Post #1782766

I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5. I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency. The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.