Books with the worst morals/messages?

[Bimbanana]

Ugh, i forgot the title but once i read a paperback telling why woman is inferior than woman using pseudoscience thingy he created himself.
The author was like from a century ago.
The worst book i ever read

 

[Peagreene]

I didn't say hyper-individualism.

And what the bleep is hyper-individualism? (I refuse to use Google.)

Hyper-individualism as opposed to what? The commune will provide? The village will provide? Mommy will provide?

Seriously. I'm honestly intrigued.

I was reminded of this just now because I'm watching a video essay about misery memoirs and the presenter makes a good point about how individualism played a huge part in the boom of misery lit because it frames suffering (especially in the context of child abuse) as something that the individual triumphs over through their own power. People enjoyed misery memoirs because they were easy to consume: a sad, abused child rises above their painful beginnings through sheer force of will and grit, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to overcome their trauma. There's nothing in a misery memoir to critique the systems that created that situation of abuse, so although at one point misery memoirs were a huge presence and sold everywhere, there was no subsequent movement from readers to overhaul or improve things like childcare, poverty, mental health services, foster care services, child welfare, because those things were never held up as important to the narrative.

 

[CountVanBadger]

One has to go back further and examine the whole arc.

There were systems and institutions. For all of that. Here in the United States, there were institutions for mental health; thousands of 501(c)(3) charities for child welfare, foster services, poverty relief, all funded by individuals and corporations through donations and endowments (Save the Children, Habitat for Humanity, the Home for Little Wanderers, and countless others); the churches with their deep pockets took a direct hand in services for orphans, providing adoption services... and on, and on. There was a time, back in the time of evil capitalism through this country's ascendency, when corporations and individuals founded charities that grew into giant institutions, when they founded schools, with capital earned and saved through individual merit, by people and organizations that wanted to give back and improve civil comity. There was a time, at the height of the United States, when John F Kennedy said, ".... ask what you will do for your country." An entire nation rose up and answered. Individual effort, initiative, and capital, for the greater good.

And then we fell.

Since then, it has all fallen apart with breathtaking rapidity. Now, socialism, the Nanny State, Hillary Clinton's "village," are all we know. We don't found charities anymore. We don't open primary schools and colleges anymore. We expect the village to do it for us. It has devolved so rapidly that two generations know nothing different. But some are old enough to remember what came before, when individuals had a personal responsibility to pull their weight for the greater good.

Literally none of this has anything to do with why I made this thread. Go make your own thread if you want to talk about this. Or don't, I don't care. Just stop derailing my thread.

 

[VanVeleca]

13 Reasons Why.

I had a pretty confusing and often times awful childhood, the same goes for my teenage years, so I always had these thoughts about how it would be better for everyone including me if I would just die. After my autism diagnosis some of those feelings died down because now I finally understood many things about myself that many others told me was just because I'm a stupid lazy asshole.

13 Reasons Why made suicidal thoughts and depression seem like something only an asshole would do to mess with people, seriously it does such a bad job at portraying how real world issues can make someone spiral and instead just hammers in feelings of guilt within anyone who may be considering suicide.

I think the message WAS supposed to be hopeful, but instead it just makes anyone who may have or had these thoughts feel worse.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I suppose the worst message seemed to be the one in Henry James "Portrait of the Lady" - as a template for soap operas, it was perfect. As anything else, it is a tedious, dreadful slog - a woman has two men approach her, one she cares for but thinks is poor, one she does not really like but he's very good looking and insanely rich. She goes with the rich guy, starts to actually care for him, and he gets abusive. She makes her decision around page 40 or 50, by the way. Around 200 the abusive part starts. She winds up running away, getting caught, and I think she accidentally kills him or just hurts him very badly before fleeing back to her childhood home...
Where she finds out the guy she threw him over for really was wealthier than the abusive jerk, but that he also may have a kind of a dark side. So, she's going with him now that she's a widow.
That last paragraph was the final, four or five page chapter of, IIRC, 450 pages. So ... 450 pages and it looks like she's making the same choice again for the same reason - about fifteen years later. She learned nothing and is chasing money still...

 

[ConansWitchBaby]

Snowpiercer - I'll count the movie because it was written down.

The message seems to be, "If your feelings are hurt. Be a little bitch without thinking anything through."

People seem to like to praise the movie while ignoring the information that it gives them. What information? That it was a literal miracle that the Tailies manged to exist. That the Tailies are only there because of a last moment act of goodwill while the world was ending. How did the world end to the point of leaving only a single train as the last of humanity? The movie doesn't care and doesn't tell you. It's so divorced from the comic (shut the fuck up about the show) and that anyone who tries to argue about the other maintenance trains and "survivors" are idiots.

In a completely closed ecosystem, it was another miracle that they managed to scrounge up enough material to make the roach bar machine.

That with the extreme depletion of resources having extra passengers, they had to get as much use out of them as possible. In point, the machine would have degraded no matter what, and the rich would have simply had no choice but to use their own children if the Tailies didn't exist.

The random word of a brain-cooked junkie (that did constantly use it; not just to gather for the bomb) security expert, that is shown to not be able to see accurately, mentions that the snow might have gone down. Well, that's great! Now, not-a-fucking-weather-expert, at what rate? What is the location? Oh, fucking Siberia. Wonderful. What season is it? The world wasn't thrown out of orbit so the seasons are still there, just muted.

 

[AmiRose]

What book(s) do you think has the worst moral or message you've ever heard?

For me, I'm gonna have to go with this one:
View attachment 48544
It's a book about a kid who gets sent to a school that teaches monster children how to blend into human society. It sounds derivative but inoffensive on the surface, but then the author really starts beating you over the head with the "don't let others people tell you how to live" message. The problem? A lot of these monster kids want to kill and eat people. So the teachers are painted as being ignorant and intolerant for wanting to teach kids not to eat people, and the kids who go along with the lessons are soulless conformists.

Raise your hand if "conformity is a worse crime than cannibalism" is a sentence you didn't think you would read today.

That's an easy one.
There was this book series about a stupid mary-sue who had less personality and memorability than my third cousin, twice-removed's pet rock, and still somehow became the center of the most boring love-triangle ever between what amounted to a feral chiuawaha (however its spelleded) wit family issues and a lil emo-boy sparkle-troll that thought it was a vampire. And somehow, the mary-sue got herself knocked up after committing what amounted to necrophilia.
I may not be a super-smart sciency biologist person, but even I know dat kinda thing is both wrong, and totally impossible.

So yeah... that one definitely takes the cake of absolute worst load of crap I've ever read.

If you know, you know what I'm talkin about. And if not, you're better off for it.