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YMMV / Death in Venice

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  • Alternate Aesop Interpretation: One young homosexual man wrote to Thomas Mann in some anxiety after reading the book, asking if Mann had intended in it to condemn homosexuality. Mann wrote back that this had not been his intention, that he respected homosexual feeling and that it was far from alien to his own experience.
  • Squick: While homosexuality was frowned upon in Thomas Mann's time, nowadays, we're far more squicked about how a grown man in his fifties is pursuing a boy who is all of fourteen. (The boy who inspired Tadzio was said to have been TEN at the time.)
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some readers may find it hard to sympathize with Aschenbach and his obsessive crush on a fourteen-year-old kid.
  • The Woobie: Tadzio himself, and his actor Bjorn Andresen naturally.
    • Baron Wladislaw Moes aka the boy who at age 10 was Thomas Mann’s inspiration for Tadzio. Baron Wladislaw Moes’s cousin who was the first to find this out, as well as their friend Jasio, who was worried he hurt his friend when they play wrestled, and all three were shocked that Mann got so much wrong about their playtime and his friendship with Wladislaw.

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