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Notes -
The good retellings
My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest. A Doom clone made for kids. With the cereal brand "Chex" replacing most of the blood, demons, and foul language with cereal motifs. Looking back on things it seems like a joke, how the hell did that thing even exist? I know there is a legit story behind the game, but I honestly don't want to read it. It is more fascinating to imagine how such a game could be created.
There is definitely something very cute and sweet about retelling adult themed stories for kids. I chuckle every time my young daughters belt out the lyrics to "Rich men north of richmond", and instead of saying "Your dollar ain't shit" they say "your doll er aint chic". That wasn't a reinterpretation I suggest or pushed on them, just what they seemed to have heard.
I also find cleverly disguised adult themes in children's media rather entertaining. The jokes in pixar movies that go over the heads of every kid, but they still laugh as they see their parents suddenly entertained and laughing along with the cartoon.
The Bad Retellings
There is however a hamfisted political messaging that sometimes gets shoved into stories. I find it bad, even when I agree with the message. I'm libertarian, and many of my fellow travelers treat Ayn Rand's books as holy text. I've instead always been highly turned off by some of her books. The short ones like Anthem were great. The long 60 page diatribe in one of the other ones is just ... gross.
The best political literature always seems to be written by the opposition (these are vague recollections, some or all of them might be wrong):
I've written a bit of fiction on my own before, and I kinda get it. I felt I was at my best when a story just came to me from the muses. I let it flow onto the page, and it took me in unexpected directions. I was at my worst when I had some ideas of how things SHOULD work, and I tried to shove them in and make a point.
Some stories written in the modern day just feel like all those authorial instincts and all the inspiration from the muse just got shoved to the side. They had a point to make dammit, and they weren't gonna let a good story get in the way of making the point. Sigh whatever, they ignore the muses at their own peril. No one will like or care about their stories in the future. Some idiot genius that learns to listen to those whispers of the muse will beat them 9 times out of 10 in the long run.
Harry Potter Legacy, the ugly storytelling
I recently beat Harry Potter legacy. Lots of good story telling in most of it. But it had a low point. A trans bartender. There was a disconnect between the face I was seeing and the voice I was hearing. I thought maybe it was some kind of audio mistake at first. Why did this female looking character sound like a dude with a throat problem? Ah, they had to hamfistedly clear it up later, "I use to be wizard, [other character] still recognized me after i became a witch".
Look, this is a freaking magic world. Polyjuice potions can completely imitate someone else, voice included. So whatever magic she/he figured out to change their appearance couldn't also target their voice? Seems dumb.
Also it had the traditional problem that once came with female superheros. They can do no wrong, and they are strong and powerful. She is the only one to stand up to a powerful evil wizard and the evil wizard just ... backs down and lets it go. Unlike every other time that particular evil wizard has encountered a problem. I'm sorry, what? A bar owner is a powerful and scary enough wizard to scare away one of the main villains of the game, while the entire Hogwarts staff, and government of magical England is just kind of an afterthought that the evil wizard isn't worried about at all?
Dumb. The scene should have been rewritten. Trans person shouldn't have confronted evil wizard, they should have hid the player character, and shamelessly lied to evil wizard. After the evil wizard leaves, trans person should have suggested the player character lay low. That would be in line with the behavior of someone that spent most of their life hiding a deep dark secret, and then decided that their highest calling in a magic world was to own a bar. The wasted story and unrealized character growth disgusts me far more than the hamfisted "trans people are great" political messaging.
I will admit, i do love the classic D&D trope of "the bartender is a retired level 18 fighter" and wish more media would lean into that. The evil overlord *isn't * afraid of the king, a level 7 noble, or his guards, a bunch of level 5 warriors (at best). But the old dude who wrecked 15 dragons and seven demon lords, and has his old +5 hackmaster hanging above the fireplace (crossed with a decorative useless sword), and the dusty suit of armor holding the menu is his mithral full plate of speed? Now *that's * who the overlord worries about, plans for, and tries to keep out of the fight.
Yeah, a lot of people fail to lean into the idea that D&D kingdoms that embrace leveling are, functionally, anarchic, and that there is no functional inherited monarchy anywhere, because power doesn't flow from the will of the people or having an overwhelming army, it flows from character levels, which can't be transferred or removed. It means that you can have the storybook endings where you kill the Evil Overlord and that does legitimately end the threat, but it also means that once anyone in an area reaches high enough level, they become de facto immune to the local government, and they get a veto over it that they can enforce with violence themselves.
Try to raise taxes on the retired high-level fighter? He can take a month off to go to the capital and murder everyone in the royal family and most of their defenders. Planning a military campaign against a nearby nation that would threaten the importation of the specific cultivar of hops that the retired adventurer prefers for his ale? Better hope he doesn't hear of it and show up to kill you and your army first.
And that's just the martial types. The high-level rogues can do all of this without you having any idea who they are or why they're doing it; it just is known that attempting certain kinds of governmental actions gets you murdered in your bed without anyone knowing who did it or how, and there's just too many categories of nation-state-level fuckery that high-level primary casters can commit to list here.
That being said, you get some fun results when you lean into the implications. In a campaign world I ran, there was an inn run by a full-on retired demigod who ended up being a sort of one-building buffer state between a kingdom and an empire; neither of the states risked any kind of military action in the area for fear of provoking him into leaving retirement, and both sides also ceded a good amount of unofficial territory where they didn't try to enforce their will just to make sure that no civic official got lost and made a nation-ending mistake. The results of all this was that I had a nice little low-level zone carved out for the PCs to start their adventure and learn about both nations and the world in general, and let them experience gentle scaling as they moved away from their starting area, plus give them a growing mystery when they returned periodically.
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Ha! That is a fun trope. Would have potentially been interesting if that had been the trope they went with, but they didn't. She just bought the bar because she worked there waiting tables as a student and liked hanging out. It gave off more of a "I never escaped my hometown" vibe than a "retired level 18 fighter" vibe.
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As funny as that is, this sort of thing used to drive me crazy about old RPGs. At some point you start asking why isn't the world run by bartenders.
The same reason the world isn't run by 160IQ geniuses with multiple PhDs really. Turns out running the world is a chore.
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Just wanted to note that Orson Scott Card is Mormon, not Catholic and George Orwell definitely did not consider himself as a communist, but rather a socialist.
Edit: Also, imo, a book with a more interesting tension with Card's religious beliefs is Ender's Shadow in which the child genius main character has some extremely lucid thoughts about why religious people are mistaken.
I'd be surprised if those were the only two things I got wrong in that list.
Well the regime in Starship Troopers also very much isn't fascist but very strongly liberal, but that's a conversation in itself.
It's fascist in the loosest "the fasces is a good metaphor for an important concept" sense, but by that point the definition is so watered down that even Hilary Clinton ("It takes a village to raise a child", and obviously "Stronger Together") fits it.
In an arguably more important sense the politics in Starship Troopers are much less fascist than every modern country in the world. The mainstream modern approach to military service in times of existential (or too-often less-than-existential) crisis is the draft. We force people to take new jobs or be imprisoned, but instead of just backbreaking work in a field they'll also be getting shot at by and ordered to kill strangers, and since in the USA we'd like the Constitution to not stop us we somehow claim this service-which-isn't-voluntary doesn't count as involuntary servitude. One question Starship Troopers is trying to answer is: if you actually want to forbid slavery, then how do you still get enough people to take such horrible individual risks in service of a collective good freely?
Arguably "military dictatorship" here is the least accurate claim. A military dictatorship has a military leader or small junta in charge of everything; in the Starship Troopers' world the military leadership isn't even allowed to vote until after they become civilians, at which point an ex-General and ex-Admiral each get the same one-person one-vote that any single-term ex-Private got to start exercising decades earlier. If they win an election after that point, the connection between political power and military service is just the same indirect "it helped the voters respect me" that e.g. Eisenhower got.
Even "defense of" here is only like 95% accurate. There's a lot of self-justification coming from within the system about why they think it's a good system, and Heinlein did seem to be happy with most of that, but even in-universe they admit that the way the system got started was basically "there was some serious war, and afterward the veterans just didn't want to trust anyone who hadn't had their backs during."
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