Lensman/YMMV

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• Broken Aesop: The Drugs Are Bad Aesop is applied unclearly; in fact, it's only applied to the dealers of a completely fictional drug which is solely manufactured and distributed by the bad guys' food chain. By contrast, the main character picks a marijuana-equivalent drug to adopt as part of a persona, and it's almost completely harmless (the text even takes note of him learning that the drug is better taken after alcohol instead of beforehand). So...drugs are bad if they're specifically designed to fund the Evil Empire?
  • The drug is shown as almost completely harmless to the protagonist -- who is a genetically-engineered posthuman with a perfect physique and a superhuman mind. It's implied to be pretty damn devastating to its normal addicts.
    • It's mentioned specifically in dialogue that Kinnison is suffering withdrawal pains for a period of time after this assignment concludes, but his willpower is capable of dealing with it. Of course, Kinnison is literally one of the two strongest-willed humans to ever exist in his universe , so if even he's still feeling this a little one can only imagine how difficult it is for normal people to ever detox from this stuff.
• Magnificent Bastard - Mentor of Arisia is the king, but honorable mention goes to Nadreck the Palainian, exemplified when he single-handedly defeated a massively defended enemy fortress by secretly manipulating the inhabitants into a civil war that killed them all. He's so embarrassed that his planning and execution wasn't perfect,forcing him to deal with the last three survivors personally, that he only reveals the extent of this "failure" when ordered to do so, and refuses to discuss it further.
  • It's implied that Nadreck's entire species is like this, except that Nadreck is the most capable of them (and one of the few willing to stick his neck out to perform tasks for the general good- a little). Palainians are among the stranger aliens in the history of science fiction, both physically and mentally, especially if you look at its early days when Human Aliens were the norm.
  • Come on - what about Helmuth? He at least realised what he was up against and tried to take precautions; had Kinnison not already learned his lesson from an incredibly close brush with death that he was lucky to survive, he'd have been toast.
    • It is a measure of Kinnison's respect for the man that even two novels later, he would look at a sloppy Boskonian defensive emplacement and go 'You know, Helmuth wouldn't have screwed this one up.'
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: The shareware game Children of Arisia takes place on the planet Medon, where the player, a third-level intellect, must fight against the forces of Boskone and the Overlords of Delgon who are attaching humanity via a hyper-spacial tube...
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The Lensman books are quite free of political preaching by the standards of modern sci-fi, but one thing that is made clear is that the author doesn't like habit-forming drugs. Eldritch Abominations may be the Big Bads of the plot, but the Complete Monsters are the drug dealers, who suffer unconditional death penalty when captured. In one prequel book, there's also a mild Author Tract on the evils of drugs, including a couple of lines that are well summed up, though with some loss of nuance, "Even the Soviet Union helped fight the international drug dealers. That's how bad drugs are."
  • Also, it's taken for granted that libertarianism is the right form of government. At one point, government is loftily mentioned as having been "reduced to its proper sphere and concentrated in the Patrol."
• Values Dissonance - When the series started, eugenics hadn't been discredited by association with the Nazis yet, so aliens "encouraging" Earth's best and brightest to make babies with each other was seen as the proper thing for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to do.
  • On another note, pacifistically inclined modern readers may be uncomfortable with the Galactic Patrol's willingness to use overwhelming force against Boskone's fortified planets, or feel that they do so without due regard for collateral damage. Whereas the books were written during and immediately after World War II, when the Allies were indiscriminately pouring megatons of explosives over German and Japanese cities and few people found anything questionable in this.