< Values Dissonance

Values Dissonance/Literature

  • The D'Artagnan Romances, better known as The Three Musketeers and its sequels, feature characters who routinely commit adultery in pursuit of wealth or advantage, shamelessly mock the least intelligent among them, and commit high treason several times a novel-and those are the protagonists. The books being historical fiction, the author himself lampshades it as an example of people behaving differently in the old days (in a way that's inspired suspicion that he was mocking people who behaved that way in his own time).
  • American fans of Terry Pratchett have a more lukewarm response when it comes to Men At Arms, a book with an anti-gun message.
    • Alan Moore even commented on this sort of thing, basically saying that "Americans are fine if you point out that they're racist or sexist but God forbid you say anything about their guns!"
      • People get upset about being accused of things that they're not, but they get even more upset at being lectured to do things that they don't want to do.
  • If the Discworld novel Men At Arms seems harsh in its depiction of firearms (i.e. The Gonne being an Artifact of Doom that turns all but the strongest-willed into vengeful murderers), keep in mind that the UK has notably strict gun control laws banning handguns entirely and regulating rifles and shotguns to almost the same effect. Also, in the story, an almost-missed point is that The Gonne doesn't want to be duplicated, because that would reduce its specialness and remove its power. Still, in the novel The Truth, firearms are, by then, illegal, but Mr. Pin has what amounts to a spring loaded pistol. Legally this is considered a crossbow; however the book says that if he was caught with this weapon by the police, his unofficial punishment for having it would be worse than the official one of owning a firearm. Similar comments are made about a similar weapon possessed by Inigo Skimmer in The Fifth Elephant.
    • On the other hand, Night Watch in the same series explicitly mocks the idea of a weapons ban, pointing out "criminals didn't obey the law. It was more or less the job description." And Interesting Times pretty much quotes an NRA slogan "Swords are outlawed, so only outlaws have swords."
    • Vimes' objections to the one-shot, spring loaded tube crossbow are more on the line that it is designed to be hidden, unlike a sword or a regular crossbow, and therefore it is an assassin's weapon. Vetinari, on the other hand, does his best to get rid of firearms because they are too powerful.
    • The Assassins' Guild is apparently even more strict on the subject of the tube crossbow than the Watch, as noted by Inigo's line:
      If you ever catch anyone with one of these in Ankh-Morpork, your grace, mhm, they will still be lucky that the Assassins' Guild didn't find them first, mmph.
      • Given that the above statement was made by an Assassins' Guild member, who was himself carrying such an implement outside of Ankh-Morpork, the Guild's stance may be more a matter of maintaining their monopoly on in-city assassinations than one of values. If any two-bit oik can pull out a spring-gonne and waste someone from a dark alley, how can they keep up their pose of elite respectability?
  • A kind of subtle example can be found in English classrooms everywhere that read books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or other novels from earlier time periods that depict boys engaging in activities that nowadays many would consider "gay." Despite their more "manly" activities like playing at wargames or going exploring, whenever young male characters go swimming naked together or engaging in an emotional connection of any kind that doesn't revolve around anger, the eyebrows raise and the children (mostly boys) start wondering if they were a little gay.
    • Not to mention Tom talks about having "orgies" while playing robbers and Huckleberry Finn calling it "gay".
  • A good, yet debatable, example is the classic Lensman series by E. E. "Doc" Smith, one of the seminal works of science fiction. On one hand, the noble protagonist, Kimball Kinnison, may come across to the modern reader as a blatantly condescending sexist when dealing with women and humanoid female aliens such as the Lyranians. On the other hand, the series still treats female characters better than much of the other fiction written at the same time -- it's mentioned that one of the distinguishing traits of Civilization (the good side) is more-or-less equality of the sexes, while Boskone (the evil culture) is generally really oppressive to women (see Second Stage Lensman). The Lyranians really are alien, and most of them seem less human (psychologically) than many of the Starfish Aliens.
    • It was brought out in the books that although the Lyranians were physically "White, Tellurian (human), females", mentally Kinnison's non-human friends were more "Human" than they were.
    • Smith provided another example in his other important work, the Skylark Series series (first story written in 1915-1921). The way the Japanese assistant to the heroes is casually referred to as a "Jap" and the very stereotypical accent Smith gives him is cringe-inducing to a modern reader.
      • Shiro (the Japanese guy) gets upgraded to a fellow scientist and martial artist later in the series, after graduating, and learns to speak better English. Also gets a girlfriend. Seems even "Doc" thought he hadn't been quite fair to him ...
  • Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is filled with colonial-era racism, making it reprehensible to a modern audience. The native Africans are repeatedly portrayed as violent, ignorant, subhuman cannibals... and those are the good ones.
    • This is a debate that's been raging at least since Nigerian author Chinua Achebe published his famous essay denouncing Heart of Darkness in 1976 - and, not surprisingly, the divide seems to often be along racial lines. People of African descent feel patronized and humiliated by Conrad's language, and perhaps they should, but white readers are so cheered to find a Victorian-era book that (tentatively) condemns racism that they will often bend over backwards to defend Conrad. The protagonist of the novel, Marlow, is certainly an enigma in this respect: he does put forth his opinion that imposing imperial rule on people of different races is wrong, but he also uses the words "nigger" and "savage" without compunction and seems to be offended by Africans speaking defiantly to Europeans. It could be argued that Conrad was walking a tightrope: he wanted to change European hearts, but stealthily, so he very carefully demolishes the rationale for racism while using superficially racist language. Achebe complains that Conrad does not go quite far enough in his criticism, but perhaps in this case Failure Was The Only Option.
      • Also note that "nigger" wasn't recognised as racist until the 70's in Britain, a good 80 years after Heart of Darkness was published.
  • In Theodor Fontane's 19th century novel Effi Briest, the eponymous, sixteen-year-old protagonist is married off to the much older Baron Innstetten by her parents. She consented to this, passing up a chance to marry a cousin she genuinely liked, because of his excellent career prospects. This is, for the time and in the opinion of everyone involved, a sensible and normal decision. Bored and feeling constrained in her marriage, she then has an extramarital affair with an (even older) military officer. Modern readers may feel unsympathetic to Effi because marrying for money is now considered cold and unscrupulous. This book is remarkable for the amount of Alternative Character Interpretation for both Effi and Innstetten, and how widely opinions vary on which characters readers blame or excuse.
    • Another one from Effie Briest: When Effi, Instetten and Crampas encounter seals during a walk on the beach, Crampas suggests shooting them. Instetten is against this idea: Although as nobleman and military officer, Crampas probably would get away with this, it is nevertheless illegal. This is probably to show Instetten's compulsion to do everything by the book, in contrast to Crampas, who is way more easy going. But modern readers may completely agree with Instetten here, while Crampas appears as a jerk willing to abuse his high social status for killing protected wild animals without any legal consequences.
  • Anne McCaffrey's earlier works show levels of sexism and violence towards women that are cringe-inducing to modern audiences. In Dragonflight (1968), F'lar, the hero, regularly shakes and slaps the heroine, Lessa, despite the author's assertions that theirs is a healthy and loving relationship. Dragonquest (1971) suggests that one of the female characters, Kylara, actually enjoys being battered as proof of her lover's masculinity. The books are products of their time -- they were written when domestic violence was quietly accepted, and the "barbaric" hero was the epitome of romance. The modern Dragonriders of Pern books, however, omit this behaviour, suggesting that the author recognises that times have changed. Unfortunately, the non-consensual sex remains, a hangover from the outdated, sexist and dangerous theory that women like to be "mastered" (read: raped) by their men.
    • As Kylara is a Designated Villain, in her case the dissonance may be less that it's appropriate for her to be 'battered' than that she clearly enjoys rough sex (something women couldn't admit to) with partners of her choosing, as a contrast to the book's designated heroine Brekke, who is deeply traumatized at the prospect of mating when her queen does even if it's not with her 'true love', F'nor. In yet another example of Values Dissonance, F'nor addresses virginal Brekke's fears/concerns about sex by, in essence, date-raping her. Kylara is punished, Brekke is given an out allowing her to stay loyal to one man.
    • The psychic connection between dragons and their riders is so powerful that, when the dragons mate, the humans do also. Green dragons are female, but their riders are male (except for a one or two women in "modern times"). The consequent gay sex is not explicit, but obviously there. So, volunteering for the exciting job of dragon-rider is consenting to sex with whichever human rides any dragon your dragon mates with. The bond works both ways, so these foursomes tend to like each other all around, but dragons appear to be less monogamous than humans. Plenty of raw material for squick, for 20th-century westerners.
      • It's mentioned in one book that incompatible human couples with compatible dragons occasionally find someone else to mate with under the influence, and do a kind of 'swap'.
    • At least one disability-activist has objected to The Ship Who Sang for its premise that those born with severe disabilities might be better off enslaved as cybernetic ships and facilities, rather than accommodated to lead a normal life.
      • And "enslaved" is not a euphemism; all "shell people" inherit mountains of debt for their care since infancy, the operations they've had to have to make them functional cyborgs, the installation in their permanent "bodies" (ships, space stations, etc.) and any upgrades to these "bodies." Few ever manage to pay off what they owe, forcing them to labor for Central Worlds, the government bureaucracy, for centuries. It does indeed amount to debt slavery [dead link] .
  • Pretty much anything written by HP Lovecraft, whose racism went far beyond what was common even in his day and age. Due to his belief in Britain as the pinnacle of civilization, he would regularly describe other ethnicities with the same revulsion as his Cosmic Horror beasts. According to his divorced wife, "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York... Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind."
    • Though he did recant his racist views and admitted that the racial mixing of New York was a good thing.
    • Lovecraft's life was subject to this; he married a Jewish author and bookstore owner. When news reached his family, they threatened to disown him for it, leading to him moving to New York. His family eventually pressured him into divorce.
  • George R Stewart's Earth Abides has a fairly innocuous tone, but does have one bizarre moment when the protagonist's girlfriend (and one of the last survivors of an apocalypse) has near Heroic BSOD when confessing (in fairly euphemistic language..."blue in the half-moons") that she's part black.
    • The protagonist takes it a lot less seriously by laughing loud and long and telling her it doesn't matter anymore because all the bigots and racists are dead now and there is only the two of them! Earth Abides is about a world wide pandemic that wipes out most of humanity and how the few survivors exist after the pandemic.
  • Sax Rohmer's The Mystery of Fu Manchu, and to some extent the entire body of Yellow Peril fiction which it is representative of.
    • Avoided and parodied in the 1980 Flash Gordon: the story basically admitted it was rather campy and old-fashioned, and the Fu Manchu IN SPACE! Ming was played by Max von Sydow, a (white) Swede.
    • The same year, Peter Sellers (white Englishman) played Fu (and Nayland Smith) in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, an Affectionate Parody of the whole business (building on from The Goon Show in the 1950s) that makes Fu a Villain Protagonist who gets the female lead to do a Face Heel Turn and ultimately triumphs over the heroes. This is also, tellingly, the last time the character has appeared on film to date aside from a completely tongue-in-cheek gag in the "Werewolf Women of the S.S." segment of Grindhouse, in which he is played by Nicholas Cage.
  • Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist features two examples:
    • The villain Fagin is a pretty bad Jewish stereotype. He's a miserly and cowardly crook who preys on Christian children to steal for him and makes sure they're executed when they're caught so they can't rat him out. He is repeatedly referred to as a Jew, though he is not portrayed as devout. When he is ultimately condemned to death, he sends away the rabbis who try to speak with him.. Interestingly, "Fagin" was the name of a friendly man Dickens knew in his childhood. Dickens apparently did not realize that the character would offend Jewish readers until a Jewish friend complained to him. He went back and reduced the references to Fagin's Jewishness in later editions of the book and attempted amends in Our Mutual Friend, which includes a far less stereotypical Jewish character. Will Eisner later put his own spin on the character in "Fagin the Jew."
    • Oliver maintains his virtue through many hardships in contrast to the other lowly urchins he meets on the street. We learn in the end that what separates him from the others is noble blood.
  • Values Dissonance is even found in the early fiction of Isaac Asimov, of all people. His first stories were written when he was a young man with almost no experience of women, and his early female characters are to a woman idiotic, strident, screeching, whining, nagging harridans who don't care if their husband is saving the world, it's dinnertime! Asimov wrote in his final autobiography that he based almost all of these characters on his mother, of whom he had a very low opinion.
    • He wrote a poem parodying his own works which had the line "it's enough [the hero] has a mother, other females are a bother" showing how aware of his failings he was.
    • His later works are largely empty of anything involving values dissonance and some of it was even ahead of its time.
    • Asimov explored values dissonance in some of his works, particularly the later installments of the Robot trilogy. Among other examples:
      • Earth men consider it extremely rude to talk to another man in the communal bathrooms, or even to actively acknowledge the existence of others. Citizens of the Spacer planets do not.
      • On Solaria, a planet of hundreds of million robots versus 20,000 people, every adult lived alone on giant estates and communicated with others via holographic images. Even being in the same room as another person was considered rather unpleasant and was avoided, let alone physical contact. Sex for reproduction was tolerated only by necessity and was still considered very Squicky. The Solarians make a strong distinction between "viewing" holographically and "seeing" physically; viewing someone in the nude isn't considered very improper since the holographic image of you isn't considered to really be you, while seeing someone fully clothed is much less tolerable.
  • Colleen McCollough's Masters of Rome series has several mentions of the ancient Roman practice of abandoning unwanted girl babies, or throwing away their bodies (God only knows what killed them). It makes for... interesting reading.
  • Flatland presents the females of the titular world's sentient species as explicitly less intelligent and more emotional than the males, though they can be deadly when need be. An addendum to the later editions mentions protests regarding that issue even when the book was released in the beginning of the 20th century; likewise, revisions to the text admit how horrible females have it (the only "blessing" being that they have no memory).
    • One suspects, counter-intuitively, that there might be fewer objections now: the Flatlanders are, of course, not human, and since that book was published nonhuman intelligences with significant differences between the sexes have become quite common in science fiction, with examples like the male Lyrans of E. E. "Doc" Smith (who never actually showed up, but were basically oversexed monkeys useful only for reproduction) to the non-sentient female Kzinti (although in that case the males bred them that way). Of course, these examples themselves have provoked controversy, and the story wasn't from those species' viewpoints as it is the Flatlanders'.
      • A couple of other examples of this sort of sexual dimorphism from science fiction; the khepri from Perdido Street Station, whose males are mindless scarab beetles that only live to eat and breed, and the Apex/Males/Females from the Azadian Empire in The Culture.
    • The dissonance may have been intentional even back then; Flatland was in large part a satire of Victorian England, and the women a satire of that culture's views on gender. It could also be a case of Unreliable Narrator. In The Annotated Flatland, Ian Stewart suggests that, if you look at what the women in the story actually do, they are a lot smarter than the narrator A. Square thinks they are.
    • Ian Stewart's sequel of 2001, Flatterland, updates the whole setting by making the protagonist A Square's granddaughter, Victoria Line (the book is full of horrible puns, I'm afraid). At the end, it's discovered that the women aren't just lines, but flat shapes like the men: it's just that they poke out into a supersymmetry dimension
  • Gene Stratton Porter's 1904 novel Freckles is based in large part on the notion that the hero, raised in an orphanage, thinks he's the bastard child of abusive parents, and therefore unworthy of love or respect. The other characters, particularly the love interest, spend much of their time convincing himself that he is worthy -- not because he's a good and decent man himself and therefore it doesn't matter what his parents are, but because his goodness and "fineness" prove that his parents must necessarily have been upstanding, righteous, and probably well-to-do. The clear implication is that an abused child is unworthy of compassion, because as the offspring of abusive parents it must be innately incapable of anything good.
  • Agatha Christie, in many of her stories. Her most infamous example would have to be the controversy over the title of And Then There Were None which started out as Ten Little Niggers. When that was viewed too offensive, it was changed to Ten Little Indians. And when that was viewed as too offensive, it was changed to the now commonly-used title And Then There Were None.
    • To Christie's credit after WWII she herself revised many of her early books to eliminate the kind of casual anti-semitism common in the twenties and thirties.
  • Likewise, James Joyce's Ulysses used the word "nigger" with impunity. It referred to "nigger lips" three times, for example. This is probably just cultural differences, though: Ireland had essentially no non-white population, and the word tended to be used as an equivalent to "Negro". It was only when Ireland began synching up with America that it was realised that that word should probably not be used, and it began to get edited out.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was a collection of tales, many featuring some incredibly un-PC events and viewpoints. However, because each tale is heavily influenced by the various tellers' prejudices, it's difficult to gauge Chaucer's own opinions on the matter. For example, the Nun tells an incredibly racist blood libel portraying Jews killing a Christian child. However, the Nun herself is shown to be a shallow twit. While Chaucer likely wasn't much friendlier to Jews than his contemporaries, the seriousness of the Nun's Tale is inconclusive.
    • This troper remembers his HS English teacher reading a Papal decree from a few years before Chaucer's time that stated that (a) the blood-libel wasn't true and (b) that the clergy were to do all that they could to quash such rumors; and here we have not just a nun, but a Prioress--about as high as a woman can rise in the RC hierarchy--actually PROPAGATING such a rumor.
    • Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales as if he were documenting true events and put reminders before at least one tale that the opinions expressed in the following story weren't his but the views of the character.
  • Popular opinion places this as the reason Victor Hugo killed off the protagonist of Les Misérables, Valjean. The book was written about 19th Century France for 19th Century France, and in 19th Century France, a criminal is a criminal until he dies not a criminal. Letting Valjean live, which would seem the logical choice today, would seem a Karma Houdini to 19th Century France. Mind you, with Valjean's sympathetic portrayal throughout, as well as the critique of the class system disguised as a Betty and Veronica, one could form a fairly solid argument that M. Hugo was not very fond of The Rules Of 19th Century France(tm).
    • It would be pretty much surprising if he was fond of the rules of the Second Empire, which pushed him into exile. Not to forget also that during his brief political career in the 1840s, Victor Hugo earned some renown by publicly speaking against the death penalty and social injustice... in the Royalist Parliament's Chamber of Peers. The establishment had plenty of reasons to think of him as a royal pain in the ass.
    • Alternatively, his death had more to do with the fact that 19th century stories tend to end with the main character either married (or about to marry), dead, or in despair. Valjean was "too old" to get married by 19th century literary conventions. Indeed, Victor Hugo very often had his main characters die at the end of his novels, even when they were young, innocent and in love. Marius and Cosette's Happy Ending is quite the exception. Read Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame) for another example that ends like this.
    • On the subject of Marius and Cosette, modern female readers are likely to have their skin crawl off when reading about the early parts of their "courtship" (or, in modern terms, Marius' stalking of Cosette). However, when the novel was written, Marius' extreme shyness, his ardent desire to see Cosette and holding her on a kind of mental pedestal all came across as intensely romantic. (It doesn't help that many of the older female readers of the time would not have objected to having a cute twentysomething follow them around like a lost puppy in the slightest.)
    • Also, lots of modern readers felt sorry for Eponine, who loved Marius and tried her hardest to please him, and thus weren't much pleased by how he basically ignored and looked down on her. At the time however, there wasn't really the concept of the "virtuous poor" or the mixing of social status. Marius was a baron and above Eponine and Cosette appeared to be the same as the daughter of a wealthy nobleman. This is also why Marius was so appalled by Valjean's distant past as a convict - despite the fact that modern readers would see Valjean's lifetime of redemption as far overshadowing what he did all those years ago, it would have meant that to Marius, Valjean was just a convict. This is also why Thenardier tried to use Cosette's illegitimacy as blackmail - the fact that she was the bastard daughter of a woman considered to be a whore would have been scandalous.
      • And on the subject of Marius and his treatment of Valijean, many modern readers would probably be rather disgusted by Marius' behavior towards Valijean once he learns that Valijean once committed some vague crime far in the past. The fact that Marius isolated Cosette from the man who worked so hard to raise her all those years (and that Cosette went along with it despite knowing her father figure's kindness) can be rather vexing to modern readers.
  • Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Frollo's obsession with Esmeralda is regarded as twisted and inappropriate because he's a priest, and supposed to be celibate. It's highly questionable because he's of (minor) nobility, and she's a Gypsy, the lowest social class in Paris. But there's no hesitation over the fact that he's thirty-six years old and she's barely sixteen.
    • There's also the portrayal of Gypsies as child thieves. Esmeralda is shown sympathetically because she turns out to be the daughter of a French woman.
    • Also, the use of the the word "gypsy." It's a racial slur.
  • Homer's The Iliad centers around women being treated as pieces of property, to be looted in warfare. The play The Trojan Women was already deconstructing this in ancient Athens.
    • It is not that women were treated as pieces of property but that prisoners taken in war automatically became slaves, something that was no different at the time The Trojan Women was written than in Homer's two epic poems (the treatment the Athenians meted out to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War for instance is rather similar to the fate of the Trojans - men slaughtered, women sold into slavery). At the time slavery was seen as a fact of life that could happen to anyone if s/he was unlucky. Consider the swineherd Eumaios in The Odyssey, a prince abducted as a child and sold into slavery by Phoenicians, yet apparently nobody thought of freeing him all these years.
    • There are readers out there who seem to think Achilles falling in love with Penthesilea as she died is highly romantic. Clearly they only know this story by hearsay or the sanitised versions -- and don't know exactly what he did to her corpse afterwards....
      • This is very much a Your Mileage May Vary kind of situation. The claim of necrophilia only appears in some variants of the story, notably that recounted by the 12th-century Byzantine scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica; the Iliad is silent on exactly what happened[1]. What we do know is that Achilles apparently fell in love with Penthesilea as she died of her wounds, was incensed by what he took to be the disrespectful behavior of another Greek warrior, Thersites (who is claimed in some variants to have cut out Penthesilea's eyes from her dead body) and killed him, thereafter giving Penthesilea's corpse a proper burial.
    • Achilles' behaviour in general often oscillates between dickish and unspeakably cruel, yet many Greeks, e. g. Alexander the Great, considered him one of the greatest heroes ever. His companion Patroclus was killed in a fair fight, but Achilles goes into a crazed rage, mercilessly slaughtering as many Trojans as he can lay his hands on, and even capturing twelve alive so he can kill them as human sacrifices at Patroclus' funeral. And he is far from the only Greek hero who by modern standards would have to be considered a war criminal (especially through the wholesale slaughter at the sack of Troy).
    • For an even greater Values Dissonance, check out The Odyssey, where Odysseus brags about the sacking and raping of the Cicones. Of course, this angered Athena, who set them adrift.
      • The Odyssey may be an odd choice for this. A number of very strange things happen. Toward the end, after Odysseus has brutally murdered dozens of young men and reconciled with his wife (who recognized him and pointedly did not welcome him back with open arms), he goes to see his father. As soon as he arrives, he torments an old man (who doesn't recognize him) with the possibility of his beloved son's death. Then he abandons his home, family, and subjects yet again for another journey. In short, Odysseus is kind of a douche (although, to be fair, the reason he has to go on another journey is because of a geas. Although, he doesn't seem upset about it nor apologetic).
        • In Homer's epic, Penelope does not recognize Odysseus and puts him to the test to see if he knows about the special construction of their bed. When he passes the test, she does welcome him with open arms. With Laertes the in-story rationale is that he had twenty years to consider the possibility of his son's death, so Odysseus went through the charade because he was afraid that the shock of learning that he was alive might kill him.
    • Virgil's The Aeneid serves as an example from a Roman perspective; Aeneas is much more concerned with protecting his men than Odysseus was. That is, he shows some interest in protecting his men.
      • It is not as if Odysseus did not try to protect his men - e. g. he warned his men not to kill Helios' cattle - but the fates and some gods were against them.
      • He's also so intent on rescuing his father during the fall of Troy that he barely bats an eyelash when his wife disappears. At least he was sort of sad when he abandoned poor Dido...
      • Well, Aeneas' focus on rescuing Anchises was essentially an instance of "honor thy mother and thy father"; veneration for one's parents has been an important ethical value in many cultures both ancient and modern.
        • In fact he was desperately searching for her in the burning Troy, until she appeared to him in an epiphania. She told him to go to Italia, where he would marry a woman and become king of the city he would found there. In fact, the Aeneid, the Odessey, and the Iliad all advocate a kind of rigid class system where only the male aristocrats have any rights, including that of being regarded as heroes, and that just about everyone else - the poor, slaves, women, etc. - are simply beneath notice.
  • The Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles has an example which also qualifies as Science Marches On: a secondary character is an expert on phrenology and various racial "sciences" of the day, traits which would certainly be villainous in any modern work. Watson clearly finds the phrenology absurd but is tactful enough not to say it aloud, especially how the character gushes over the shape of Holmes' head and wishes for it to be displayed should the Great Detective depart from his mortal coil.
    • Also, as an interesting mark of how perspectives change, when Doyle depicted Mormons as a Religion of Evil, that wasn't considered controversial, whereas his similarly unsympathetic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan was. Nowadays, this is essentially reversed. He supposedly later issued an apology to the Mormons after being taken to task by them.
    • In The Yellow Face (A reference to a mask), when the mother of a mixed-race daughter showed Holmes and Watson a locket with a picture of herself and her black husband, Watson commented that the man was "strikingly handsome and intelligent-looking, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent." Authors of the time would often describe sympathetic non-white characters as being very attractive except for their non-white features.
      • Though the ending does ameliorate this somewhat.
      • I think the point is that the woman is afraid her past married to a black man will come up which will harm her social standing, as opposed to casting aspersions on black people. She is specifically concerned about the reaction of her husband - who as it happens reacts beautifully.
    • The Three Gables opens with a black man in an ugly salmon-colored suit coming in to threaten Holmes. Both Holmes himself and Watson's narration insult him repeatedly, in a manner that would certainly be considered racist today; Holmes repeatedly refers to Steve Dixie's smell and even comments about his 'woolly head'. And it has a Jewish villainness. Way to go, Sir Arthur!
      • In justice to Holmes, the black man in question is a criminal who Holmes wishes to insult. His behavior towards a respectable black person would probably be quite different.
        • Holmes' behavior towards even a less-than-respectable black person who hadn't broken into Holmes' house with intent to assault him would probably be quite different. The fact that Steve Dixie left 221-B Baker Street in the same physical condition he entered it bespeaks to Holmes' relative self-restraint during this scene.
      • Some Holmes scholars suspect that the story (published in 1926, near the end of Doyle's life) was--like several other stories of the period--ghost written.
      • And then, the villainess of this short story delivers this line about a good young Englishman who traveled to Italy:

It was as if the air of Italy had got into his blood and brought with it the old cruel Italian spirit

    • A non-racial Holmes example is the Great Detective's drug use, which began being dissonant when Cocaine started being banned, but is particularly noticeable when the stories are billed as young adult literature. A common perception is that Watson was essentially Holmes' drug dealer. This is one of the things addressed and debunked in the pastiche The Seven Percent Solution. It is Canon that Watson disapproved of Holmes' excessive drug use, when he bothered to mention it at all. He even mentioned it to Holmes at the beginning of The Sign of Four, but it didn't help. In Victorian times, a gentleman could freely walk to any drugstore and buy as much cocaine and morphine (and after 1899, heroin) as he saw fit. The Jeremy Brett adaptation addressed this by having Watson clearly and repeatedly voicing his disapproval about Holmes' drug taking. Finally in "The Devil's Foot", Brett (with the explicit approval of Doyle's granddaughter) had Holmes give up this habit and bury his syringe.
    • In "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," Holmes expresses a hope that the U.S. would rejoin the U.K. Decidedly a minority position in 2010!
      • I think that was meant to be one of Holmes's weird eccentricities. A minority opinion, to say the least, in 1900 also.
    • This is a description of the Andaman Islanders from The Sign of Four

"They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they, that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast. Nice, amiable people, Watson! If this fellow had been left to his own unaided devices, this affair might have taken an even more ghastly turn. I fancy that, even as it is, Jonathan Small would give a good deal not to have employed him." Yes.Hideous Cannibalistic Savages

    • Naturally for Victorian literature, many acts of murder, extortion and conspiracy in Holmes' casebook were committed to cover up scandalous intimate liaisons which, if exposed publicly today, would be greeted with a resounding "So What?" from everyone except the paparazzi or a divorce attorney.
      • Given the number of crime shows that use this as a motive for murder even today, this may not have entirely died out in media.
      • In some cases, perhaps. But to try and conceal the fact that a young groom had previously dated someone else?
        • In that instance the problem was who the young groom had previously dated.
    • In a story from The Case-Book Of Sherlock Holmes, a man confesses to concealing his sister's death so he can retain use of her properties long enough to clean up at the track. These days, his hiring someone to impersonate her smacks of identity theft, and would be prosecuted as fraud. Holmes lets him walk, apparently not considering it objectionable once he's confirmed the sister was not murdered. The fact that both he and the suspect refer to his creditors as "the Jews" doesn't help.
    • Quite a few culprits are allowed to go unprosecuted on the condition that they leave Britain, or are treated as if the crimes they've committed outside of Europe are none of Holmes' affair. Crimes outside the U.K. may not be Lestrade's jurisdiction, but Holmes takes pride in not having the same constraints as the police, so it seems hypocritical when his commitment to justice ends at the British coastline.
      • Practically speaking, Holmes can only use his 'freedom of constraints' when he is erring on the side of mercy because for Holmes to punish a wrongdoer in a situation where the British legal system has decided its not their problem would require Holmes himself to become a vigilante murderer. Which he doesn't want to do.
  • In one of Doyle's "Professor Challenger" stories, The Poison Belt, the Earth passes through a toxic region in the Ether, which gradually kills knocks out the entire population of the world... in order of darkest to lightest skin. Professor Challenger's plan to protect people from its effects was offered to his friends, but not to his servants.
    • The skin-tone ordering is somewhat alleviated by the fact that the story suggests the order was more on the lines of 'the equator first, then outwards from there' rather than ordered by skin-tone alone.
    • "The Slavonic population of Austria is down, while the Teutonic has hardly been affected." No, not racist (in the wider sense) at all
  • In the book Gone with the Wind, all the sympathetic male characters (except Rhett, who is something of a rogue) are in the Klan. Moreover, all the black characters speak in a stereotypical slave dialect, while the white characters speak perfect English. Readers might also be surprised by the fact that Gerald and Ellen name each of their three infants who died in infancy Gerald Jr, as reusing names lost to infant mortality was a common practice at the time.
    • It's not so much that they "speak perfect English". The problem is that the slaves' accent is written in eye dialect -- non-standard spelling, used to indicate an unusual accent and frequently an illiterate one -- while the whites' accent is not, as if somehow the white accent isn't an accent at all. (Some Americans do this unconsciously when they say that someone from the Midwest "doesn't have an accent". Oh yes they certainly do, and as strong an accent as any other.)
      • And, seeing as Mammy is a house slave, her accent likely wouldn't have been all that different from Scarlett's, yet she gets the eye dialect treatment while Scarlett does not.
    • Also the fact that Scarlett's mother married at 15 and the rather sexual way in which the narrator describes Scarlett and her younger sister's attractiveness to men (they are 16 and 14 respectively) is somewhat squicky.
    • The marriage of Ashley and Melanie, cousins. Again, during the 19th century, it was quite common for cousins to marry, though the degree of relationship was usually second-cousin or more distant.
      • This is commented on in the books - Mrs. Tarleton mentions that the constant inbreeding has weakened the Wilkes and Hamilton stocks, and they need fresh blood to mix things up before they die out. Granted, today we'd probably be talking about how gross it was that they were all inbred, but hey, landed gentry have always been the same.
  • In the James Bond novel Goldfinger, Bond "cures" a lesbian by being sexy enough.
    • Given the Sean Connery is so sexy Even the Guys Want Him this may not be such a stretch...
    • Ian Fleming was pretty bad about this. Pussy Galore was far from the worst case -- try From Russia with Love, where not only does Darko Kerim hold a stated belief in the Rape Is Love principle, but his own history with women also makes his role as a sympathetic character (one of a very small group of people Bond considers friends) border on the absurd.
    • Not to mention the book Live and Let Die with its over-the-top crazy racism. Hilariously, James Bond's Texan sidekick Felix Leiter tries to educate him about black culture in America.
      • Which you have to admit is bizarre!
        • In fairness to the book it points out that Leiter's knowledge of black culture is because before joining the CIA he used to work as a journalist in Harlem. Additionally, however incomplete Leiter's knowledge might be on the topic it is still notably more substantial than Bond's, who literally just got off the plane from London.
      • Even more ironically, Leiter was portrayed by a black man in the Casino Royale reboot with Daniel Craig.
      • And before that in the "non-canonic" Never Say Never Again with Sean Connery.
    • Felix makes a joke in Diamonds Are Forever about how you can't call a measure of whiskey a "jigger" anymore; now you have to call it a Jegro.
    • In "The Hildebrand Rarity", Bond muses that "the only trouble with beautiful Negresses is that they don't know anything about birth control." Admittedly, he was having a conversation about Nigeria at the time, where contraception is indeed less prevalent, but the line's still jarring.
      • In Live and Let Die Bond is surprised to see a "Negress" driving a car in New York.
        • In the early 1950s, in an expensive Cadillac, in downtown Manhattan, as a professional chauffeur. Which is legitimately surprising.
    • Orson Scott Card, in his novel Enchantment, quotes an unspecified Fleming story as having the line, "All women love semi-rape." Even if it is true for some women (which it might be, Rule 34 being what it is), it still comes across as rather creepy.
  • Helen Bannerman's children's story Little Black Sambo has long left a bad taste in people's mouths due to the horrible "darky" caricatures that illustrated most of the early publications. However, apart from this and the name of the title character (which became a racial slur after the fact), the story is rather innocuous and has been retold (sans Unfortunate Implications) several times in recent years.
    • To illustrate (pun not intended), here is an example of some earlier artwork for the story. Contrast that with the cover of one of the more recent editions and, well, you see the difference...
    • It may also be worth mentioning that, seeing how she spent much of her life in India, Bannerman's original target audience was composed of Indian children. The fact that British usage of the period made it reasonable to use the term "black" to refer to dark-skinned Indians is a whole different level of dissonance.
      • Although not as much as most of 15th and 16th century literature, where a "black girl" or a "nut brown maid" would always mean a young white woman with dark hair.
  • The Warhammer 40,000 novel series Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain have as main characters Commissars who don't field-execute their men very often. This is more in line with 20th -- 21st century military practice than the rest of the Imperium, arguably in order to keep the characters sympathetic.
    • Ciaphas Cain almost subverts this, in that the title Commissar will tell anyone who asks that he refrains from shooting his own men because he knows that if they like him, he won't be the victim of "accidental" friendly fire like many, many Commissars tend to be. However, it's plainly obvious that, while he certainly believes in this logic, he also genuinely cares for them.
    • Gaunt's Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain suggests that most effective Commissars are relatively judicious in how they perform their duties- which are maintaining morale, discipline, and field leadership when necessary. While field execution for cowardice or failure is indeed an option, it's one most successful commissars use sparingly. Since both heroic commissars are effective and inspiring leaders, and their soldiers are excellent units with high morale and valuable soldiers, field execution would be a bad idea and utterly unnecessary anyways. The stereotype of the excessively execution-happy commissar is linked to the older, more game-version theme of the Guard as a generally incompetent Redshirt Army instead of the modern, more story-version theme of them as a well-trained and well-equipped force that can battle most Orks, Chaos cultists, and Tyranids on an equal footing.
  • In the Doc Savage novels, Doc runs a facility known as "the Crime College", where captured crooks are given brain surgery to erase their memories and wipe out criminal impulses, than retrained into productive, law-abiding citizens. This leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many modern readers, and some later authors have gone so far as to suggest that Doc was lobotomising criminals. (The college was phased out in later novels, probably as a result of Science Marches On.)
    • Then again, the College was introduced as an alternative to having Doc behave like most pulp heroes and just kill the bad guys (something which he did do in the first few stories). The idea that giving someone a brainwipe was morally preferable to killing them outright might involve a little Values Dissonance in and of itself, but it's just what one would expect from a Technical Pacifist.
    • It's also a noteworthy part of the presentation that Doc Savage is presented as firmly believing in the principle that since he is forcibly taking away the criminals' ability to earn a living at what they're familiar and practiced with (crime), he must then assume responsibility for ensuring that they can support themselves. Which he does by not only training them in new job skills, but in then using his ownership of various corporations to guarantee that they actually get a job.
  • The Charge of the Light Brigade was treated at the time, most notably in Tennyson's poem, as an act of tragic heroism, exemplifying military courage despite the unfortunate mix-up in the orders making it all a futile blunder. A watching French general commented "it's magnificent, but it's not war". The modern sentiment is that it wasn't heroic at all, just tragic, and above all an indictment of a military system that made soldiers "lions led by donkeys". The lesser-known but much more amusing part of that quote, "it is stupidity/madness" would suggest that he caught it well enough. Unfortunately it seems to still work that way... but at least communication speed means botched orders can (usually) be corrected in time.
    • What most critics of The Charge of the Light Brigade don't realize it that it worked. Despite heavy losses it went through and the Russian cannon were stopped.
      • On the other hand, they were the wrong cannons and the action (and subsequent rout) broke the momentum of the allied counter-attack, leading to the Russians holding the captured redoubts and winning the battle.
    • Note that poem has been deconstructed at least since 1890, when Rudyard Kipling wrote The Last Of The Light Brigade, influenced by firsthand accounts of the Brigade's few survivors.
  • There's an interesting dissonance in how modernity tends to look at "fops" in both historical fiction and works actually written in the 18th century. There's often an assumption that a man wearing makeup, facial powder, and elaborate clothing must either be Ambiguously Gay or a Camp Gay, even though this was the style of the time for heterosexual men. Many people dressing this way were more along the lines of being The Casanova. (Possibly including Casanova.)
    • To make matters even more dissonant, male characters derided as "effeminate" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature aren't any sort of Camp Gay. Instead, they're hyper-heterosexuals whose feminine mannerisms are supposedly a way of attracting women.
      • Indeed, this "superficial-femininity as a means of attracting females" has seen a recurrence in several modern subcultures, most notably the Anglo-European Glam Rock scene of the early- to mid-1970s and those influenced by it, and the Japanese Visual Kei scene. Although both of these did include some degree of bisexuality, they had a profound influence on later subcultures which more closely replicated the feminine-but-hyper-heterosexual fops of the 17th and 18th centuries; most notably the Glam Metal scene of the mid-1980s
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the novel, not the anime) manages to have a TON of Values Dissonance because it is set in early-AD China (the main story is from 184 to 234) and because of the Confucian moral slant of the novel. Some of the most extreme examples are ironically from the main protagonist Liu Bei, who sometimes puts Honor Before Reason to the point where other good guys, despite sometimes having similar moral slants, have to call him on it.
    • It's not helped by the fact that Liu Bei comes across like a Designated Hero quite often (especially in pure Values Dissonance scenes like throwing his infant son at the ground because the valuable general who managed to save the child could have been killed in the process, and Liu Bei considered his general far more valuable than his son), and Cao Cao is more of a Designated Villain. Many people who read the books today consider Cao Cao to be the far more noble, honorable, and likeable character.
      • Likable maybe, since Cao Cao's scenes are often actually pretty funny, but noble and honorable? Cao Cao agrees to assassinate high officials multiple times, constantly runs away with his tail between his legs, at one point murders an old family friend and his household over a stupid misunderstanding and finally attempts to take over China as the new Wei emperor (which he, posthumously, actually manages.) A lot of things describe Cao Cao, but "honourable" or even "nice" is not one of them. His most famous quote is "Better I wrong the world than that the world wrong me!" for a reason.
      • Actually, the troper says that Cao Cao was more honorable and noble than Liu Bei. The joke here is that, despite how bad Cao Cao was, Liu Bei was even WORSE. Just think about that for a bit.
    • One of the most blatant examples of this is when Liu Bei stays at the home of a commoner. The commoner goes out hunting and promises him a fresh kill but fails to kill anything, so the would-be hunter murders his wife and serves her for dinner instead. When Liu Bei finds out, he weeps tears of gratitude for the man's noble sacrifice.
  • What we modern readers consider a Mary Sue was considered an acceptable type once (see Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin). More idealistic characters were accepted in certain eras than now, types like the Princess Classic and Pollyanna.
    • The 18th-century idea of children's literature and poetry was painfully moralistic and didactic. Goody Two-Shoes was an actual book. This trend was mocked by Lewis Carroll in his Alice in Wonderland books.
    • Likewise what we'd call a Marty Stu, especially the Jerkass Stu kind, was once considered a role model and pinnacle of manliness, and the classical definition of 'hero' was more like an Ubermensch. Naturally, today these characters come off as an Anti-Hero at best, Designated Hero at worst.
  • While it is still regarded as a masterpiece of world literature, War and Peace is not known for espousing the feminist philosophy. It never becomes so bad that women are considered inferior in the book, but anyone looking for it (and ignoring the actual morals of the book) could probably find enough subtext to dismiss it as male chauvinist propaganda.
    • There's also the Sonya/Nikolay/Marya love triangle. Sonya is secretly delighted when Andrey and Natasha reunite because Nikolay can't possibly have an 'incestuous' relationship with Marya; this despite the fact that Sonya is his blood relation (first cousins), while Marya is only his brother-in-law's sister.
  • Buck of Left Behind blackmails a woman with the threat of outing her as a lesbian if she reveals certain information that she has, and that she legitimately feels the public has the right to know. Chloe, his wife, who used to be a realistic, fairly nice woman before she was 'saved', laughs about said blackmail.
    • Even better, the scene in question plays out exactly like the opening to a standard smear campaign to harass a woman out of her position (She's his boss, who he's been disrespecting, belittling, and treating like his secretary because he thinks she's not good enough). Buck brings up, out of nowhere, "Well, what if I go around telling everyone you're a lesbian? How will you like that?" It's not even clear initially that she is a lesbian, since her response is simply to panic at the idea he's going to start spreading the rumor and deny it (not that this stops him from taking this as "proof"). Later Buck takes over her office and, when she comes in to demand to know what he's doing, he attempts to kick the door into her face. This is, of course, presented as one of his great heroic actions in the books, and also totally hilarious, even more than blackmailing her.
      • The blackmail story itself reveals even more Values Dissonance between the writers and a large chunk of contemporary society, namely that blackmailing someone about being a lesbian would even work; most people these days in North America wouldn't care if someone working at a newspaper (or anywhere, now including the military) was gay.
    • There's a huge blog dedicated to discussing the Values Dissonance and general craptastic writing in that series. Notable examples: The protagonist Airline Pilot who considers himself a hero for refusing to ride on a bus from his plane to O Hare Terminal, even though this requires him to walk around plane wrecks and ignore the dead and wounded inside. And the protagonist Reporter who discovers an International Conspiracy after it murders his close friend, and then runs right to the head of that conspiracy and trades silence for his life.
  • Simon Black in the Antarctic (1956). While the patronizing attitudes toward a lost tribe of Neanderthals was expected, one thing that stood out was how contemporary novels about Antarctica emphasise its beauty, whereas this novel went on about how terrible the place was.
    • In the same way, older writing tends to portray rainforests as hellish environments, challenges to be heroically overcome, rather than precious ecosystems.
      • To be fair, if you're stuck hacking your way through a rain forest with nothing more than a machete, compass, and pith helmet, all that malaria and yellow fever can make it into a pretty awful place. This might be a Science Marches On, in that science has made rainforests more tolerable.
      • Likewise, Antarctica isn't exactly the most pleasant place to explore either. It's hard to appreciate great scenery and penguins when your balls are freezing off.
    • Not to be picky, but....how can a "patronizing attitude" toward a "lost tribe of Neanderthals" possibly bring up Unfortunate Implications? Not only have they been extinct for thousands of years, but even modern-day anthropologists concede that, genetically, they were only semi-human at best. One might as well complain about someone having a patronizing attitude toward woolly mammoths.
    • What modern-day anthropologists concede is that they are not our direct ancestors, not that they don't belong to the "Homo" family. They were "humans", but of a different kind. Their cultural development does not put them on woolly mammoth level either.
    • To further complicate things, the latest evidence is that Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens. Specifically, most non-Africans have 1-4% Neanderthal blood. (It's not as simple as white/black, and it's certainly not Europe/Africa or Europe/other, it's sub-Saharan Africa/everywhere else. At least, that's the early-2012 sequencing data.)
  • In The Last Guru by Daniel Pinkwater, a sudden increase in spirituality in America leads to the world economy crashing.
  • Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment features an out of nowhere aside that homosexuals make ideal suicide bombers, as they already don't have to worry about spreading their genes. The number of terrible jokes that could arise from that statement just fills it with Unfortunate Implications
    • He argued at various points in the Dune series that homosexuals made ideal warriors, for precisely the same reason. (For example, Leto II's army was made up exclusively of lesbians.) Herbert thus achieved the remarkable feat of pissing off both sides of the gays-in-the-military controversy.
  • Works such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contain period-appropriate depictions of racism and racist epithets, causing them to be criticized as racist books despite their clear stance against racism.
    • People who think these books, and others like them, are racist should find copies on the internet and download them. Use "Find & Replace" to change all the words they find "racist" to their PC equivalents. Read the new modified book and see if it was improved, or was even close the same great story it was before they got their hands on it.
      • For a fun sci-fi twist, replace that word with 'robot'!
    • That's not an argument against banning the books, that's an argument against shoddily bowdlerising books. The point you're trying to make is that to critique something you have to depict it, that showing racism to criticise racism isn't racist.
    • Also, much criticism of Huckleberry Finn is from how Jim is presented -- uneducated, superstitious, and naive. It probably doesn't occur to some people that Jim was actually portrayed as extremely intelligent and morally sound despite being ignorant, and that he was ignorant because really, how many Missouri slaves do you think were allowed to get an education?
      • Additionally, we only get to know Jim from Huck's perspective, and as the book progresses and Huck grows up, Jim is viewed in an increasingly positive light.
  • In the original Doctor Dolittle books, the African animals were portrayed with considerably more dignity and sympathy than the human natives.
    • The king is shown to be pissed off at the whites because the last white man who came to his country first dug up holes everywhere looking for gold, and started to kill lots of elephants for ivory when he didn't find some. And the second book introduces an African character who has studied at a university and loves Cicero. (He still dislikes algebra and shoes, on the third hand.)
      • The last is a standard English trope: the degraded, disgusting African cannibal/murderer who is also a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge.
        • Prince Bumpo is neither degraded, nor disgusting nor a cannibal - though he does tend to mangle the English language on occasion. Also he has yet to graduate.
    • The greatest naturalist in the world, greater even than Charles Darwin, is an Indian shaman, who is also a great warrior. He's illiterate, sometimes naive and quite realistic in the description.
  • Sir Walter Scott gives an ambivalent portrayal of Jews in Ivanhoe. Isaac and Rebecca are both sympathetic characters who constantly suffer from unfair persecution. However, the book still indulges rather heavily on Jewish stereotypes by making Isaac a typically greedy, rich Jewish usurer. On the other hand, Isaac is said to only be this way because it is the role society placed upon him. He frequently shows that his love for his daughter outweighs his love of money, and his daughter Rebecca shows no signs of greed. The book also portrays plenty of period-appropriate views on Jews, even from the hero Ivanhoe, who considers himself a different race from Isaac and never considers courting Rebecca due to their differences in heritage. Because Rebecca is a much more developed character, many readers are annoyed that Ivanhoe never sways from Rowena. Among the nineteenth-century annoyed readers: W. M. Thackeray, who satirically "corrected" Scott's plot in Rebecca and Rowena -- and by "corrected," we mean "had Rebecca convert to Christianity."
  • In lines 53-56 of Juvenal's fifth Satire, he describes a black waiter 'you would not want to meet by night among the tombs on the Latin Way.' This is because ghosts were believed to be black instead of white in those days, the afterlife being dark and gloomy in general, not because of the stereotypes now current in some parts of the world.
  • In Lord of the Flies, the heretofore admirable and sensible character Piggy shouts at Jack's tribe "Do you want to be a bunch of painted niggers, or do you want to be sensible like Ralph is?" The phrase was changed in later editions: some replace it with "a bunch of painted Indians" (which may have been a case of Acceptable Targets at the time of the reprinting, but by today's standards isn't a whole lot better), and some substitute it with "a bunch of painted savages" (which is probably the best and most fitting to the story).
  • Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958). While trudging across the surface of the Moon in a life and death situation, Kip takes dexedrine tablets when he gets exhausted. There is a major Values Dissonance in that the reason he has dexedrine is that when he rebuilt a surplus space suit as a hobby while living on Earth, the town doctor wrote him prescriptions and the druggist he worked for filled them so the suit could contain the original medical supplies. This is when no one, including himself, ever expected him to actually go to the Moon. It is about impossible to imagine a modern law abiding doctor and pharmacist agreeing to provide dexedrine to a minor with no medical condition requiring it no matter how impressed they were at his hard work in rebuilding a space suit (about like turning a junked car into a pristine one). And this is a young adult story!
    • It's noteworthy that Kip's father is a retired psychiatrist, and as an M.D. would thus have a license to both store and prescribe restricted drugs. That may have had a factor in how willing the pharmacist would be to trust Kip with dexedrine, as Kip's being a minor means that the legal owner of that spacesuit is actually his father.
    • Heinlein walked into his own Values Dissonance in an earlier work, "'If This Goes On -- '", about a brutal religious dictatorship overthrown by a revolutionary cabal. The original magazine edition, published in 1940, had the revolutionaries literally brainwashing the populace into mental independence and skepticism: "More than a hundred million persons had to be examined to see if they could stand up under quick re-orientation, then re-examined after treatment to see if they had been sufficiently readjusted. Until a man passed the second examination we could not afford to enfranchise him as a free citizen of a democratic state." When Heinlein revised the story for book publication in 1953, he rejected his own idea, instead having a minor character (described as resembling "an angry Mark Twain") shout, "Free men aren't 'conditioned!' Free men are free because they are ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in their own way--not have them spoonfed by a self-appointed mind tinkerer!" (And then, as Alexei Panshin likes to point out, the old man proves the point, or proves something at least, by dropping dead.)
  • The Sheik, a 1919 novel, is practically the epitome of this trope. Young, independent heroine who has no use for traditional feminine values takes a trip into the desert and is kidnapped by a cringeworthy-stereotype of an Arab Sheik. Said Sheik proceeds to rape her more or less daily, giving her what is actually a fairly accurately written case of severe PTSD. The dissonance sets in when, halfway through the novel, she realizes she's in love with him because he's 'mastered' her, made her realize she's a woman and weak and needs a man, and proceeds to give up her personality and do whatever he wants to make him happy. While he eventually falls in love with her, too, he feels so terrible about what he did that he wants to send her away so he won't hurt her anymore, and only agrees to let her stay because she tries to shoot herself in the head. And even today, a lot of people consider this romantic. (The heroine's abrupt change of heart could easily be read as Stockholm Syndrome, but nobody knew what that was in 1919 and that clearly wasn't the author's intent.)
    • You forgot the cherry on the sundae of dissonance: he's not even Arabic, but rather the product of an English father and a Spanish mother. God forbid our heroine should fall in love with someone who's not white!
      • The racism really is a category of dissonant fail all on its own. While Diana is favorably impressed by the Sheik's intelligence, it's because she's surprised he's not the savage idiot she assumed all Arabs to be. (It's worth noting that the Sheik's nemesis is the brutal slob she was expecting.) She's also very contemptuous of the native people of India, where she and her brother were staying before, and doesn't hesitate to say so. None of which would even be blinked at in 1919, but it's pretty cringe-worthy now.
    • If now there are readers for Fanfic with fantasies of this kind, why not then?
  • One View of the Question by Rudyard Kipling is about Values Dissonance among other things. Only, this time the narrator is Shafiz Ullah Khan and readers encounter a good (and very cynical) exposition of how thoroughly perverted, small-minded, self-righteous and plain stupid "progressive" and "modern" Europeans themselves may seem from outside... complete with hopeless attempts to understand their quirks.
  • Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad offhandedly poured a cup of acid on purportedly respectable books of travellers bragging what "great dangers" they encountered in moderately visited locations and what "brave explorers" these tourists were, by presenting similar situations through his own eyes.
  • Tristan and Iseult, a classic romance about true love, is full of the titular couple engaging in behavior that seems to be absolutely reprehensible. Of course this is all justified by their having true love... except this "true" love only came as a result of their accidentally drinking a love potion. Before that Iseult hated Tristan to the point of wanting to kill him. But apparently getting drugged is enough to make their love justify infidelity on both sides, deceit, the death of a dwarf whose crimes were being ugly and telling King Mark the truth about them fooling around and then proving it, and Tristan taking a young boy's dog.
    • Some other translations have Iseult actually in love with Tristan despite their earlier "misunderstanding", getting her servant's hint that she served them the Love Potion, and drinking it willingly.
  • Don Quixote has the usually lovable Sancho Panza fantasizing about getting rich selling Africans into slavery, as well as a man who raped one woman and abducted another being instantly forgiven and counted as a friend by the heroes as soon as he agrees to let go of the second woman and marry the first. And let's not even get into the stuff about Muslims, which sadly probably isn't Values Dissonance for a lot of modern readers...
  • The Great Gatsby was written and takes place in the 1920's, providing for some in- and out-of-universe Values Dissonance.
    • Tom, the novel's resident Jerkass, fancies himself an intellectual by spouting a lot of racist tripe that he's read, which is intended to make him seem like an even bigger tool. He favorite racist screed, "The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard" is thought by most critics to be a parody of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color (1920), and that Fitzgerald is having at laugh at its expense.
    • Jay and Nick see a car with three black men in it being driven by a white man, which prompts Jay to comment how "anything can happen in this town".
      • This scene takes place shortly after the incident mentioned above.
    • The character of Meyer Wolfsheim raises a lot of modern eyebrows. The only overt Jew in the story, he's also a gangster who fixed the world series, wears human teeth for cufflinks, and speaks with a Funetik Aksent. However, he's an obvious expy of real-life Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, who is widely suspected to be behind the Black Sox fix.
  • There's several complaints about Mercedes Lackey's Elizabethan novels, specifically the sexual relationship between the 15 year old Elizabeth and the much older Denoriel, and the attempted seduction of Elizabeth by her stepfather Thomas Seymour. Never mind that in the 1500s a fifteen year old female is old enough to already be a mother (per Shakespeare), and that Seymour did try to seduce Elizabeth.
  • Farmer Boy has numerous chapters in which Almanzo and/or his siblings stay out of school because there are more important things to do at home. The Little House books about Laura and her family are more in line with today's "You're a kid; school is your job" attitude, since Ma is a former teacher.
    • If time-critical tasks on a farm weren't done, the family might well starve or lose their land. This -was- more important than regular school attendance.
    • The Little House books were recounted by Laura in her old age, and were most likely white-washed to match then-current values. There's still plenty of stuff (like her father doing a black-face routine) that would be shocking today.
    • As with a lot of entries in this page, by today's standards there's some age issues. Laura was fifteen when she started being courted by twenty-five-year-old Almanzo, something which would hardly be blinked at in the 1880's but which wouldn't be legally tolerated in modern America. Ma has some problems with it, but because of Laura's youth in general, rather than Almanzo's age. Laura herself is somewhat surprised, once she figures out she's being courted (she's fifteen, it takes her a while), but not because she herself is so young. Interestingly, Pa subverts the Overprotective Dad trope and seems to actively encourage it; he knows Almanzo well and trusts him, even if Ma is convinced he's going to get Laura's neck broken taking her driving every Sunday.
  • Perry Mason novels. The mysteries are great, but sometimes the morals and ideas from those days can... really be distracting. There will be times where certain characters will go on long monologues about how a woman should know her place in order to keep a man, to never ask questions or inquire into his decisions or affairs, and must make it her duty to make the home heaven on earth for him. And then there's his racism in terms of Asians... in one story, he pretty much had a bunch of characters bashing on how sneaky and untrustworthy "Japs" are, and used rather unflattering terms to describe them.
    • But the author of these novels defended quite a few Chinese-Americans in court, so that was probably just anti-Japanese sentiment, not anti-Asian sentiment.
  • In the Chinese folk tale Water Margin, there's a section where some of the main characters (who are a part of the rebellion) are drugged at an inn. It turns out the inn is just a front for a black market for human meat. Just as the owner is about to cut them up into meatbuns, his accomplice comes back in time to stop him and tell him the identity of his would-be victims. He spares them, and when they wake up, they're so thrilled that they're "all on the same side," they decide to become sworn blood brothers with him, and act like everything is completely rosy. Nothing like becoming best friends forever with a cannibalistic serial killer.
  • Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond was one of the great 'Boy's Own' adventure heroes of British literature between the wars (1920s-1930s). You rarely see him or his adventures these days, mostly because the character was jingoistic to the point of naked racism, and was incredibly anti-semitic to boot.
    • Most of the 'imperial' British adventure heroes of the early twentieth century, such as the works of John Buchan, are similarly jingoistic and not without their tendency to resort to crude racial caricatures; for perhaps obvious reasons, they're particularly harsh on Germans. When put up against Drummond, however, the works of Buchan are downright progressive by comparison.
  • Jules Verne's Les Aventures de Hector Servadac has a repulsive Jewish merchant, portrayed with an array of anti-Semitic clichés, who is consistently treated with contempt by the novel's French and Russian protagonists. It is implicit that the reader ought to share their view of him. In several post-1945 translations, all references to Judaism have been removed, making said merchant merely a repulsive and greedy individual.
    • Robur the Conqueror from the same author may be an even bigger offender, since its black character Frycollin is the Butt Monkey and a sum of just about every flaw imaginable - he's gluttonous, cowardly, stupid - with the only "redeeming" quality of "not speaking like a nigger" (Verne also makes sure to tell the reader how loathsome "Black English" is).
  • All of Jane Austen's novels suffer from this to varying degrees:
    • Sure, today's readers Pride and Prejudice tend to find Mrs. Bennet from cringe-worthy to utterly repulsive, but they still might miss how, in the Regency era, her indiscretion, attempting to talk to Mr. Darcy (who is, of course, of much higher station than herself) before they are formally introduced, and blatant mercenary attitude would be considered the worst sort of poor manners and was, in fact, a valid reason for Darcy not to want his best friend to marry into her family. Similarly, Darcy's refusal to dance at an assembly where there are more ladies than gentlemen is also phenomenally rude, although modern female readers have the exact opposite reaction to his silence and stoicism as the women of Hertfordshire.
    • And in the 1995 adaptation, Lydia's being caught in only a chemise might be cause for a blush akin to one being caught in one's nightgown today, but by the standards of the day, she was practically in flagrante delicto.
    • Lydia's situation in general is likely to create Values Dissonance for modern readers, for whom the best possible resolution for "scoundrel runs off with sixteen-year-old girl and lives alone with her for two weeks, leaving a pile of debt behind" would not be "he is bribed into marrying her." In that time period, however, living alone with a man for two weeks would leave Lydia Defiled Forever as far as society was concerned, making it impossible not only for her to marry, but for any of her sisters to make decent marriages either. And while Mrs. Bennet's fuss about her daughters getting married may also seem shallow and silly to a modern reader, the issue of the entailment on Mr. Bennet's estate helps to clarify that marriage is literally the only way to make sure that any of the Bennet girls will be provided for after Mr. Bennet's death.
    • Sense and Sensibility runs into problems concerning the ages of the characters. A modern reader would find it laughable that nineteen-year-old Elinor should legitimately worry about being an old maid, but back in the Regency era, that was really a concern. Furthermore, the "right guy" for sixteen-year-old Marianne is 35-year-old Colonel Brandon, who has a niece slightly older than her.
    • Mansfield Park has two major plot points that turn on the morality/scandalousness of certain actions. The second is that of a woman who leaves her husband for another man and eventually is divorced (which is still not that all cool in modern Western society, although no longer shocking), but the first is that a group of friends are acting out a "racy" play amongst themselves -- a total WTF? to modern readers. Although, the latter scandal was also a WTF? for some of the characters, and the man who was especially upset by the play is frequently portrayed as domineering and unreasonable.
    • Modern readers tend to judge Anne Elliot of Persuasion harshly for breaking off her engagement with Captain Wentworth, but in Austen's day, it would have seemed like the most prudent thing to do. Like most women at the time, Anne would have to rely entirely on her husband for financial stability, and Wentworth was in a dangerous line of work in which promotion was by no means guaranteed. For all anyone knew, he could have died at sea a year later, leaving her penniless and helpless.
    • A couple of Austen's books have characters marrying or wanting to marry their first cousins, which was totally acceptable at the time.
  • Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels depicts the Houyhnhnms as a perfect society based on Reason--infinitely superior to the narrator's native humanity anyway--but to a modern reader they're contemptible. Whether Gulliver's value judgments at that point are meant to be taken at face value or not may be questionable, but in any case Ted Danson didn't tell us the nice horses had a rigid racial hierarchy (among themselves, based on their coat colors) and were last seen contemplating genocide...
    • Swift's proposition of a perfect society might fully well have seemed just as alien to his contemporary audience. Further elaborated in this essay by George Orwell.
  • In-universe example: there are a few places in the 1632 series where the values of the "downtimers" and those of the "uptimers" Clash. Noteworthy is the example of mutual Values Dissonance when modern-day schoolteacher Melissa Mailey is shocked to see refugee-matriarch Gretchen Richter hitting any of her younger siblings who doesn't obey her promptly. Melissa is of course reacting with modern sensibilities towards corporal punishment. Unusually, the author shows Gretchen's reaction as a case of Values Dissonance as well -- what kind of neglectful woman fails to properly discipline children and lets them just run riot? That would ruin them! Amusingly, this tension is resolved when Gretchen sees Melissa ordering around her uptimer students, and comes to the conclusion that Melissa objects to corporal punishment not because she wants to let kids run riot but because she is so personally formidable that she has never needed to smack a kid to make them listen to her. Which of course is what starts Gretchen on the path of learning that there are other methods of child discipline.
    • Also, the "uptimers", whose view of 17th-century people is heavily colored by the image of the prim, uptight Puritan, are quite startled to find out just how frank - and bawdy - "downtimers" can be in discussing sexual topics and using so-called "barnyard" language. On the other hand, the "uptimer" habit of casually taking the Lord's name in vain often causes sticky moments with "downtimers", for which this is a serious no-no.
  • Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is decked in this trope.
    • A stand-out instance is the tale of Sir Pelleas and the lady Ettard, whom he has fallen in love with. He proves himself in a joust and thus feels himself entitled to her love, even though she hates him (and it's implied she's not just Tsundere, she literally hates him). Pelleas refuses to leave her be, harries her, hangs around outside of her castle, and she is described as afraid of him. He's a creepy guy. And the heroic Sir Gawain gets involved in a scheme to convince Ettard to love Pelleas, because women in those days had no right to decline a passing fair knight like Sir Pelleas, but he ends up bedding Ettard himself. Pelleas demands vengeance - against Ettard - and in the end the Lady of the Lake uses magic to make Ettard fall in love with Sir Pelleas. Then Sir Pelleas falls in love with the Lady of the Lake, leaves Ettard, and Ettard dies of sorrow. Pelleas gets to become a Knight of the Round Table.
    • King Uther falls in love with Lady Ingraine, wife of the Duke of Cornwall. She realizes this and warns her husband, who prepares for Uther's advances. Merlin helps Uther to get to Ingraine and sleep with her about two hours after her husband coincidentally dies. Ingrain does not know this because Uther is magically disguised as her husband. After she receives word of her husband's death, Ingrain marries Uther and her only concern is that she is pregnant with what she believes to be her first husband's child. Uther assures her that it is his child since he was disguised as her husband at the time. And she is happy, because it means that the child was not illegitimate!
    • If I remember correctly, the only portrayal of a non-noble is a carter who is severely beaten for refusing to give his sole means of supporting himself (his cart-horse) to a noble.
  • The original Jungle Book is a lot more brutal and gory than any of the remakes attempted.
  • Nibelungenlied has a scene where the protagonist heroically pins his best friend's love interest down, so that his friend won't be rejected. In fairness, the lady in question is Ax Crazy and appreciates violence.
  • O. Henry's racial attitudes are particularly jarring, because they're usually not immediately relevant to the story, so they're not expected when they appear. For instance, an out-of-work match salesman in one of his minor stories talks about how gasoline is so much better for setting black people on fire (and the word he uses is not "black.")
  • Cup of Clay by Carole Nelson Douglas contains a brief scene in which a traveller from our world thinks a woman from a pseudo-European society is bisexual. A man who knows the woman is appalled at the concept--"Such a monster would be destroyed."
  • Enid Blyton's children's books often encounter Values Dissonance -- The Famous Five are often criticised for the fact that Anne takes pleasure in preparing food for the boys (although it's hardly surprising for her to act as a subordinate, given that she's also the youngest child. There's also the tomboy Georgina (George) to balance things out a bit.) The Faraway Tree series had Miss Slap (a teacher who slapped children) changed to Miss Snap in modern editions (she just shouts a lot), and even changed a boy who didn't go to school (he worked on his father's fishing boat) into a boy who went to school and only went on the boat at weekends. Her use of golliwogs and the word "nigger" have also been altered in reprint, as has the tale of a black doll who wanted to be pink. As early as 1960, a publisher rejected a story of hers, saying "There is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves; they are 'foreign'...and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality."
  • When Samuel Richardson's Pamela first came out, one of the complaints of "antipamelists" was not that Pamela fell in love with her boss/kidnapper after several Near Rape Experiences but that a real man wouldn't have nearly raped her.
    • One of the other complaints was that the book was a bad example - not because near rape is bad, but because am upper class man marrying the help is the worst possible thing.
  • For societies which value the concept of romantic love, folk tales (even from previous periods in the people's own history) where the heroine's reward after her ordeal is essentially to bag a man of wealth can be a bit jarring.
  • Herodotus in his Histories narrates an illustration of this trope which may be the Ur Example. King Darius of Persia asked some Greeks at his court how much he'd have to pay them to eat their fathers' corpses; they said they wouldn't do it for any money. He then summoned some members of an Indian tribe who did in fact eat the bodies of their dead and asked them, in the Greeks' presence, what he'd have to pay them to cremate their fathers' bodies (the ancient Greek norm); they said he shouldn't speak of such a horrible thing.
  • Tall Tale America has a fair bit of this, but the most flagrant is probably the part that was meant to Bowlderise the original story. In the chapter on Pecos Bill, he no longer shoots his wife to keep her from starving to death. Instead he threatens her with this fate to teach her not to "disobey her lord and master" (a.k.a. her husband). Yeah ... that Aesop wouldn't really fly well these days.
  • The Divine Comedy can be seen as Values Resonance. Dante didn't put any Jews in Hell; very important because a piece of literature at that time would expect and condone anything that shows Jews as sinners or marginalizes them in anyway. Notably when the moneylenders that he encounters are all gentiles. He also puts a poet who writes homosexual love poems in heaven, as well as a few virtuous pagans. He lets Cato the Younger be the caretaker/gatekeeper of Purgatory which implies that one day he will be allowed into Heaven. One time in Paradise he actually says (paraphrased) that an Indian who is a good person but has never heard the name of Jesus should be allowed into heaven. Dante was not happy about the Catholic doctrine that made anyone who isn't a Christian go to Hell or Limbo. Especially poignant throughout Inferno and Purgatory where Virgil guides him and Dante cannot reconcile how Virgil is a great man and has saved his life but will have to return to limbo for what is essentially an accident of not knowing Christianity.
    • Also notable is the inclusion of eminent Muslims such as Averroes in Limbo. Even Muhammad, who Dante places in Hell (for being a "schismatic"), still tells Dante to warn a contemporary schismatic of his wrongdoing, so as to spare him from the same fate.
  • Grimm's fairy tales, in , for example, the Jew in the thorns.
  • In an instance of What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?, Ben Elton's novel Meltdown features a character who attempted to be an actress but dropped out of her first production, Oedipus Rex, because the director wanted to show her as Jocasta breastfeeding Oedipus. Elton portrays this as something equivalent to non-simulated incest and the woman's reaction ("You want me to get my tits out?!") as perfectly justified. While the idea would be provocative and unusual, and many actors might reasonably decline to do it, there are plenty of performers in legitimate theatre who have no problem with appearing nude and simulating sexual acts. For someone who claims to want to be active in the theatre community, therefore, the character comes across as prissy and provincial for being shocked at the mere idea.
  • In Beverly Cleary's Beezus And Ramona, pre-school age Ramona is left to play in a sandbox in a public park with no supervision. Modern parents would be too terrified of her being scooped up by a pedo to do such a thing. Later in the series, Kindergarten Ramona hides all day because she doesn't want a substitute teacher (with no concern over where she is that we see), walks to and from school, crossing a busy street, is left home alone, and is punished by having to sit outside the classroom-when the classroom opens not onto a hallway, but a playground!
  • The classic mystery novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1859, centres on the dire and terrible Secret with a capital S that the evil baronet Sir Percival Glyde is going to great lengths to conceal. The nature of the Secret? Turns out, his parents weren't married when he was born, so he is not the legitimate heir to the baronetcy or to his father's property. Granted, this does mean he's committed some pretty serious fraud -- he falsified a marriage register to make a claim on a title that wasn't legally his -- but still, a modern reader is likely to think "really? That's all?" and possibly even be sympathetic to him. This is probably why some recent adaptations add something extra to give the Secret a bit of spice; both the 1997 BBC adaptation and the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical version add the detail that he raped Anne Catherick when she was a child.
  • Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, written in Britain in 1938, features a night-club singer called Miss Fosse trying to choose between her three lovers, Nick, Phil and Michael. Nick's a thorough cad, but the main point against him seems to be that he's a "foreigner", with various slurs against Italians made throughout the book - never mind that his family appears to have been in England for at least five generations. Likewise, the title character sees Phil as a kind, generous man, but openly says that Miss Fosse shouldn't marry a man who's possibly of Jewish ancestry ("he's not quite English, and one should marry within one's own nationality"). Meanwhile Michael, who believes that Miss Fosse needs "physical correction" from time to time, wins out as the ideal husband. Not entirely surprisingly, when the movie adaptation finally showed up in 2008, while the basic plot remained the same a lot of these elements had disappeared.
  • George Orwell wrote about Values Dissonance in his essay on Tobias Smollett: Duelling, gambling and fornication seen almost morally neutral to him. It so happens that in private life he was a better man than the majority of writers. He was a faithful husband who shortened his life by overworking for the sake of his family, a sturdy republican who hated France as the country of the Grand Monarchy, and a patriotic Scotsman at a time when — the 1745 rebellion being a fairly recent memory — it was far from fashionable to be a Scotsman. But he has very little sense of sin. His heroes do things, and do them on almost every page, which in any nineteenth-century English novel would instantly call forth vengeance from the skies. He accepts as a law of nature the viciousness, the nepotism and the disorder of eighteenth-century society, and therein lies his charm. Many of his best passages would be ruined by an intrusion of the moral sense.
  • H. Rider Haggard's adventure novel King Solomons Mines, which pre-dates Heart of Darkness, is equally unlikely to be regarded as a balanced picture of African tribal societies, although Haggard at least seems to regard the tribespeople who aren't villains as noble savages. However, an even more striking piece of Values Dissonance is that the first thing on Allan Quartermain and chums' agenda, before even starting their adventure, is mowing down numerous elephants and giraffes on a hunt. In his defence, he does make elephant hunting sound like the most fun you could have standing up.
    • Similar attitudes about wildlife are extremely common in older wilderness-adventure fiction. Even the Hardy Boys were known to shoot wild animals on sight, either because they were attacked by a predator for no reason, or because the creature in question was considered a dangerous pest at the time.
  • Paradise Lost regularly gets criticized for being misogynistic due to Eve's role in the plot. This is partially Fan Dumb because Paradise Lost is based on The Bible, which defines Eve fulfilling that exact role. However, for the time and culture it came out in, Eve is a very progressive female character. The level of character development, her level of intelligence and reasoning, and her extremely significant role in the plot were almost unheard of in female characters, who were regularly little more than background characters added when needed by the plot.
    • Also, Milton goes to great lengths to distinguish that Eve and Satan are distinct and unalike. Consider that at the time, it was an acceptable artistic portrayal to have the serpent or tempter possess Eve's face, showing that in fact the serpent was an aspect of Eve, therefore women are evil, a-ha!
  • A substantial part of Plato's Charmides involves a group of middle-aged men discussing a 15-year-old boy's beauty, having him brought before them, and lusting after him. There are descriptions of the men almost falling out of their chairs at the sight of him, and jokes about how seeing the boy naked would make them forget about other things. To be fair, the men (and especially the author's role model, hero, and mentor, Socrates) seem more interested in his unusual level of wisdom for his age and his ability to engage in philosophical discussions as they were in his body. They never actually touch him.
    • Truth in Television: This type of attitude was considered normal in most of the Hellenistic world at the time. In the 21st century, some teachers really do fawn over their favorite students like this, although it isn't usually sexual in nature and is probably more related to the paternal instinct than the sexual one. Lookism exists in adults' treatment of youths as well, even when this lookism isn't sexual.
  • In the short stories of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, the titular character regularly expends the lives of cats or dogs in his paranormal investigations, leaving them confined as live bait in order to test if a potential ghost is dangerous. Servants and underlings of named characters tend to soak up a lot of abuse, such as a constable who is thrown bodily down the stairs of a haunted house by his superior, or a butler who doesn't press charges, sue, or even quit when he's wounded near-fatally by a booby trap set by his employer's father.
  • A Little Princess ends with Sara being restored to her wealth and position and her friend Becky ends up as Sara's personal attendant. Modern audiences may find this a little shocking but in the context of when the novel is set, it's a fitting happy ending. Considering that Becky would have risen into a very powerful position and gained security as well as a kind and friendly mistress it's a very happy ending indeed.
  • George Macdonald Fraser wrote mostly historical fiction, which can lead to a lot of Values Dissonance. Usually it's lampshaded. The author was from the Greatest Generation and a pretty firm believer in Political Correctness Gone Mad, though, so sometimes even his lampshading can be dissonant to younger readers.
    • One of his McAuslan stories is about a black soldier who wants to join the pipe band in a Highland regiment (ca. 1947). It's notable because even though the outcome feels right to modern readers - the piper joins successfully - every one of his superior officers was against it, to greater or lesser degree, and he's only allowed to join because the Colonel tricks the pipe sergeant into sticking up for his piping skills.
  • Edward Everett Hale's short story The Man Without a Country was written in 1863 as a deliberate piece of propaganda. A young man who commits treason against the United States and who cries "I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" and gets just what he asked for. He's forced to live on US Navy ships always stationed just out of sight of land, his news and conversation is censored, magazines he reads are cut up so that all references to the States are omitted. By the end of his life, the narrator finds that he's made a shrine to the United States in his bedroom and he blabs on his deathbed about how one should hold your country sacred, love it, cherish it, etc. Good sentiment and all, but such patriotic fervor seems a little scary nowadays. Basically it was low-key Brainwashing, revolving the man's entire life around the lack of the United States. Wouldn't it have just been kinder all around to exile the guy rather than torture him with a cruel half-life at sea?
  • Jahnna N. Malcom's Jewel Princess series had a couple of cases that this troper can remember. In the first book, Roxanne, the future princess of the Red Mountains, runs away before the coronation because she doesn't want to be a princess- she'll have to move to a place she either hasn't been to or doesn't know well, she prefers running around and climbing trees to remaining indoors, her future kingdom is a desert mountain range unlike her sisters', which are all much more widely populated and idyllic, and she'll have to rule over her people, despite not wanting to rule and having no real experience at it. After running away, she makes some allies, foils an attempt to put an impostor on her throne, and returns to the coronation willingly. OK, fine. Except that Roxanne is about eleven (though she doesn't act like it), and the idea of giving a pre-teen that kind of responsibility, especially since she wasn't prepared for it, is a ridiculous idea..
    • Another example comes from the third book. In it Emily, the princess of Greenwood, is a notorious practical joker who has played tricks on everyone while refusing to see that most other people don't think that they're funny. Eventually, when a prank is played on a subject that seriously harms him, the people of Greenwood believe that Emily played it, and one of them says that he's going to talk to her father (the King) about her, because 'when a princess starts harming her own people, it's time for her to stop being a princess'. Again, fine, but like Roxanne, Emily is eleven, and expecting an eleven year old to be responsible and mature on that level is simply ridiculous- not to mention that there was no proof that it was Emily, and she had several witnesses that would have given her an alibi and testified to her non-violent nature if it had come to it.
  • The Lady Who Loved Insects is a short story from 12th century Japan which describes an eccentric Japanese noblewoman who, as the title suggests, is obsessed with insects. The story seems to spend equal time describing her mania for insects and how dreadful it is that she ignores the conventions of courtly beauty, and how both combine to make her a laughingstock.
  • Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: There certainly is this! In the first book Weekend Warriors, Kathryn Lucas insults Yoko Akia about being wishy-washy just because she's Asian and she's different. Indeed, the series portrays Asians as being different from other people to the point of being virtually alien. That, and books in the series like Vendetta cheerfully play the Yellow Peril trope as straight as an arrow!
  • The modern reader of Margery Allingham's Police At The Funeral are likely to abruptly realign their sympathies when the secret minor villain George Faraday is using to blackmail his aunt is revealed: George is the result of a 'messalliance' with a mullatto woman (i.e. a woman who was the product of an interracial marriage) - a fact of which George is not at all ashamed but his aunt would do anything to keep hidden. Good on you, George!
  • During the 1850s, there existed an entire genre of "anti-Tom" literature (or plantation literature) written by Southern authors in reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such books portrayed slavery as beneficial to Africans, and argued that the claims made by abolitionists about the conditions "enjoyed" by slaves were exaggerated and false. Such literature became Deader Than Disco for obvious reasons after the Civil War.
  • The Land of Oz series has a few of this. One of the major ones is in the second book, where young boy Tip learns that he is the lost Princess of Oz and is transformed into his "true form". After he does so, he changes from his previous personality into an out-and-out girly girl who does little to no adventuring. A few other bits of dissonance shows up as well, such as in the first book when the Tin Man, who can't bear to see any other creature die at the hand of another... kills a wildcat that was chasing a small mouse by chopping off its head with his ax.
    • On the other hand, the book series is actually quite Fair for Its Day regarding topics such as feminism. The Land of Oz is ruled by four women and a man in the first book, and the women are portrayed as equally likely to be Wicked as they are to be Good. Female characters that appear later on range from good to bad on the morality spectrum, and each and every one of the characters, female or not, are different and varied characters. Same goes for the male characters; they are all equally as likely to be good characters as they are to be bad characters, and just as varied as the females.
  • Father Brown: This article published at the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Forum The Sins of the Saint: Racism in GK Chesterton written by a Chesterton fan, analyzes 15 Father Brown’s tales that seem to contain this and absolves some of Unfortunate Implications… and others not. It also points that a lot of classic authors of Detective Literature (Agatha Christie, McDonald, Burton Stevenson) also had racist views, and he asks the reader to take in mind the purpose of the work (they were not racist propaganda, but Detective Literature).
  • Mario and the Magician contains this In-Universe as well as outside with the the beach scene: when the narrators 8 years old daughter get naked for a few seconds, the Italians reac with rage, whistling and treat this as personal insult. The narrator considers his daughter's behaviour fully normal, and is disgusted by Italians' raction. Of course, the issue of public nudity remainds highly contested to this day.
  1. ↑ because Penthesilea only came to Troy after the events it describes and so makes no appearance
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.