Gone with the Wind/YMMV


 * Adaptation Displacement: The novel this film is based on, while still relatively popular, is far less remembered than the movie. Generally it's not discovered until adulthood.
 * Alternate Character Interpretation: Scarlett is one of cinema's most enigmatic characters.
 * There's a story out there that the actress playing Prissy had one of these about her character: Prissy certainly know "bout birthing...babies," She simply could not give less of a fuck about Melanie, her baby, or the well being of any other slaveholder, and was getting revenge in the only way she could.
 * Designated Hero: For the hero of the novel, Scarlett is a huge bitch.
 * Ending Fatigue: If you are assigned this book for school, run. That is all.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Mammy.
 * Ethnic Scrappy: Prissy. Oh God, Prissy.
 * Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Until the book no longer could be marketed due to the declaration of war in 1941, Gone With the Wind was a big bestseller in Nazi Germany. A Bernhard Payr, a culture bureaucrat, praised that the book taught that losing a war was worse than the preceding horrors of war and how it established a clear racial hierarchy between the "master class" and the subservient "good blacks".
 * Hollywood Homely: In the book, Melanie is described as very plain. Scarlett describes her thusly in the movie, but the effect is somewhat lost due to Melanie being played by Olivia de Havilland.
 * Arguably, Scarlett might just be subconsciously envious because everyone loves kind-hearted Melanie.
 * It Gets Better: The book seems to take the longest amount of time possible to get through anything.
 * It Was His Sled: The book was written in 1936. The movie came out in 1939. You should know how this story ends just by Popcultural Osmosis.
 * Jerkass Woobie: Is Scarlett a philandering bitch with no real sense of human emotion or empathy who will use, abuse, and kill anyone who stands in her way? Hell yes. Is she more or less trained to be such as a byproduct of her own damaging environment, a woman pulverized by every single horrific fate the war and the New South dish out at her, and someone who ultimately suffers for every one of her mistakes, with several empty relationships, dead family and children, and the one person she truly loved leaving her? Hell yes.
 * Magnificent Bastard: From what we hear of Rhett, he manages to manipulate both sides of the Civil War to his own massive profit, speculating, blockading, and swindling his way into millions, without any significant personal consequences. Scarlett just happens to be his Achilles' heel.
 * Scarlett qualifies as well. She promises to do anything--lie, cheat, steal or kill--to protect her land and her family, and she bloody well makes good on that promise. Even while the things she does are terrible and she hurts many people including herself, you can't help but be impressed by her.
 * Memetic Mutation: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn".
 * "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies".
 * Mind Game Ship: Rhett/Scarlett comes across as this at times; Rhett is definitely manipulating her and toys with her emotions. Subverted in that she causes him significantly more angst than he does her, despite hardly manipulating him consciously at all.
 * Narm Charm: The movie sometimes boils over with narm thanks to the difference in acting styles between the thirties and the 21st century. Particularly all of Scarlett's over the top screams and when she whines: "Why do I have to pretend and pretend?"
 * Retroactive Recognition: A young George Reeves appears early in the film as a potential suitor though his hair is dyed red.
 * Suetiful All Along: Scarlett
 * Actually dodged in a lot of ways. She's regularly mentioned in the novel as attractive but not beautiful, by multiple characters. References are made to the war aging her as well, though she's only twenty-eight by its end. It's made clear that a lot of her appeal is very good fashion choices, expert flirting, and a lack of attainability.
 * Values Dissonance: Today's society is much less tolerant of the Confederacy and the KKK than the society of 1936 (or the society of the reconstruction era).
 * Not entirely true since the movie, which came out only three years later in 1939, removed all allusions to the KKK.
 * Also, in the novel, the KKK isn't viewed in a particularly rosy light. Scarlett describes it as a meeting of half-baked fools who want to relive the war, and Rhett argues to them that they are only making their situation worse. Rhett and Ashley manage to disband the Atlanta wing of the KKK pretty quickly. Actually, the Confederacy also takes some blows in the book, and Ashley is repeatedly portrayed as out of touch for wanting to relive the beautiful parts of the old days, while pretending the bad parts didn't exist.
 * Scarlett is angry that the men involved in the KKK are engaging in vigilante "justice" rather than helping the people of the South to survive, which is a completely different problem than anyone objecting to the KKK would have today.
 * Values Dissonance is all over the book even if you write the KKK out entirely. Scarlett's servants refer to blacks who would rather be free as trash, and it's looked at as heroic when a black man is killed for so much as insulting a white person. Entire chapters are devoted to describing how free blacks are "tricked" into believing they're equal with whites and should be allowed to vote and sleep with white women. The post-war South is presented as a kind of lawless Badlands where white women are in danger of being flat-out raped in the street and the North would throw anyone who protested into jail. There's horror at the very idea that a well-bred white Southerner should work and that a black person wouldn't want to. Whether it's an Author Tract or just a reflection of the philosophies of the time, there's no opposite view shown to challenge any of these ideas that are horribly racist and highly disproven nowadays.
 * The Victim Falls For Rapist scene also shows an example. Spousal rape wasn't legally a crime in all 50 states until 1993. Especially, at that time, Rhett forcibly taking his wife to bed wouldn't necessarily be seen as a problem. This doesn't make it any better though.
 * WTH? Casting Agency: No one expected a little known English actress would get the role every actress in Hollywood was dying to play. A critic even predicted that there would be rioting in the streets to protest the casting of Vivian Leigh.
 * Margaret Mitchell reportedly wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett. Oh, just try and wrap your brain around that one.
 * Probably because book-verse Rhett was a lot snarkier and smartass than movie-verse Rhett was. Change the costume--it could'a worked.