Values Dissonance/Literature: Difference between revisions

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{{trope}}
Examples of [[{{TOPLEVELPAGE}}]] in [[{{SUBPAGENAME}}]] include:
* The ''D'Artagnan'' Romances, better known as ''[[The Three Musketeers (novel)|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 ''[[Discworld/Men At Arms|Men At Arms]]'', a book with an anti-gun message.
== ''[[Discworld]]'' ==
* 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 ''[[Discworld/Men At Arms|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 ''[[Discworld/The Truth|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 ''[[Discworld/The Fifth Elephant|The Fifth Elephant]]''.
* 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, ''[[Discworld/Night Watch|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."
** On the other hand, ''[[Night Watch (Discworld)|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. [[Magnificent Bastard|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:<br />''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?
 
== ''[[The Iliad]]'' ==
* [[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 [[Deconstruction|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 [[I Love the Dead|what he did to her corpse afterwards]]....
** This is very much a [[Your Mileage May Vary]] kind of situation. The claim of [[I Love the Dead|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<ref>because Penthesilea only came to Troy after the events it describes and so makes no appearance</ref>. 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 [[Squick|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 ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]'', where Odysseus brags about the sacking and raping of the Cicones. Of course, this angered Athena, who set them adrift.
** ''[[Odyssey|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.
 
== [[James Bond]] novels ==
* 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 (novel)|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 (novel)|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.
 
== ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' novels ==
* 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 [[wikipedia:The Adventure of the Yellow Face|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 - {{spoiler|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:
{{quote|''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. [[Fanon|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''
{{quote|''"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." '' [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3326/3184612185_c09f72131e.jpg Yes.][[Sarcasm Mode|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.
 
== Other works ==
* The ''D'Artagnan'' Romances, better known as ''[[The Three Musketeers (novel)|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).
* 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 [[Have a Gay Old Time|"gay"]].
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** 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 [[Kissing Under the Influence|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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage| debt slavery]{{Dead link}}.
* Pretty much ''anything'' written by [[H.P. Lovecraft|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.
Line 63 ⟶ 125:
** There's also the portrayal of Gypsies as child thieves. Esmeralda is shown sympathetically {{spoiler|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 [[Deconstruction|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 [[I Love the Dead|what he did to her corpse afterwards]]....
*** This is very much a [[Your Mileage May Vary]] kind of situation. The claim of [[I Love the Dead|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<ref>because Penthesilea only came to Troy after the events it describes and so makes no appearance</ref>. 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 [[Squick|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 ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]'', where Odysseus brags about the sacking and raping of the Cicones. Of course, this angered Athena, who set them adrift.
*** ''[[Odyssey|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 [[wikipedia:The Adventure of the Yellow Face|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 - {{spoiler|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.
*** 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:
{{quote|''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. [[Fanon|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''
{{quote|''"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." '' [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3326/3184612185_c09f72131e.jpg Yes.][[Sarcasm Mode|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 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.
* In one of Doyle's "Professor Challenger" stories, [[wikipedia:The Poison Belt|The Poison Belt]], the Earth passes through a toxic region in the [[wikipedia:Luminiferous aether|Ether]], which gradually kills {{spoiler|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.
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** [[Kissing Cousins|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 (novel)|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!
*** 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 (novel)|Live and Let Die]]'' Bond is surprised to see a "Negress" driving a car in New York.
** [[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), [http://www.johnmariani.com/archive/2008/080106/alephBetBooksStoryOfLittleBlackSambo.jpg here] is an example of some earlier artwork for the story. Contrast that with the cover of [http://www.k-state.edu/wwparent/story/award/r-sambo.htm 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 4000040,000]]'' novel series ''[[Gaunt's Ghosts]]'' and ''[[Ciaphas Cain]]'' have as main characters [[Bad Boss|Commissars]] [[The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything|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.
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* 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 [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|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 [[Rape Is Love|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 [[Fan Dumb|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.)
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* 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 [[I'm a Humanitarian|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.
* [[Bulldog Drummond|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 [[The Thirty-Nine Steps|John Buchan]], are similarly jingoistic and not without their tendency to resort to crude racial caricatures; for [[World War OneI|perhaps]] [[World War II|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 [[Writer on Board|tell the reader]] how loathsome "Black English" is).
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** A couple of Austen's books have characters marrying or wanting to marry [[Kissing Cousins|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 [[Unreliable Narrator|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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20130904104151/http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/politics-vs-literature.htm 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. LiberalNoteworthy is the example of ''mutual'' Values Dissonance when modern-day schoolteacher Melissa Mailey is fairly shocked to see refugee-matriarch Gretchen Richter hitting anyoneany of her younger siblings who doesn't obey her promptly. GretchenMelissa findsis herof course reacting with modern sensibilities towards corporal punishment. Unusually, the author shows Gretchen's reaction confusingas 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, untilthis shetension is resolved when Gretchen sees Melissa ordering around her uptimer students, and concludescomes to the conclusion that Melissa hasobjects probablyto corporal punishment not because she wants to let kids run riot but because she is so personally formidable that she has never ''hadneeded'' to smack anybodya 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 ''[[King Arthur|Le Morte d'Arthur]]'' is decked in this trope.
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** 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 [http://gadetection.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/the-sins-of-the-saint-racism-in-gk-chesterton/ 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 narratorsnarrator's 8 years old daughter get naked for a few seconds, the Italians reacreact with rage, whistling and treat this as personal insult. The narrator considers his daughter's behaviour fully normal, and is disgusted by Italians' ractionreaction. Of course, the issue of public nudity remaindsremains highly contested to this day.
* In ''[[Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter]]'', which takes place in 1950s Peru, the main objection to Mario and Julia relationship isn't their age difference (she's fourteen years her senior and he at eighteen is still legally a minor), nor that they are aunt and nephew, is that she is a divorced woman.
 
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[[Category:Values Dissonance]]