this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
305 points (100.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
10135 readers
2573 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I never could finish 1984. I got maybe halfway through it and was like 25% interesting world building, 25% a sad, bitter, sexist person lamenting the way of things (particularly that be can't just fuck every woman, but also the lying totalitarian goverment) but also having no spine to even consider doing anything about it, and 50% him sneaking around to fuck some horny manic pixie dream girl against the rules. Unfortunately, id have probably enjoyed it more if I had read it at 16
Idk, I likes that part. Ultimately Winston is flawed and weak and yet he thinks he's making a grand defiant gesture, only to find out the party knew it all. All his secrets and triumphs where plainly and obviously known.
Effectively he builds himself up as a dramatic hero in his mind, and in narrative. The reader gets swept along, but when he falls, when he is crushed, we remember all the gross parts of his personality. We see him as the broken, pathetic man he becomes at the end lf the novel. I enjoyed how the experience of reading the text, and the experience of remembering the text tell two very different stories.
But you see how if they immediately saw the base pathetic person Winston is beyond the curtain of his own narrative, none of that really works.
Then he's just an audience proxy, reflecting our own patheticness. :)
I'm not saying everyone has to like 1984, I'm not saying there is one concrete experience of it. I'm merely pointing out that unlikable protaganists are a choice, and there can be a strong narrative experience when that choice is made.
A lot of old sci-fi books are like that, interesting world, boring (maybe not the best word for this) story.
Starship troopers. The movie has a story, unlike the book.