Does This Remind You of Anything?/Literature

• In the eighth Light Novel of Suzumiya Haruhi, Haruhi tries to get the last page of Kyon's short story because she wants to know the aftermath of the date. He unconsciously touches his blazer, and Haruhi, being the Genre Savvy girl, immediately works out where he hid it and wrestles him to the floor, in this position. Followed soon after by this position. Guess what came to Mikuru's mind when she walks in on this. You're right.
• In Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear, the MP Sherman Bartholomew built his reputation on being the first openly gay Member of Parliament, but is secretly straight. His husband is aware of his dalliances with women, and has agreed to support him if any of them were to become public knowledge. The same book also featured talking bears who developed addictions to honey and porridge, which were therefore controlled substances.
• In the Discworld series:
  • The prejudice shown by traditionalist dwarfs to those who admit to being female is portrayed in a way that reflects reactionary attitudes to feminism, homosexuality, and transsexuality.
  • In Thud, on the other hand, the clash of ideals between moderate and extremist dwarven factions closely resembles similar conflicts in the history of religion, Islam being the most prominent one recently.
    • The Fifth Elephant makes the point in the same Dwarvish context that "conservative" does not necessarily mean "extremist".
  • Jingo was centered around a conflict between the Westernized Ankh-Morpork and the Arabia-metaphor country of Klatch. Anti-Klatchian prejudice bore a remarkable similarity to the xenophobic ignorance shown against Middle Eastern peoples, and the illogic of this stance is lampooned many, many times.
    • Though the prejudices were less about the modern religious terrorists angle, but about the old British colonial stereotypes.
  • There's also the Black Ribbon Society, a group of vampires which have pledged to give up blood, which is clearly meant to be similar to Alcoholics Anonymous.
  • In Guards! Guards!, drunk Vimes says (paraphrased): Ah, life... it grabs you... kicks you in the... in the... y'know, thingies... that you have in the mouth... Teeth. That's it.
  • Angua wears a leather collar as a part of her everyday clothing and calls her boyfriend "master" (albeit not to his face). She's a werewolf, and has a mild case of dog-like instincts towards humans.
• In the Taltos novels, the Teckla rebellion is clearly reminiscent of a communist revolution. In fact, in one book, a ridiculously long-lived character actually seems familiar with Marx's text and makes this comparison.
• Dune's whole "desert planet where everybody speaks Arabic with the most important substance in the galaxy" thing.
  • It's named Arrakis.^[1] I think that's a bit more than reminding.
• Harry Potter: See what this sounds like: An eleven-year-old girl exchanges messages with an older stranger she has never met in real life. It's so easy! She enters her thoughts and he immediately transmits back. She confides in him, but he's really using her and preying on her insecurities. He makes her do horrible things for him which she doesn't want to do, but she still doesn't tell anyone. Finally, he meets her in person and nearly kills her. After she's been rescued, her father chides her for knowing better than to trust someone like that.
  • More blatantly, the werewolf Fenrir Greyback seems to have some pretty heavy "sexual predator" undertones, what with all his salivating over young children and whatnot.
• In John Green's An Abundance of Katherines, Lindsey has a cave. It seems like more of a short tunnel. She's never had anyone else in there, but she wants the protagonist to go in. She remarks that it's a bit tight, but she'll guide him in. She also notes that she must have overlooked that opening a hundred times before noticing something special around eighth grade, when she started using it whenever she was having "me time".
• In John H. Ritter's Choosing Up Sides, 13-years-old Luke's left-handedness is treated in the same manner as homosexuality. His father has always tried to correct his tendencies, for fear he'll go to Hell, and Luke believes for a while that he can change if he tries hard enough. His uncle even tells him there's no point in trying; he's simply "oriented that way".
• There was SF short story in which people would regularly have sex in public, pay for sex, and treat sex as a generally essential part of life... but ate in private and were ashamed if anyone found out they'd paid someone to cook for them.
  • Wasn't that part of Venerian culture in Heinlein's Space Cadet?
• Anything and everything that happens or is discussed in Invisible Man has something to do with race relations, from the ingredients in the paint the main character helps to make, to the cast-iron bank he keeps trying to get rid of. It gets more than a little Anvilicious at times.
• In Lord of the Flies, there is a scene with a mother pig, whom the boys force away from her piglets, and then spear. This is reminiscent of some soldiers who have just gone AWOL, as Jack and his tribe have just left the main group gang-raping a mother. A few quotes, in chronological order:

The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream.
Then Jack grabbed Maurice and rubbed the stuff all over his cheeks.
"Right up her ass!" [One of the boys is bragging about where he managed to get his spear.]

• Toward the end of Dracula, the vampire forces Mina to drink some of his blood from his chest. The protagonists walking in on this event feel both awkward and enraged. Afterwards, Mina is traumatized and ashamed, and struggles to explain what happened to her husband. She laments her doomed soul and blames herself for "wanting" it.
  • There's a fair bit of this in the novel. Jonathan's little teeny tiny budding man-crush on his host (Wow, he'd make such a good lawyer! He's got such a big library! What a cool guy!) seems to disappear after the incident with the Brides—which comes across, for one not already expecting vampiric goings-on, to be the Count having a jealous fit about someone else getting to (ahem) kiss his guest.
  • Well, vampirism was a way to get away with writing sexual stories. And Bram Stoker, the author was known to have a correspondence with Walt Whitman that included a "dirty letter".
• In The Dresden Files the eternal rivalry between the Summer and Winter courts of the fairies bears more than a passing resemblance to the Cold War between America and Russia. Both sides are pretty much equal in strength, and it's clear that a full scale conflict between them would, in the most likely scenario, largely wipe both sides out and send the world into a new ice age, but if it looks like one side's showing weakness ... well, they just have to exploit it. That's what archenemies do, right?
• In The Witcher novels the presence of the Witchers can be sensed as a tingling sensation by sensitive people. There's a reason why they all seem to attract the opposite sex quite a bit. Likewise, in The Blood of the Elves a 13-year old girl learning to be a sorceress draws power from the earth, an experience that's described in a manner reminiscent of menstrual cramps and concluding in an orgasm.
• Roald Dahl's The Witches includes a scene where the protagonist is dragged out of hiding by a group of witches and force-fed a potion as they hold him down.
• A very, very likely unintended example:

Orion Pax listened, and cataloged, and archived, and indexed, but his mind was not on his work... Who was this Megatron, this gladiator thug, killer of criminals and criminal himself, who gave voice to a longing that Orion Pax had never known he felt?

—Transformers: Exodus

• • Still, it's one of those things where you desperately want to ask how no one looked at it and went, "Hey, guys, this kind of sounds like a romance novel set-up..."
• Goblin Market is full of this trope, sometimes disturbingly so, with multiple scenes that suggest a connection between the consumption of food and seduction or attempted rape.
• In The Berenstain Bears book about the Beanie Babies, The Bears go over to the Bear City, to a Bears R Us, to a long line, and the narration actually mentions two dads who are being arrested for getting into a fight. That was probably one of the more grittier elements of the usually light-hearted books.
  • In another book, The Berenstein Bears and the Sleepover, the Sleepover that Sister Bear is attending ends up going way out of control to the extent that the police arrive shortly thereafter and the parents take the children home to punish them, and then they have to clean up the mess. Gee, that sounds like something from a stereotypical Party House from one of those high school films like Superbad.
• Ever notice how, in the Redwall series, the male villains are always trying to steal the supposedly magical Sword, yet the female villains ignore it completely, with the exception of Tsarmina, who broke it in half and imprisoned its owner?
• Detractors like to say this about the Inheritance Cycle, claiming that Paolini copied plot points or even the entire storyline wholesale from other, better books or movies. This is somewhat helped along by the fact that the plot synopsis on this very wiki's page for the series was constructed to read like a Troperiffic plot synopsis of Star Wars.
  • That has more to do with the fact that the Inheritance Cycle page is really biased against it
• Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book concerns two peoples split by a trivial ideological difference (which side toast should be buttered on), locked in an arms race that escalates to the point that if either side actually acts, both will be destroyed. If this sounds exactly like the Cold War as seen by its detractors, congratulations, you just got the point of the book.
  • The Sneeches is this trope about racism. There are Star-belly Sneeches and Star-less Sneeches, and the Star-Belly Sneeches have cookouts and picnics that the Star-less Sneeches are excluded from and generally look down on the Sneeches without stars.
• DH Lawrence's Women in Love has Gerald Crich, the typical manly man. In one of the scenes, he's shown riding a horse, and a train comes by. The horse is naturally afraid of the noise, but Gerald holds her there and forces her to endure it. The way it's written makes it sound like a rape scene, and it's very unsettling.
• New Moon has young men literally exploding out of their clothes when they turn into animals. Predatory animals.
  • Eclipse has two instances of one of those young men "showing his love" by forcing himself on a girl, just in case we didn't get it the first time.
• In The Penderwicks, Jeffrey's only friends (as far as we know) are the titular quartet of Penderwick sisters and he is revealed to have a talent for playing music. However, his overbearing mother wants him to go to a military school to follow in his father's footsteps. Hmmm...

1. ↑ Which comes from the traditional name of Mu Draconis, which comes from the Arabic al-Raqis, "The Dancer". Yes, we know that Arrakis orbits Canopus, another star entirely.