to his attempts at correspondence.
• Delicate Condition has the protagonist and several other pregnant women experience serious symptoms. The novel is a Take That! to doctors who don't take them seriously or give unhelpful advice with Condescending Compassion like take baths, eat fruits and vegetables, take aspirin.
• The character of Karmazinov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons is a caricature of the author's contemporary and sometime friend, sometime rival and ideological opponent Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev. The whole novel, really, is a "tract-novel", polemicizing against contemporary political and ideological movements that Dostoevsky regarded as dangerous or abhorrent.
• Quite common in The Devil's Dictionary. For example, in the definition for Incompossible: "Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man."
• Discworld:
  • A small Take That occurs in the novel, Night Watch Discworld, where the narrator points out the sheer stupidity/illogical nature of the famous "They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!" speech of Braveheart. Amusingly undermined later, when the revolutionary who kept using the battlecry gets shot up and killed... and gets back up, making the boast entirely literal.
  • Susan Sto Helit makes a rather blunt jab against The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland during her first appearance in Soul Music, and Vimes has turned one of Sherlock Holmes' explanations on itself with his own brand of thought.
  • Susan Sto Helit takes a not-so-veiled shot at Mary Poppins in Hogfather, when she is working as a nanny. She also thinks that Jack and the Beanstalk's moral is that you can get away with ecoterrorism, theft, and murder as long as people think that you're a hero.
  • And Susan's appearance in Thief of Time seems to be a jab at overly-lenient "progressive" schools.
  • Also in Hogfather are several from Death himself, directed at various 'uplifting' Christmas stories. The best, however, makes it into the film adaptation, in which he rips apart the idea that the spirit of Hogswatch is somehow bolstered by a little girl freezing to death in the street.
• The Divine Comedy:
  • Dante's personal and political enemies, as well as historical villains — even some of his friends — often end up in Hell. One of the most notable examples is none other than the then-current Pope, Bonifacius VIII, of whom Dante was not a big fan. This was a big "screw you" to Boniface and the town of Florence for exiling him (in an order that wasn't repealed until 2008). The pope's not in Hell yet, but it's stated that he will be.
  • Dante himself gets one when he meets Beatrice at the top of Purgatorio. While he expects a tender and loving reunion, she angrily lambasts him and tears him apart, calling all of heaven to bear witness to the fact that Dante doesn't love her like he thinks he does.
  • The Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law, Ali, are seen in the Circle of Hell reserved for schismatics, cut in half, a reference to how they supposedly divided God's domain; most Western Christians of Dante's day didn't realize that Islam was not originally a Christian sect, but started as something different, and that the bulk of its original followers had not been Christians before conversion.^note It is true that in the conquests after Muhammad, many Christians in North Africa and what used to be the Roman East did convert to Islam, but that happened centuries after the conquest as a result of careerism and tax avoidance (Muslims were preferred for government positions and paid lower taxes in the various early Muslim empires) as well as simple cultural exchange.
• A Dog's Purpose pokes fun at certain dog training methods that insist the owner be "dominant" over their dog. A human attempts this by turning Ellie onto her back to make sure she that she knows who's the boss. Ellie doesn't understand the reasoning for this and just thinks it's either a game or a punishment.
• Don Quixote: Cervantes uses his book to attack several people and institutions of the XVII century, always in a funny manner:
  • Unfortunately for him, Cervantes was not a very known author when he published Don Quixote at 1605, and given the extremely difficult Spanish literary environment of his time, he didn't get any commendatory verses for his book from any (famous) author, so he wrote a dialog in the Preface of the Author, Part I, where Cervantes explains this setback and despairs to publish Don Quixote. His friend advised him to pretend that Cervantes has done extensive research to impress his audience, when in fact he will take advantage of some tricks used by several renowned Spanish writers of his time (Cervantes never mentions names so as not to disturb famous Spanish authors like Lope de Vega).
    • The first advice of his friend is to make himself (Cervantes) the commendatory verses, and then claim they were made from some famous or powerful characters of his time, even claiming that some of them were famous poets, when the truth is that a lot of the powerful Spanish people of his time could not be poets, and even were illiterate.
      "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with."
    • The second advice of his friend is to include sentences of Latin that seem to be profound (and so impress his lectors), but in reality, those Latin sentences were very common and any author of his time could find them with very little effort.
      "As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro; and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it...With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and profit."
    • Cervantes also mocks the authors attributed to another author famous lines by way of Popcultural Osmosis, despite the fact that those lines were never uttered by them:
      ... when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro; and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it.
• In the foreword of Dora Wilk Series, the author has a bit of fun with The Doll, which in her home country is considered either their best novel or the worst bane of students, depending on who you ask:
  In a novel, it isn't good to derail your story - unless you plan to stroll on Paris' streets in a black turtleneck and monologue about streams of consciousness and moments in life. I like black, Paris' streets sound nice as well, but the rest makes my eyelids get heavier and heavier.
• A critic named Platt wrote some rather contemptuous and, in David Drake's opinion, ill-informed remarks on one of Drake's early stories. Since then, people named "Platt" in Drake's books are invariably unpleasant in one or more ways — usually being stupid; unsavory sexual tastes sometimes come in as well.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Jim Butcher did not like Child's Play. When a bunch of nasty fae take on the shapes of horror movie monsters in the book Proven Guilty, Chucky's Captain Ersatz gets smashed effortlessly, and someone says this:
    "Personally, I never understood how anyone could have found that thing frightening to begin with."
  • Someone also gets snarky about "tortured, sentimental vampires" in a book released not too long after the The Twilight Saga craze started.
    "Some of the bloody fools I've known can't stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they're just like us. Bloody idiots."
  • And to make it even better, the audiobooks are read by James Marsters. For that particular character, he pretty much just used his Spike voice.
  • The outsides of the books always show Harry with a fedora to match his duster. The inside of the books have been getting progressively louder about Harry's dislike of hats, and in Dead Beat he makes fun of someone specifically for wearing "an honest-to-God fedora." The issue began when the books shifted from a first-edition paperback to first-edition hardback release, with a change in cover artists. The cover artist had not read the novels yet when he got the commission, so he had to work off the publisher's description which mistakenly included "an honest-to-god fedora". For consistency (as well as being a Running Gag that both the author and artist gleefully participate in), the hat's remained on the cover and more and more jokes have appeared in the novels about the hats.
  • Skin Game includes the line "Television never does the original stories justice," an apparent reference to the television adaptation.
• It's apparent that David Eddings had some issues with academia, and went to the effort to portray universities and professors in particular as arrogant, aloof and disconnected from reality.
  • In The Belgariad 'Verse, characters mostly dismissed out of hand any literature from an academic source, and a visit to the Melcene University, largest in the world, was almost entirely fruitless because almost no one there had the slightest inclination to put their knowledge to any actual use.
  • In The Elenium, an entire college of physicians is easily bribed to refuse treatment to a main character, except for one old rascal who only helps because of the chagrin his colleagues will feel when the bribe money doesn't come through, thanks to his intervention.
  • And in The Tamuli, set in the same 'Verse, the main Tamul university exists primarily as a propaganda machine for the empire.
• Ben Elton:
  • A successful writer for television, he attacks reality TV in his novels Dead Famous and Chart Throb.
  • And books like Popcorn and Blind Faith contain increasingly random and non-plot-related Take Thats at any number of things, including New Age spiritualism, Soundtrack Dissonance in movies, bloggers, MySpace, and a really ridiculous amount of pagespace in Blind Faith is given to bitching about women who shave or wax their pubic hair and men who find that attractive.
• In Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, Helen, the violinist and the only woman in the protagonist's string quartet, remarks that "In the Quartetto Italiano, the woman was serially married to all three of the men."
• Euripides' Electra mocks the signs that Electra used to infer Orestes' presence in the earlier The Libation Bearers of Aeschylus — e.g., the idea that Electra could find one of Orestes' hairs and recognize it as his. Not surprisingly, Take That is Older Than Feudalism.
• Evensong, the second book in the Village Tales series, has, as one of its main plots, a local crisis over social housing plans in an idyllic village. The rather acidulated (and Tory) Chairwoman of the County Council's Regional Planning Committee, Dame Sarah Penruddocke, wearing a large lampshade, gets off an In-Universe Take That! towards The Casual Vacancy:
  "No questions having been received, I shall now briefly explain the rules of public participation and the procedure we shall follow. This appears to me to be specially important in this session in light of one agenda item, the public interest in it, and the really quite extraordinary ideas, spread by that lady novelist, of how, precisely, planning applications are decided."
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham, he quotes the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a blunderbuss, which concludes with the statement that it is "now superseded in civilized countries by more sophisticated firearms" and says that as the hero's country hadn't been civilized yet, the blunderbuss was the only sort of gun around and rare at that. A Take That to the O.E.D.'s editors and to those who equate a "civilized" society with one that has the best guns.
• The Fault in Our Stars:
  • When Hazel describes having sex with Augustus for the first time, she mentions that "no headboards were broken".
  • The entire book, as well as An Imperial Affliction, is designed to be one big Take That! to the Glurge that most cancer stories are filled with.
• The Flight Engineer: Using an in-universe movie as a proxy, The Privateer by S. M. Stirling and James Doohan delivers a nice whack on the head to the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series where Space Is Noisy was taken to an absurd conclusion: to wit, that the Enterprise could be stealthy by running silent, and then be given away by a crewman dropping something.
• In Tom Holt's Flying Dutch, when the crew of immortal sailors has gotten a new ship and a new immortal crew-member, they decide to go to Reykjavik, on the grounds that they have all the time in the world...and want to save the good bits until later.
• Horror author Johnny Mains received a negative review for his first collection of short stories, which were described as too "cosy and mild" for the horror genre. He went on to publish a gorier second collection titled Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types as a Take That at the writer of the review.
• The Warhammer 40,000 — Gaunt's Ghosts novel Straight Silver can be seen as subtly mocking those who consider the Imperial Guard to be little more than a poorly-led Redshirt Army.
  • Similarly, the Ciaphas Cain series can be seen as a slight Take That to the over the top portrayal of Commissars and their role in the Imperial Guard.
• Gone:
  Lana: "Maybe you're attracted to dangerous unbalanced people, but listen up: I'm not Edward and you're not Bella."
  Sanjit: "I don't understand what that means."
• The Great Gatsby mocks the white-supremacist beliefs of a thinly-veiled version of Lothrop Stoddard's then-famous tract The Rising Tide of Color. In the same vein, Tom extols the virtues of the "Nordics" despite his last name of Buchanan, demonstrating the hypocrisy of many people of similar views.^note For quite some time in Anglo-Saxon society, the Irish were considered barely one step above African-Americans, and certainly not of the "proper" white race.
• Harry Potter:
  • The scene involving the destruction of the Slytherin Locket from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is seen by many fans as a giant Take That to the still-vocal segment of Potterfen who continued to see Harry and Hermione as destined soul mates, despite "Anvil-sized hints" as to Hermione and Ron eventually hooking up. It turns out that Voldemort is a Harmony shipper.
  • Another Take That in the series could be the character of Romilda Vane, a parody of every PotterSue who thought Harry would fall in love with her.
  • The character of Rita Skeeter is by Rowling's own admission an extended Take That at those portions of the British media obsessed with the personal lives of celebrities, whose speculations about her own life she refutes on a section of her official website called the "Rubbish Bin".
  • Also, the art of divination is considered trickery. Even in the magic world(!).
  • Dolores Umbridge and the actions of the Ministry in the fifth book could be seen as a Take That to the Moral Guardians who've railed against the series.
  • She states categorically in her Rubbish Bin that Lockhart was not based on her ex-husband, despite some rumors, and that she considers this speculation very hurtful. However, Lockhart was actually based on another person; she doesn't specify who exactly, but Lockhart is barely an exaggeration of him.
  • She brought out a book called The Tales of Beedle the Bard that's set in the same universe. It is presented as a collection of wizard fairy tales with editorial notes from Dumbledore. In the notes to one story, he observes that some readers had thought themselves cleverer than others and believed the author was leaving hidden messages for them in the text.
  • There's also the offhandedly mentioned character Beatrix Bloxam, who felt that children were too young and tender for Beedle's fairy tales and rewrote them as senselessly corny stories meant for three-year-olds. The notes say that absolutely nobody liked her work. A chocolate frog card in one of the licensed video games mentions that Bloxam's writing is capable of causing uncontrolled vomiting. Not to mention the aside regarding the role of women in Fairy Tales, as opposed to the superior heroines of Wizarding — that is to say, J. K. Rowling's — fairy tales.
  • The 6th book is also one big Take That at the idea of Voldemort as a once-sweet kid mistreated in the muggle world and shunned in the wizarding world, and thus becoming evil. Specifically, the idea that Riddle grew up in an Orphanage of Fear is turned on its head — it was an Orphanage of Fear — because of Riddle himself: all the other children feared him!
  • The Quidditch World Cup in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is clearly a huge Take That! at critics of the rules of Quidditch. Catching the Snitch gives the team who catches it an extra 150 points (equivalent to fifteen extra goals), and fans saw from the first book that that means essentially none of the other players matter but the Seeker. As such, the Cup involves a highly contrived scenario in which the Irish team are just that good and the Bulgarian team (aside from the Seeker) are just that outmatched that Ireland still wins even though Bulgaria catches the Snitch.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • In The Rolling Stones (1952), you have to wonder if some of Roger Stone's rantings about his much-hated science-fiction show contract had anything to do with Heinlein's experiences working on Destination Moon, or Tom Corbet Space Cadet.
  • Lord of the Flies got its own Take That in the form of Robert A. Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky: Teenagers on a survival test get stranded on an alien world. The selfish, aggressive, independent ones manage to get themselves killed, while the cooperative ones willing to help each other out manage to build a functioning society by the time they're rescued.
• Ernest Hemingway: Upon hearing Gertrude Stein's quote, "A rose is a rose is a rose," Ernest Hemingway responded, "A bitch is a bitch is a bitch." Mind you, that might not have been what Stein said.^note The original poem's line is "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
• While the first two books aren't too bad in this regard, the third book of His Dark Materials is a massive Take That to organized religion. The author has himself stated that he hates the Narnia books, and wanted to essentially write an atheist version of them, so they were basically a Take That against those in general.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy:
  • A human named "Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings" is credited as the writer of the very worst poetry in the universe (it's stated to be even worse than Vogon poetry, which is a near-impossible feat to top in-universe). This is a disguised reference to a real individual (Paul Neil Milne Johnson) whose name was actually used in the version originally broadcast on radio but altered in all later versions due to legal threats.
  • The short story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" first published in 1986, ends with a not-terribly-stealthy-at-all Take That at Ronald Reagan.
  • In Life, The Universe, and everything, there's The Running Gag about Paul McCartney, noting that the royalties from even a single Macca song would enable him to buy first a medium-sized town, then the whole of Hampshire (one of England's most affluent counties) and finally, should Macca hit on a theme half as lovely as the one hummed by the Krikkiters, escalating to ownership of massive swathes of the South of England. This derives from performing rights issues for the LP version of H2G2, where Trillian faces death and oblivion whilst humming A Day in the Life. McCartney's copyright lawyers hammered Adams and his production company for serious money, for the use of just two bars of a Beatles' song. Sung by somebody else. Adams worked this experience of being fleeced into this novel.
  • According to Adams, the characters of Shooty and Bang Bag were modeled after Starsky & Hutch, who "claimed that they did care about people being shot, so they crashed their cars into them instead."
• In the H.I.V.E. Series book Dreadnought, Wing and Otto are talking. Wing makes a sarcastic comment, to which Otto replies "Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit". Wing retorts with, "I thought funny pictures of cats from the Internet was the lowest form of wit." Otto concedes, saying, "Okay, that's the lowest form of wit, but sarcasm comes in a close second."
• Hollow Kingdom (2019): When S.T. is describing various aspects of human culture to other animals, the plot of Inception is denounced as something that's impossible to explain.
• David Weber's Storm from the Shadows contains a very obvious Take That for anyone who frequents his forums — by explicitly calling anyone who thought that the hundreds of years of technology advantage that the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven have over the Solarian League has rendered their massive fleet obsolete. Weber apparently spent a long time battling the horrible ideas of his forum members. In Torch Of Freedom, he uses most of them in a single battle that ends up one-sided.
• The Hunger Games: In-universe, the mockingjay becomes an increasingly unsubtle one of these towards the Capitol.
• A short story by Zora Neale Hurston features a poor black woman who sells songs to a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Elvis Presley. Later, Elvis returns to ask what her songs were about. The woman insists that the lyrics are self-explanatory, but he doesn't have the life experience or character to understand them. Hurston was a musician herself, and obviously not happy by the way white performers co-opted black music.
• In the short story "Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt, Pete discovers a video store from an Alternate Universe called Impossible Dreams Video. He wanted to see Stanley Kubrick's version of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence "without Steven Spielberg's sentimental touch turning the movie into Pinocchio." After he is unable to watch the Alternate Universe version of The Magnificent Ambersons, Pete watches the version from his own universe "with its butchered continuity, its studio-mandated happy ending, tacked-on so as not to depress wartime audiences." He also describes I, Robot as a "forgettable action movie with Will Smith."
• InCryptid: In Imaginary Numbers, Sarah complains about sexist comic book fans, which Seanan McGuire has likely had experience with, as a writer for Spider-Gwen.
  Sarah: If I want to subject myself to toxic people, I'll just read the comments on literally any article about female-led comic book properties.
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's joint retelling of the Inferno in the imaginatively titled Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) follows in the same vein, condemning to Hell people who supported banning diet foods, people who shut down nuclear power plants based on bogus science, and a teacher who knowingly and wrongly suggested that some her students had dyslexia because they were hard to teach. And of course, they deliver a massive Take That to Kurt Vonnegut for supposedly being a terrible writer. They followed up with a sequel, Escape From Hell, which includes attacks aimed at the New Orleans authorities over Hurrican Katrina.
• Invisible Man doesn't even bother veiling its insult to Horatio Alger. Most other insults fall under No Celebrities Were Harmed, but are fairly obvious if you know enough about the time period.
• James Bond:
  • Ian Fleming named the titular villain in the James Bond novel Goldfinger after architect Erno Goldfinger, whose work Fleming despised. When Erno threatened to sue, Fleming suggested changing the name of the villain to Goldprick, instead.
  • Francisco Scaramanga (who is described to be a possible homosexual) in The Man with the Golden Gun was named after George Scaramanga, Fleming's fellow student in Eton whom he had animosity towards to.
• One of the oldest examples of this comes in the very first English dictionary by Samuel Johnson.
  • He defined 'oats' as 'a grain which is principally fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' The retort was "England has beautiful horses, Scotland has beautiful women."
  • Samuel Johnson was full of anti-Scots lines. When he was first introduced to James Boswell, Boswell said "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." Johnson's reply: "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."
  • Johnson was one of the great Take That champions of his time. His letter to Lord Chesterfield is a masterpiece of Take That: an enormous "go to hell" couched in the most ostensibly respectful language imaginable. ^note Chesterfield agreed to be Johnson's "patron". He did nothing for seven years, during which Johnson experienced some of the leanest years of his career, then right before the book came out, he printed a "puff piece" that puffed himself more than the book or its compiler.
• In an interview, British novelist Jilly Cooper admitted that a goat in her latest novel, Jump!, was named Chisholm after the critic Anne Chisholm. Cooper explained that Chisholm's offence had been to reveal too much of the plot of her earlier novel, Rivals, in a review, rather than being a Caustic Critic. She added that "he's a terribly nice goat."
• Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist was criticized for the similarities between Ira Zuckerman's harpy of a wife and Roth's own ex-wife. Roth defended himself by claiming the character wasn't so bad, only manipulated by her daughter - by that logic, Roth's book was a Take That! against his own stepdaughter.
• Stephen King:
  • IT contains a flashback to one of the protagonists' college years where he took a Creative Writing class. The teacher and the other students are all snooty, pretentious jerks who see no value in any story that isn't some kind of symbolism-filled indictment of the evils of modern America. The protagonist makes a rousing speech to them about how stories should be good entertainment, and don't have to be anything more. It's hard to see it as anything other than a point that King really wanted to make. King wrote that he met people like that in his book about writing.
  • His interview with MSNBC has him stating flat-out that in his opinion, Stephenie Meyer 'can't write worth a damn'.
  • The finale to The Dark Tower septology includes a scene in which the main characters have to save Stephen King from dying in his real-life near-death accident. The guy who hit him is portrayed as a high, drunk idiot who is fighting with his dogs over meat instead of driving at the time. As a side note, the real Bryan Smith had been dead for four years by the time the book was published. Overdosed, possibly on purpose, on King's birthday.
• One caller from Shreveport in Kitty Goes to War tells Kitty Norville that Speedy Mart owner Harold Franklin can control the weather and causes storms wherever he goes. The caller says that Franklin should be brought to justice for Hurricane Katrina. Kitty notes that he isn't the only one who thinks someone should be brought to justice for what happened to New Orleans, but most people are thinking about events that happened after the hurricane, not the storm itself.
• Boris Vian's L'ecume des jours is full of vicious-seeming Take Thats at Jean-Paul Sartre (called "Jean-Sol Partre"), culminating in him being murdered and his books burned. However, Vian and Sartre were, and remained, good friends.
• Several in British statesman Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son:
  • The Earl describes the Arabian Nights as "Oriental ravings and extravagances".
  • He also includes one against Samuel Johnson in letter 132.
  • "I love 'la belle nature'; Rembrandt paints caricatures" (letter 142):
  • "There [at the theological society of the Sorbonne] unintelligible points are debated with passion, though they can never be determined by reason."
  • "I discovered, that, of the five hundred and sixty [in the House of Commons], not above thirty could understand reason." (letter 196)
• The Last Adventure of Constance Verity:
  • Dana invites Connie to a poetry slam at a local coffee shop, the scene portrayed under a thick layer of hipster stereotypes (self-important weirdos in funny hats reading badly written spoken word about capitalism and the patriarchy), Connie quickly losing her patience with a barista trying (and failing) to talk her into ordering one of their fancy lattes.
  • When Tia deconstructs Connie's collapsing relationship with one of her ex's (Trevor), she points out how judgemental she got, particularly in his taste in movies. When Connie points out that his favorite movie was Ghostbusters II, Tia relents that it's a "big strike".
• William Golding's Lord of the Flies was a Take That at several Utopian Kids' Wilderness Epic books of the Children Are Innocent persuasion, most famously Insu-Pu by Mira Lobe from 1947. Her book tells the tale of eleven European children who are stranded on an island, and manage to build a functional society, and even the more aggressive children manage to fit in afterwards. Another is The Coral Island, a popular children's book about three young men who live out an idyllic life on a desert island before being threatened by "the savages". Golding took umbrage at the racist undertones, but also at the idea that savagery was some sort of external factor that threatened poor Anglicized civilization rather than an internal factor that could be cultivated under the proper conditions.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Depending on how you look at it, the Scouring of the Shire at the end could be seen as a rather vicious Take That against the concept of Happily Ever After, as well as of a reflection of Tolkien's opinion of industrialization.
  • There are a few take thats against Macbeth, all taken from Act IV, Scene i, when the Witches tell Macbeth their prophecies of his death.
    • The Ents' besiegement of Isengard and the Witch-King's defeat by Éowyn are references to the prophecy that it will not happen until "Great Birnam Wood...shall come against him", only for Macduff's army uses their branches as camouflage. Tolkien always hated the fact that the wood which came to Dunsinane was just men in disguise, so he wrote a scene with a real marching wood.
    • The "none of woman born shall harm him" bit where Macbeth is killed by a man who was not born, but removed from his mother's womb via what we now call C-section, is referenced by the Witch-King, who can be killed by "no living man," and is killed by a woman.
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum: Both the original novel and its film adaptation are one giant middle finger to the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung and its journalistic practices.
• In The Lost World (1995), some mooks try Jurassic Park (1993)'s tactic of staying still to avoid being seen by a T. rex (which was present in the book, but implied to be the result of frog DNA, not a natural handicap). Predictably, they get eaten. The main characters, who are watching this through a camera, comment that this behavior was based on incorrect information, and suggest the T. rex in the first book just wasn't hungry. The scene in general feels like a take-that against the movie in that regard. One of the main characters even calls the paleontologist who suggested the T-Rex had motion-based sight an "idiot".
• Mediochre Q Seth Series: In The Good, the Bad and the Mediochre, Mediochre Q Seth has, in his expansive library, a pile of Edgar Rice Burroughs books with an attached post-it note reminding himself not to bother reading any of them again.
• A Memory of Flames contains some pretty unsubtle jabs towards people who think that life would be so much better if dragons were in it, or want to become dragon riders/dragon soul mates, as per its deconstruction of the Dragon Rider trope. This is especially apparent in the character Jaslyn.
  Jaslyn: (to herself, but the dragon, Silence, can read her thoughts) Silence! This is my Silence! Why is my Silence so cold and hostile?
  Silence: Because you are my enemy, Princess Jaslyn. You would like to have me as I was. Stupified. I can see it in you, a great desire. I am not the creature you once flew. I am not some beast of burden. I am a dragon, and dragons do not serve men. Find another creature to be your slave. Be gone.
  Jaslyn: Could we not live together? Work together?
  Silence: Why? What could you possibly offer us?
• Misery: The entire premise of the book (a Battleaxe Nurse kidnaps her favorite author after he crashes his car, finds out that he plans to kill off her favorite Victorian romance novel heroine Misery Chastain in his next book so he can focus on his new gritty crime thriller instead, promptly loses her shit and demands that he write a new novel that brings Misery Back from the Dead and resolves her romance plots, and threatens to torture and kill the poor guy if he doesn't go along) is a massive Take That to Loony Fans, Fix Fic writers, cheesy romance novels, writers who use Deus ex Machina and Cliffhanger Copout...
• Monster by Walter Dean Myers is a gigantic indictment against the dehumanizing criminal justice system in America. The law side cares less about justice and more about winning cases and bolstering their reputations, the cases aren’t about the facts but whoever can manipulate the case in their favor, and prisons are absolute nightmare factories that don’t rehabilitate but turn out more criminals and the punishments are harsh, even to children. Even if the reader believes Steve is guilty, his involvement was minuscule yet he is faced with the real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
• Monster Hunter International contains this one against The Twilight Saga.
  "What is it with people who think vampires are sexy?" "I blame it on Twilight." In real life, vampires don't sparkle unless they're on fire.
• Monster of the Month Club: In-Universe, Aunt Poppy did this when she named the family goat Nancy after one of her ex-husbands' new wives.
• Monster of the Year: The whole book is one to censorship. In-universe, Mike and Kevver decide to make a monster billboard as a shot at BAM for trying to shut down Mrs. Adams' business.
• More Horowitz Horror by Anthony Horowitz contains a story in which a disgruntled Author Avatar plots to kill Darren Shan, jealous at Shan's superior literary success. This was an affectionate response to Shan using a Horowitz Expy as a villain in one of his books, the two being friends in real life. Another story in More Horowitz Horror contains much less affectionate examples aimed at JK Rowling and Charlie Higson (author of the Young Bond books which competed with Horowitz's own Alex Rider).
• My Godawful Life by Michael Kelly, a parody of Misery Lit:
  • All characters react with extreme horror at the mention of Northumberland. Being forced to live in Northumberland is described as far and away the most horrifying event in the main character's life, even though he's suffered every kind of misery imaginable. He marvels at the poverty and degradation suffered by a woman he met there, whose husband forced her to live in Northumberland "with only a £70 000 book advance to tide her over." This is a Take That at the "Wife in the North" blog, written by wealthy middle-class Judith O'Reilly about her struggle to adjust when she moved from London to rural Northumberland with her family. Kelly has also admitted in interviews that he dislikes O'Reilly and her blog.
  • Also, the chapter about being abused by nuns in an Irish convent school is probably a dig at Kathy O'Beirne, the author of several memoirs about her abuse in a Magdalen Laundry.
• The Name of the Game (Elrod): The Boogieman is a Perpetually Protean demon who's forms are increasingly scarier than the last "like Michael Jackson."
• The famous quote of Sir Isaac Newton, "If I have seen further than other men, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants" was nothing more than a veiled Take That to a colleague and rival, Robert Hooke who was, shall we say, vertically challenged. Newton was really not that nice a man; then again, supposedly Hooke wasn't either. By modern standards, although both were geniuses, they were also...loosely hinged.
• Nightside: In The Bride Wore Black Leather, when message-bearing ravens keep arriving at John's office, Cathy deliberately lets their messages expire, ensuring they won't return to their source and she can find them good homes where they'll no longer be exploited as couriers. Probably a Take That at Harry Potter.
• In-Universe example: In Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse, companies that make flying carpets and car companies take pot shots at each other in their ads. (The main character has a magic horse that turns into a car.) Hell also does ads that are sometimes Take That at Heaven. Out of Universe: Could Anthony be doing a Take That to advertisement in general?
• P.J. O'Rourke's writing style is filled with them, due to his Gonzo Journalism roots. One particularly particular example:
  "Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as "the Bob Dylan of the Philippines." This is unfair, since he's good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense."
• Paradise Regained, the follow-up epic to Paradise Lost, has a rather powerful shot against Rome that may be interpreted as the Protestant Milton's attack on the Catholic Church. With Paradise Lost itself, the ancient gods of the Egyptians and Babylonians are listed among the forces of Hell.
• China Miéville's Perdido Street Station had a part where the heroes hire some professional warriors, who are obviously modeled on both D&D type adventurers and post-Tolkien fantasy heroes. They're greedy and uncaring, and almost all of them are killed horribly. That said, Miéville said in an interview with Dragon that he had played D&D when he was younger, and that it was an Affectionate Parody. And let's face it — D&D characters do have a tendency to die horrible deaths on a regular basis! Sometimes more than once.
• William Burroughs' The Place of Dead Roads contains some monumental Take Thats on England in general and W. Somerset Maugham in particular.
• Edgar Allan Poe:
  • In response to criticisms that his stories didn't have morals, he wrote the humorous short story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", which is a Take That against both the entire idea that stories need to have morals and against some of his contemporaries that endorsed the idea. It combines a Spoof Aesop with a patently and intentionally ludicrous Space Whale Aesop — technically being a "story with a moral", as they insisted on, but not what they meant at all — while taking jabs at specific literary figures of the time along the way.
  • The victim in the short story "The Cask of Amontillado" resembles a then-popular author whose most recent novel had featured a No Celebrities Were Harmed insert of Poe as a comical villain.
• In-story example: In Christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping, God made humankind as one big Take That to the demons and the djinn for being able to create and for being free. As the King of the Djinn remarks: “Jehovah is infinite in his snottiness.”
• In the President's Vampire novel Red, White, and Blood, President Curtis wants Cade to accompany him on the campaign trail. His partner Zach questions if that is a good idea, as the scariest thing voters would expect is a mention of Sarah Palin.
• The Priory of the Orange Tree is a feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon by a British author who developed a strong skepticism about her nation's patron saint in childhood, particularly George coercing the city by offering to kill the dragon only if they converted to Christianity. The book is set in several Fantasy Counterpart Cultures a thousand years after the slaying (Cleolind, Kalyba, and Galian/George are all historical figures). The nation of Lasia (the city from the original tale) sees Galian as a thuggish fraud and are particularly disgusted by the fact that Galian offered to fight the dragon only if Cleolind would marry him. The historical Chickification of Cleolind reflects how retellings of the George story often reduced the princess' role into a passive observer who might not even be named.
• One story in Rev. Wilbert Awdry's The Railway Series contains a jab at Clarence Reginald Dalby, a former illustrator for the books, a jab that had previously been delivered to him personally by the author. After Percy arrives late one time too many, Thomas complains that he crawls about like a "green caterpillar with red stripes". Dalby, in spite of graduating from Leicester Art College, was an incompetent illustrator who frequently got the engines' proportions wrong even though he had reference pictures and drew things inconsistently. The last book he illustrated was "Percy the Small Engine", in which Percy was drawn stretched-out and somewhat short. Awdry was not happy, and told Dalby that Percy looked like a green caterpillar with red stripes. Dalby, naturally, did not take that well and he quit.
• The Reluctant King: The folk tales Jorian tells often have morals that seem like veiled satires of ideas such as welfare solving crime (since criminals are supposedly all just motivated by want) or the disaster that renouncing material concerns as a Hindu-like sage advises would result in.
• Romeo and Juliet: Some theories have it that the line "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was a Take That to the Rose Theater, rival to the Globe Theater, the one for which Shakespeare produced his plays. The Rose Theater also had a sewage problem, so this is very likely. Though it seems more likely it was meant as a reference to the War of the Roses. Of course, there are examples older than television.
• Roys Bedoys:
  • Roys hates a movie called The Lion Prince, which is a parody of The Lion King (1994).
  • In "It's Spirit Week, Roys Bedoys!", Roys hates a Star Trek parody called Starry Trek.
  • In "Don't Get Distracted, Roys Bedoys!", Roys is seen disliking a Spider-Man parody called Webman.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events.
  • Lemony Snicket takes some not-so-subtle jabs at various political figures via Sunny's "baby talk": There's "busheney" for "You're an evil man" in The Slippery Slope and "scalia" in The Penultimate Peril, both of which have somewhat unkind translations.
  • Then there's his association of poet Edgar Guest with the villains in The Grim Grotto, even stating outright that it's because his poetry sucked in a Sickeningly Sweet way. Kind of jarring in a series so focused on Black-and-Gray Morality.
• Henry Fielding's Shamela is a barely concealed Take That at Pamela by Samuel Richardson, which was wildly popular at the time. The introduction, for good measure, was a Take That at its fans. Apparently on a roll, Fielding followed up with Joseph Andrews, which is another mocking parody of Pamela, though a bit more subtle.
  • The intro also mocks Colley Cibber, a famous playwright at the time.
• Sisterhood Series: Hoo, boy! Fern Michaels is clearly very fond of this and is not subtle about it either! Weekend Warriors fires one at three rapists who happen to be dentists. Payback fires this at a Democrat senator and a Health Maintenance Organization (which is Republican, by the way). Vendetta have some unflattering things to say about China and its people. The Jury throws one at a Domestic Abuser, who happens to be the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States - and his good pal! Free Fall pokes at Hollywood. Hide And Seek shoots one at the FBI. Fast Track hurls this at newspapers like the Washington Post, and the Department of Homeland Security. Final Justice essentially says that Las Vegas casino security teams are one step away from the Gestapo and the Mafia. Under The Radar says that polygamists in Utah are a bunch of pedophiles and cultists, as well as mocking the National Guard. Razor Sharp fires one at johns/pimps, and portrays congressmen, senators and the Vice President himself as part of this group. Vanishing Act throws one at identity thieves. Home Free fires one at the CIA. The POTUS is never given a name, but it's a Republican man, and might be none other than George W. Bush! FM is a 79-year-old woman going on 80, and it seems that she is angry at the world, and probably sees a lot of topics as those bratty kids that won't stay off her lawn!
• The Val/Caelan subplot in Skulduggery Pleasant is a Take That at The Twilight Saga / Deconstruction of the vampire romance genre. Caelen insists he isn't the brooding vampire type. He also believes that Stalking is Love and makes the heroine confused. One a whole, he just acts very stalkerish and creepy.
  • Death Bringer ends with Fletcher calling Caelan a moany little whinge-bag and then killing him when he turns into a vampire and attacks.
    • Edward and Bella are mentioned by name. By Valkyrie. While she is dumping him. The chapter in which Caelan gets his Yandere on was actually called My Twilight. Subtlety is for the weak.
• Song at Dawn: In-universe. Al-Hisba sends one to the Archbishop. When asked why he saved Dragonetz from belladonna poison, he replies: "I am a physician. It is not permitted to me to kill nor to let someone die." A bishop for a Thou Shall Not Kill religion would be keenly aware of this, and indeed he winces.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In A Feast for Crows, Jaime considers trying to practice jousting by using his left hand to hold a lance and putting a shield on his right arm since his right hand has been cut off by then. But he quickly dismisses the thought because a jouster's foe is always to his left, and "a shield on his right arm would prove about as useful as nipples on his breastplate."
  • In A Dance with Dragons, someone proves to be Harmful to Minors, murdering the nine-year-old Walder... of House Frey, the In-Universe Scrappy because of their role in the Red Wedding. Lord Wyman Manderly — who probably ordered the murder — has a response that Crosses the Line Twice: "Had he lived he would have grown up to be a Frey."
• Sonic the Hedgehog and the Silicon Warriors:
  • Two of Sonic's animal friends become convinced that they are world-famous plumbers who must save a princess by jumping on people's heads. The descriptions are less than flattering: "...I musta wear a stupido hat and daft-looking blue overalls, and I musta have a big bushy moustache, and I musta run very slowly and say daft things-a in a silly fake accent..."
  • Later, when asked if he would like to play Super Gimbo Land, Sonic is insulted; as if he would ever play something so slow!
• In Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, an alien species is given a copy of The Bible... and a copy of a book written by the protagonist. Guess which one got used for firewood and which one was the foundation of a new religion. The guys who wrote the Bible apparently have nothing on Ender Wiggin. Interestingly, Card himself is known for his conservative, Mormon beliefs, the Book of Mormon being another book of scripture Mormons use in addition to the Bible, and which is the foundation of their religion. However, by the time of the sequel, Xenocide, most of the aliens have been converted to Christianity by missionaries.
• Spellfall by Katherine Roberts is a Take That at the whole Down the Rabbit Hole subgenre. The one who introduces the heroine to magic is NOT a wise mentor, but an evil Wizard who wants to mount an attack on the Magical Land. Said attack is possible because the people who rule that land are arrogant, intolerant, ignorant, and backward-oriented. It is up to the heroine and some banished wizards to save everybody.
• In the first of the William Shatner/Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens Star Trek Novels, The Ashes of Eden, Kirk orders the Enterprise NCC-1701-A to go to warp on a course that would skim her through the atmosphere of the nearby planet. When the helmsman objects they would burn up, Kirk says something like "Who are you going to believe, the manuals or someone who's done it?" Felt like a Take That to the Nitpicker's Guide objection to them taking the Klingon Bird of Prey to warp in atmosphere in ST:IV.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Timothy Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology, while well-written and entertaining by itself, contained an extended Take That directed at everything Zahn hated about what had happened to the Star Wars Expanded Universe since he published The Thrawn Trilogy. The excessively powerful Jedi of earlier books had been unwittingly channeling The Dark Side. The lingering romantic subtext between Mara Jade and Lando Calrissian was resolved by revealing that nothing happened between them, that they'd been working together on a massive information-gathering project and sometimes had to pretend to be lovers. And then Luke proposed to her, and she accepted.
  • Later on, Walter Jon Williams gave us the following in Destiny's Way, one of the better New Jedi Order novels, aimed at the overuse of superweapons in the Expanded Universe — some of it could apply equally to the Death Star, but the Parody Names make it quite clear that's not the intended target.
    Han: What The Empire would have done was build a supercolossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what The Empire would have done.
  • Aaron Allston's run on the X-Wing Series has a quiet one. An earlier book, The Courtship of Princess Leia, had as its main villain Warlord Zsinj, a self-important shallow bad guy distinguished by being fat and very stupid. Apparently the only way he'd become such a threat was because of the size of his fleet, which he'd been able to take control of because... because! While retconning the various continuity errors in the novel, Allston makes Zsinj very smart, resourceful, and someone who played the buffoon in front of others to get them to underestimate him. The Wraiths even note that anyone with brains would see past it, so it's not really fooling anyone. He just likes playing to an audience.
  • Fate of the Jedi has quite a few, mostly aimed at Karen Traviss. To wit:
    • The Mandos go as far as to murder innocent Padawans, and they later brutally put down a slave rebellion.
    • The Anticlimax Boss takes the form of Callista.
    • Daala threatens to extradite Kyp to the Empire, where he will be tried for war crimes.
    • A huge Take That to reality TV in Outcast.
    • Ben's helium speech is a Take That to the Ewoks cartoon.
• In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes takes jabs at two famous literary detectives:
  • He gives some grudging credit to Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin: "He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."
  • Holmes angrily tears into Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq:
    "Lecoq was a bungler," he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be a textbook for detectives to teach them what to avoid."
  • However, Word of God states that this was intended to show Holmes's Insufferable Genius nature; in real life, Doyle was a fan of both Poe and Gaboriau. Thus, it's more an In-Universe example.
• Jonathan Swift launched so many Take Thats at other authors, classical poetic styles, and famous people, that he finally wrote a poem about the Royal Court that got him in so much trouble he had to flee the country for years. Oops.
• Raymond Briggs, creator of When the Wind Blows and The Snowman, wrote a satirical picture book about The Falklands War called The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. It depicts Argentine generalissimo Leopoldo Galtieri and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a pair of bullying, metal-skinned giants who send men to fight, die, and be maimed in a pointless war over a "sad little island".
• Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a family Take That aimed at sister Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The female protagonist of Tenant falls in love with someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Rochester. Things proceed to go very badly.
  • This is the background to Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontes"!
  • Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is another Take That on Jane Eyre.
  • Jane Eyre is a Take That at itself. It just tends to get lost in the accretion of romanticism around it.
  • Also the school. Not so much a Take That as a thinly disguised portrayal of a horrific reality. It had been cleaned up and reformed by the time the book came out, but Charlotte nonetheless had the satisfaction of sitting on a train behind an elderly gentleman who said loudly "Why, they have got Cowan Bridge School here, and Miss Temple and Mr. Wilson!" Hah hah hah.
• In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol, Everard wishes that people from his time — the author's own — who talked of the "noble Nordic" could see the Dark Ages peasants he is seeing
• Trans Wizard Harriet Porber and the Bad Boy Parasaurolophus, is, as its name suggests, a parody of Harry Potter starring a transgender wizard. This premise serves as mockery of J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, who has gained widespread notoriety for espousing increasingly transphobic viewpoints on social media. In addition, the Dumbledore Expy comes out as gay in his first scene, a criticism's of Rowling's controversial decision to only have him come out via Word of Gay after the series had concluded, in a way that has no impact on the actual story.
• Trigger Warning:
  • The New York Times is named as being one of the publications which defames Jake after he is assaulted by "antifa" students.
  • The Democratic Party is insulted several times, including once when several of its in-universe politicians are revealed to be sex offenders, and once when Chief McRainey blames them for ruining the country with high taxes.
  • Pierce states that both Black Lives Matter and "antifa" are guilty of widespread voter intimidation.
  • Hillary Clinton is name-dropped to show how the "mass media" is dishonest, due to them "praising" her during the 2016 presidential election.
• Mark Twain:
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had a sinking ship called the Walter Scott. Mark Twain hated Walter Scott.
  • The War Prayer by Mark Twain is a scathing attack on war, patriotic fervor, and religion being used to support them. After people in a church are praying for victory in war, an angel comes down, telling them how their prayer entails death and misery to the enemy, then asks whether they really do want that from God. They just dismiss him as a lunatic.
• Privates Carr and Compton, the two drunken British soldiers in the "Circe' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, are named after two British consular officials in Zurich that Joyce was mad at.
• The UNIX Haters Handbook at first seems like a lighthearted jab at UNIX and including some creative language, funny cartoons, and a hilarious Anti-Forward from UNIX co-creator Dennis Ritchie. Once you start reading it, you begin to realize that many of the points are serious problems in the design of UNIX, complete with usenet postings from very frustrated users of what is supposed to be a production system.
• Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War: The entire book is written as a series of Take Thats to political correctness, multiculturalism, and all forces of perceived liberalism. In it, the United States fractures into a series of successor states with straw feminists, environmentalists, academics, and gays, each overcome and in most cases destroyed utterly by the protagonists. Along the way, the book takes time out to insult pop culture, in particular rap and 'that crooner Madonna.' Also, at one point, an elderly Jane Fonda appears to try and justify her actions during the Vietnam War... just in time to perish in a nuclear fireball.
• The War of the Worlds (1898): It's almost certainly not a coincidence that the invading Martian war-machines of H. G. Wells' novel rampage across portions of suburban Surrey, it being a region of England that Wells had come to loathe.
• Jung's response to The Waste Land was to deem T. S. Eliot schizophrenic.
• Jacqueline Wilson re-wrote What Katy Did as Katy, a modern retelling in which Katy adjusts to life in a wheelchair after suffering a spinal injury. Wilson explains in an afterword that she was concerned about the message given in the original novel (as well as other children's classics such as The Secret Garden and Heidi) that the disabled can miraculously heal if they are patient and virtuous enough. As such, the book features characters making disparaging comments on several occasions about the saintly invalids in Victorian novels.
• Wicked: Son of a Witch was written in 2005, after the musical, and the Tonys, in which it lost to to a show that gives new lyrics to classical Broadway Songs. Early in the book, Dorothy and Company remember how hard it was to get in the first time. Good thing Scarecrow notices that the guards are distracted by a motley crew advertising some strange new show done mostly with puppets so they can sneak in.
• William the Pirate by Richmal Crompton featured the character of insufferable child star Anthony Martin, a vicious parody of Christopher Robin in the works of A. A. Milne.
• Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall sends a fairly blatant one to the generally very positive media portrayals of Thomas More, describing him as a religious fanatic and emotionally abusive towards his wife. The comparison is basically spelled out when Cromwell complains that More is probably writing an account that casts him, Cromwell, as a fool and oppressor, and More as the innocent victim with "a better turn of phrase."
• P. G. Wodehouse:
  • P. G. Wodehouse was widely denounced for his wartime broadcasts from Berlin, and leading the attacks on him was his erstwhile friend A. A. Milne. Stung by the bitter and personal nature of Milne's remarks, the usually-mild Wodehouse was driven to take revenge, and wrote a short story, "Rodney has a Relapse", in which the author of hard-boiled detective stories turns to writing the most sickening poems about his son, Timothy Bobbin. "I am not a weak man," says the narrator on hearing one, "but I confess that I shuddered."
  • P.G. Wodehouse also aimed a Take That at the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley by creating 'Roderick Spode', a preposterous figure leading the 'black shorts' who leads a double life designing ladies' underwear. His put down by Bertie Wooster deserves to be read in full.
    "It's about time some publicly-spirited person told you where to get off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you've succeeded in convincing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Hail, Spode!" and you imagine it's the voice of the people. That is where you make your bloomer. What the voice of the people is actually saying is, "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your life see such a perfect perisher?"

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