Everybody's dead, Dave.
Is there a room in this article for Insane Troll Logic? I imagine it would be, seeing as The Party thinks it's a great idea.
H.B. Ward Hide / Show Replies
Needs more context, I think.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Is the Society Marches On example valid? It's hard to imagine a feminist revolution in the repressed, controlled world of Oceania. I think it makes perfect sense that gender roles and sexual norms remained stuck in the 1950s.
I don't think that O'Brien's lecture to Winston is a Hannibal Lecture, as Winston is the perp here, and O'Brien is the interrogator. I think that it should be cut out.
done w ur shit
"Tim Burton is working on an adaption." WHAT. YES. MUST SEE THIS. PLEASE LET THIS BE TRUE.
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I'd have gone with a director who's better at horribly depressing, soul-crushing stuff. Tim tends to bring whimsy into his work.
On the auto-display of the name: Isn't the title usually rendered as Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than 1984? That's what Wikipedia and IM Db have, and it's how I've always seen it in libraries and on book sleeves.
Seems pedantic, I know, but as it is we're already "correcting" people who've written it one way into something that's less correct.
From Wikipedia, for illustration:
1984 is a year and may also refer to:
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, a 1949 novel by George Orwell
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1953 TV program), an American television adaptation
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (TV programme), a 1954 BBC television adaptation
- 1984 (1956 film), a 1956 film adaptation
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (film), a 1984 film adaptation
- 1984 (opera), a 2005 opera adaptation composed by Lorin Maazel
(Do auto-retitles display the same for every namespace?)
Edited by 94.185.209.3 Hide / Show Replies
I've submitted a request for the custom title to be changed.
(Yes, but we only have a page on the book, so that's not what's at work here.)
Edited by 91.125.235.103 That was the amazing part. Things just keep going.
Just a note on the edit I just made: Handling Spoilers says a fifty-year-old work shouldn't be spoiled, and 1984 came out over sixty years ago. Given its popularity as School Study Media, probably most people know what happens in the novel anyway. And the Handling Spoilers page also specifically says that whole examples shouldn't be spoiled. There were entire paragraphs on this page hidden by spoiler tags.
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That's kind of what it says, but not really.
It says that some works are okay to spoil. An incomplete list can be found on Spoilers Off. This book is not on that page, making the issue up for debate. The "fifty-year-old" example was about a film. A film that has been around for fifty years is considered old, sure. But a book that's been around for fifty years usually isn't. A video game released fifteen years ago is considered old. It depends on the medium (and on the work itself).
It says that examples should be useful even if you don't read the spoilers.
I personally don't think that most people know what happens, although I can't claim to have done any extensive research (but I didn't know before I read it, and neither did the friends of mine I recommended it to). Moreover, I think part of the impact is lost if you know what happens.
We could, however, make a separate section for spoilers (so one folder for spoilers, and one for everything else).
Sound like a fair compromise?
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Quotes from above are bolded.
A film that has been around for fifty years is considered old, sure. But a book that's been around for fifty years usually isn't....It depends on the medium (and on the work itself).
Have to say I disagree here. Specifically, don't see a difference between a film and a book, as far as what is considered "new" and what isn't, and Handling Spoilers says that 50 years is the cutoff.
It says that examples should be useful even if you don't read the spoilers.
The page certainly failed in that respect as well. Entire paragraphs were hidden behind spoiler tags, and better than half of the rest of the tropes listed had important information obscured by tags.
I didn't know before I read it, and neither did the friends of mine I recommended it to). Moreover, I think part of the impact is lost if you know what happens.
I guess I didn't know what happened in 1984 before I read it, but I was 11 years old the year I read it, which happened to be 1984, which was the reason I read the book (yep, I'm that old). Handling Spoilers says that "If you don't want to read any spoilers at all, and want to go into every work as pure and unsullied as a virgin to her wedding bed, then it is strongly suggested you steer clear of a work's trope page and its subpages until you have actually seen/read/heard the work" and the part we're discussing re: the 50-year-rule says "There's no need to tag the Twist Ending to a William Shakespeare play or a fifty-year-old film because Joe Average might not have gotten around to seeing it yet." I think that maybe outside of the Gospels there is no work that is so universal that literally everyone knows how it ends, but it's a School Study Media entry, it's named tropes, it's added words like "Orwellian" to the language—this is not obscure. The age and fame of this book would seem to argue that it is one of those works where the burden is on the reader to stay away from the TV Tropes 1984 page if they wish to be "unspoiled".
We could, however, make a separate section for spoilers (so one folder for spoilers, and one for everything else). Sound like a fair compromise?
Ehh...honestly I'm not a big fan of separate subsections for spoiler tropes. If it is deemed that 1984 requires spoilers, I for one would rather see them sprinkled throughout a standard A-Z trope list in the regular way, as they were before I took them out, although hopefully somewhat more judiciously and without whole paragraphs being hidden as we saw before. Better to replace every spoiler tag I took out than hide the spoiler tropes in a spoiler sub-list.
Just to make clear, I'm not going to start an Edit War over this or anything; consensus will rule and if consensus decides that the 1984 page needs spoiler tags then so be it. Personally I think that the 50-year rule as given in Handling Spoilers makes a lot of sense.
To clarify: yes, entire paragraphs whited out is completely useless - I just thought that the "useful even if you don't read the spoilers" part was so good a rule of thumb, it should be brought up here.
I really don't think that's meant as a 50-year-rule, nor as a Shakespearean rule. They're probably both just examples of works that would be considered old enough that all plot points are considered It Was His Sled (I don't really agree, but that's a different discussion altogether). Spoilers Off says that it's probably [emphasis added] okay to spoil works where the copyright has expired, and that The Mousetrap will never be okay to spoil (for reference, it's already over 60 years old).
The book certainly isn't obscure, but that doesn't mean that its plot points are well-known; there is such a thing as Pop-Cultural Osmosis. Agatha Christie's works are well-known, the plots (and endings) less so. The Bible is one of the most well-known literary works (or any works, for that matter) of all time, having named several tropes, (kind of) being required reading for over a billion people, and having originated virtually countless phrases and expressions ("pearls before swine", "those who live by the sword, die by the sword", "the writing is on the wall", etc.) - often without people realizing that it's the source. Yet, only a small portion of the stories (albeit the most important ones, probably) are known to most people.
And yes, I'm aware this is kind of an Analogy Backfire (The Bible is officially free to spoil), but the point still stands.
Note that I'm not actually arguing in favour of spoiler tags - I just think the decision to remove them was made rashly.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Maybe it was rash—but that page was a mess. If we do wind up putting the spoilers back we should follow that up by cutting out some of the natter so that the page at least doesn't look so bad.
Good idea; I did some cleaning up.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Anazi By Any Other Name removed==== I don't want to start an edit war, but I removed this entire section, because I can't even edit it to resemble something from the book. The word very was even italicized, which made it worse.
The book uses the terms "German Nazis" and "Russian Communists," so it needs to reflect the terms in the book. For some reason (which I can easily guess at) the term "Nazi" stayed, but the term "Communist" was changed.
"[T]irelessly releases propaganda" is not unique to the Nazis and is reflective of the majority of totalitarian regimes. The editor even seems to note this, which begs the question of how it makes the Party very "Nazi-like" as opposed to very "Communist-like."
The Party is an apolitical oligarchy whose only goal is to perpetuate an eternal status quo with the favored Inner Party in eternal power. It has both fascist and socialist features but was deliberately written to encompass the end product of any authoritarian regime.
The perpetual war is completely unlike anything Nazi Germany did during WWII, as its goal is not Lebensraum or the establishment of a pure Aryan society or even to win, but only to destroy anything that may result in the betterment of society. Society is kept in a state of perpetual hardship (O'Brien: "Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.") to end any chance of progress. ("In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.")
The phrasing "The Party INGSOC" is a product of ESL, I'm guessing (also "Ingsoc" is only written in ALL CAPS when it's being directed quoted from a poster, or the like). Also, the vague words "is discriminant towards the populace" unfortunately existed.
{{quote |text=It may verge into Commie Nazis, as they're also based on Stalinists (who Orwell hated) and also the then-current Soviet repression (the point being all totalitarianism has some similarities), with a supposedly socialist ideology still (however O'Brien privately admits their real goal is simply power). |author=quote from edit }} This, frankly, poorly phrased run-on sentence contains nothing related to what it's supposed to be (i.e. Anazi By Any Other Name).
In my personal opinion, a Anazi By Any Other Name doesn't belong here, because the Party was not a direct stand in for the Nazis. On that page, part of the description says, “people have created villains who are clearly analogous to the Nazis.” As Orwell was clearly not doing this (and had the Soviet Union more in mind anyway), this section shouldn't be here.
If it must, please at least write it well.
Thanks. ~~~~