Unpopular Literary Opinions You Hold

Does anyone have anything they'd like to get off their chest?

I'll start: I didn't think The Help was all that impressive. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't great.

I like Tom Bombadil. He's not my favourite character, but he doesn't deserve half the shit that gets heaped on him.

Also, while I understand Gollum's role in the story, I've never liked him. After the movies, when he was everywhere, I got absolutely fed up with him. Overexposed. But he annoyed me to start with.

Red Wolf wrote:I like Tom Bombadil. He's not my favourite character, but he doesn't deserve half the shit that gets heaped on him.

Also, while I understand Gollum's role in the story, I've never liked him. After the movies, when he was everywhere, I got absolutely fed up with him. Overexposed. But he annoyed me to start with.

I am going to cosign on both of these things.

I stayed up til 2 a.m. this morning to finish Little Women just so I could throw it across the room with great force.

If it helps at all, I seem to remember an author's note in Jo's Boys saying that Louisa May Alcott was sorely tempted to blow up all of her characters just to be done with them, so it seems they even got up her nose eventually.

Don't get me wrong, Laurie is one of my huge fictional crushes and there are parts of the book, and of the whole series, that I still love - but I wanted to slap Beth, hated the way we were supposed to blame Jo for stupid Amy falling through the stupid ice (after what she did to Jo's book, she could have stayed there for me), and Marmee annoys me with her lectures. And that's without even getting to the sequels and the way Dan was treated.

Aha - found it, it wasn't an explosion, it was an earthquake:

It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.

I think it'd be awesome if one day we find out Alcott actually wrote that ending in a fit of rage after one too many "WHY DIDN'T JO MARRY LAURIE?!!!" letters. People are finding lost letters and unfinished pieces in an attic all the time, why not the lost ending to the March sisters saga?

I definitely wanted to throw Little Women across the room when I finally got around to reading it. The sequels are even worse. I just wanted to smack Laurie and Amy's kid into oblivion, which sounds terrible since she was just a child. They made her so insufferable though, like she was supposed to be this heavenly sprite who could do no wrong and whom everyone was in love with and fawned over. UGH.

Jo's reasoning for why they can't be together never made any sense to me. They would always fight?! Did they ever fight prior to the proposal? They were too much alike? Especially since in 19th century novels pairings were usual people 'cut from the same cloth'? Eh. It's not so much that they didn't end up together, what really chafes me he marries Amy. Amy sucks.

I'll start: I didn't think The Help was all that impressive. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't great.

I agree.

I also think it's a problematic book in terms of racism, but not for the same reasons I often see cited. I think the book is pretty honest about the fact that Skeeter is partially motivated by self-interest, and doesn't gloss over the White Savior aspect of the story. But Aibileen's constant mentioning of how she really and truly loves Mae Mobley just reeks of the author saying, "my family had an underpaid black woman in their employ when I was a kid and I feel really bad about it, so I'll feel less bad if I imagine the maid liked taking care of me!" and it was uncomfortable to read.

ulkis wrote:It's not so much that they didn't end up together, what really chafes me he marries Amy. Amy sucks.

YES! I think I could probably have dealt with Jo's rejection of Laurie if he didn't end up marrying Amy. It's such a downgrade and just irritating as all hell that she basically gets the perfect life she always dreamed of. It irks me to no end.

See, I didn't think Amy was that bad. I hated Beth, but Amy never bothered me that much. Jo will always be my favorite, though, no competition.

Also, I thought Prof. Bhaer sounded hotter than Laurie.

Crowbridge wrote:Also, thought Prof. Bhaer sounded hotter than Laurie.

I agree. But my unpopular opinion is that I think Laurie is obnoxious and Jo was right to say no.

queenofdenile wrote:

I'll start: I didn't think The Help was all that impressive. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't great.

I agree.

I also think it's a problematic book in terms of racism, but not for the same reasons I often see cited. I think the book is pretty honest about the fact that Skeeter is partially motivated by self-interest, and doesn't gloss over the White Savior aspect of the story. But Aibileen's constant mentioning of how she really and truly loves Mae Mobley just reeks of the author saying, "my family had an underpaid black woman in their employ when I was a kid and I feel really bad about it, so I'll feel less bad if I imagine the maid liked taking care of me!" and it was uncomfortable to read.

That's pretty much how I felt about it as well.

punzy wrote:

Crowbridge wrote:Also, thought Prof. Bhaer sounded hotter than Laurie.

I agree. But my unpopular opinion is that I think Laurie is obnoxious and Jo was right to say no.

Exactly. Laurie was a little kid- Bhaer was a man.

Crowbridge wrote:

punzy wrote:

Crowbridge wrote:Also, thought Prof. Bhaer sounded hotter than Laurie.

I agree. But my unpopular opinion is that I think Laurie is obnoxious and Jo was right to say no.

Exactly. Laurie was a little kid- Bhaer was a man.

I am a Bhaer fan forever. I much prefer him to Laurie.

I find both Moby-Dick and Walden to be utter wastes of time.

I still have never made it past the first few chapters of Little Women.

People at my work are obsessed with the Outlander books. I don't get it. I read the first one, and I thought Claire was too stupid to live, and Jamie was kind of an asshole. I felt the same way about The Bronze Horseman, which people on another message board I frequent salivate over.

The only part of Walden that is interesting is when Thoreau discusses the French Canadian lumberjack who (if you look through slash colored lenses) he CLEARLY has a crush on.

The rest is dull.

People at my work are obsessed with the Outlander books. I don't get it. I read the first one, and I thought Claire was too stupid to live, and Jamie was kind of an asshole.

Aha, mokey you've just crystallized my problems with A Discovery of Witches, which I felt was SUPER similar to Outlander in that they both obviously took a lot of research, but then sort of fell into (what seemed to me) a sort of romance trope of the woman needing to be saved by a big strong man from outsider her normal life. Like, I liked reading the details of the world in which both Claire and Diana find themselves, but I wanted both of them to have more agency, not just fall back on Jamie/Matthew.

Crowbridge wrote:Does anyone have anything they'd like to get off their chest?

I'll start: I didn't think The Help was all that impressive. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't great.

Yes. I thought the whole "the mom has cancer, wait no she doesn't" and Skeeter's 5-minute-long engagement were stupid. The male characters were largely underwritten and I had a problem throughout with the use of dialect. The plot was affecting, and I did like some characters a lot, especially Celia and Aibileen. But the book had some serious flaws, and I felt the same way about the movie.

tiller wrote:

Crowbridge wrote:Does anyone have anything they'd like to get off their chest?

I'll start: I didn't think The Help was all that impressive. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't great.

Yes. I thought the whole "the mom has cancer, wait no she doesn't" and Skeeter's 5-minute-long engagement were stupid. The male characters were largely underwritten and I had a problem throughout with the use of dialect. The plot was affecting, and I did like some characters a lot, especially Celia and Aibileen. But the book had some serious flaws, and I felt the same way about the movie.

I agree about the male characters being underwritten. I can't even remember the name of Skeeter's fiancee, or why he was even in the book. I liked Celia's husband, but he was only in it for a nanosecond. Meh.

I hate, hate, hate Moby Dick. Couldn't get through it at all.

I thought the whole "the mom has cancer, wait no she doesn't"

I took that to be a temporary remission and a little denial on the mother's part. I got the feeling the romance parts were thrown in as an afterthought.

oxymoron wrote:The only part of Walden that is interesting is when Thoreau discusses the French Canadian lumberjack who (if you look through slash colored lenses) he CLEARLY has a crush on.

The rest is dull.

Ugh, I had to read bits and pieces of it in 8th grade and in college, and I wanted to die of boredom. I can't believe anyone can read that and actually give a shit about whatever Thoreau's rambling about.

I read the first one, and I thought Claire was too stupid to live, and Jamie was kind of an asshole.

I made it to book six before giving up in utter defeat. Jamie's assholishness just got worse, Gabaldon would take the one thing I liked about a character and destroy it for no good reason, the plots got increasingly soapy (and they started out pretty darn soapy) and the time travel got so tangled up I was on the verge of writing a Back to the Future crossover where Bree and Roger borrow the Delorean, go back and bring Jamie to the future, and problem solved! (Good thing I didn't, since Gabaldon hates fan fiction). There was a lot of potential to the Outlander books, but for me they just didn't follow through.

Going back to Little Women, my unpopular opinon is that I liked Amy. People are always rooting for her to drown under the ice (Meg Cabot did a video on that once that I think was supposed to be funny but just seemed mean to me), but she was a child: kids do cruel things to their siblings without thinking it through, because they're too young to fully realize you can't take an action back. It's not a reason to let someone die. I though the whole incident showed Jo being mature, to place a life above revenge for a petty act. Amy had a lot of weaknesses and foibles I could sympathize with, plus she got stuck with Laurie, while Jo got the awesome Professor Bhaer.

I just wanted to smack Laurie and Amy's kid into oblivion

That whole "Dan's not good enough to even think about being in love with Bess" stuff in Jo's Boys drove me crazy. What's so freaking special about Bess anyway? She's pretty? She's nice? She's got some artistic talent? She doesn't even have a personality! At least Amy had a personality. Bess is the only one of the kids who seems colourless and flat: Demi, Daisy, Josie, Rob, Teddy: they all have distinct personalities, I don't know why Alcott dropped the ball there.