this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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I felt this way about the book 1984. Entirely overrated.
Like yes I get that the subject matter is what makes it important, but plenty of other books (and other media) has covered it and done a better job of it. Plus, now we get to live it making the book wholly irrelevant.
That's an issue you can run into with many classics. Either they did something so well it's become a trope, or the artistry in it has been refined so much that the original feels like a poor imitation.
A great example in film is Citizen Cane. It used a lot of ground breaking approaches for cinematography and sound design, but those things aren't ground breaking anymore, so watching it now doesn't have the same "excitement". A more modern example might be Toy Story; the animation doesn't look too impressive by modern standards, but was ground breaking at the time.
yeah I had something similar with the Beatles, where literally my first memory of music is Abbey Road, so my whole life I was like, I don't get the hype, that's just what music sounds like. it was only recently I went and listened to the album again with context of what other music from the 60s was like, and I finally realized that they were truly doing some wild shit with songwriting and production
Funnily enough that’s exactly why I think the Beatles are just mediocre. Literally sticking out was all they needed to do, since literally nothing was good. In this day and age it’s just not good music, even if it might be a classic.
No music in the 60s was good? I think you might just have some very narrow taste.
According to my Spotify wrapped I listened to over 400 genres, and 1200 artists last year, so no, I’m pretty positive I don’t have narrow taste, even in the slightest.
Maybe it’s just in this specific case, but if you can’t find any enjoyable music from an entire decade, that’s on you. Unless you want to try and make the case that you’re the only one with good taste and the rest of us are just lowly rubes, which is obviously ridiculous (though I’d probably enjoy the attempt).
But you’re allowed to have narrow taste and it’s not an insult. No need to get offended.
Especially if you consider the late 60s, which was an incedible cultural phenomenon, maybe unparalled since in innovation.
Has nothing to do with narrow taste. And has nothing to do with that decade either. 70s and 50s were terrible as well. When your artist pool is only a few thousand artists that’s what happens. Like, seriously, there’s so few of them that wikipedia has an article of the majority of them.
I’m just trying to understand, do you think that with such a small number of artists that it was even slightly statistically possible that there was a artist from the 60s and 70s that is comparable to a single artist in the top thousand artists in the past 30 years? Like it just doesn’t even make statistical sense, much less any sense if you listen to a lot of music.
I’m not making an argument on taste. I’m making a statistical argument that is backed up by listening.
The rubes argument was less fun than I expected.
I can see this, but at the same time there are classics that still hold up great. Frankenstein for example is still a good read. Paradise Lost can be a big hard to digest, but I really enjoyed it.
Then again I don't really read much Bible fanfic.
Frankenstein really doesn’t hold up, unless you’re on the younger side. The moral outrage on both sides is timeless and beautiful, but “I was put on bed rest because I looked at a cat funny” sticks out a bit too much in modern day.
Ah, I'm talking about Frankenstein and 1984 as stories. Frankenstein still a fun read, 1984 is definitely not. But yeah, that's obviously a subjective thing.
I enjoyed it a lot and honestly, while I could see the massive influence it had on other things, and even being impressed by the distopian technology that would seem really scifi at the time, but is normal today, I think there are some aspects that have been explored further, but not at the same detail.
For example, doublethink and newspeak as a concept exists in other media, but I've never seen it explored to such details than in the book.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
It's a kind of natural selection. The most fit pieces of art succeed so much that we see their good traits echo into the future and become the norm. But we iterate on them further and continue to improve until the ancestor would no longer be able to compete with its descendents. Audiences adapt to what was once a trailblazing stroke of genius and it just becomes the standard.
Personally, I've found the trend to be very true. There are very few classics that I like nearly as much as the modern popular pieces that were inspired by them. Music might be the exception.
If anything, the book is even more relevant now.
I wish it had never been written. I'm convinced it and Brave New World inspired a lot of the people ruining the world today.
I don't see how. It's a book about a dude trying to get his dick wet, and ultimately both he and his girlfriend sell each other out when they're tortured. The themes are "totalitarianism and torture is bad." The characters are flat and uninteresting, as is the world.
Yes, I've heard people make the argument that it's written that way to reflect the dystopian reality of it all, and that's fine. It's still a shit story.
Besides, given that the U.S. is now facing that same reality and pushing it onto the rest of us, I don't think the message the book tried to convey was conveyed particularly effectively.
Worth noting is that the book doesn't deal with the topic of "oops, you're in an authoritarian fascist dystopia, how do you deal with it."
The Hunger Games does, though. The solution there is to kill the fascists.
The characters position in 1984 is how real people experience horrifying dystopia.
I feel like it doesn't hold up well specifically because we're living it now, but I dunno if I agree on it being overrated. For me, feels like 'out of date' or maybe just depressing is a better word.
When that stuff was fantastical and served as a warning, it had meaning, now it just makes us sad. It's like oh yeah, we have that now, but it's not even the government doing it, just some random snack company and we're all just going along with it.
Well, I think it fails from a storytelling perspective. Some argue that at the time the ideas were novel, but like... Orwell drew inspiration from Nazi Germany so it can't have been that novel. As far as Orwell goes, I think Animal Farm was a better read.