- This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
by pfisherman
17 subcomments
- Counterpoint: Charlie Brown
A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.
He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
by workmandan
11 subcomments
- Stephen Fry made the same remarks in a Q&A session some years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao
As a Brit I can't agree more with both, I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
by bisekrankas
8 subcomments
- I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.
Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.
By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
- The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
- As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
- "In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"
There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?
Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
by RNanoware
4 subcomments
- Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
- This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
- This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
by coole-wurst
2 subcomments
- I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
- What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.
I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
by jobs_throwaway
2 subcomments
- > In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk
I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
by blenderob
2 subcomments
- 100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
- Relevant Orwell from 1940: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys "Boys' weeklies". Contrasting the older and newer British stories with the American ones:
> If one compares the [British] Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern [British] paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is... there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the reader of the Skipper, Hotspur, etc., is led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist... This character is intended as a superman... There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the threepenny Yank Mags... In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence.
by Wowfunhappy
1 subcomments
- Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.
I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.
Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
by sarchertech
2 subcomments
- I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
by ChrisMarshallNY
3 subcomments
- One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.
It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.
Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."
Heroes are often those that accept their lot.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
by eikenberry
1 subcomments
- One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
by PeterWhittaker
1 subcomments
- The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.
Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.
YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
by class3shock
1 subcomments
- I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.
Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
- Americans don't celebrate failure?
Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.
And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.
by Munksgaard
0 subcomment
- Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
by bethekidyouwant
1 subcomments
- Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
- > There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S.
I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker:
'Take me to Detroit', he said.
'We are already going to Detroit', she replied.
'Oh...good,' he said, and sat down again.
by fodkodrasz
0 subcomment
- I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny.
Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
by jiggawatts
0 subcomment
- An “Americanism” I noticed in the show Heroes first but now I see everywhere is that every hero just wants to be normal. Claire Bennet — who’s only special ability is healing — whines about the burden of this for several seasons! Just shut up already! You have what everybody wants and there’s basically no downside! Just put away the costume and get an office job if you want to be a normie.
Conversely, any metahuman that fully maximises their extra abilities is almost invariably labelled as evil. Magneto is the obvious candidate here, but Wolverine is even better: same powers as Claire Bennet but he leans into them… so he’s got to be an anti-hero type.
by RicoElectrico
1 subcomments
- > We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals
Polish people say the exact same thing about themselves while thinking this is endemic to Poland.
- The exception that immediately sprung to my mind is "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski. Maybe other Coen brothers’ "heroes" also fit the bill, but I’m not so familiar with the rest of their œuvre.
by Forgeties79
0 subcomment
- And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:
> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
by sriram_sun
0 subcomment
- I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
- Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.
I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.
For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.
So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
- Different foundations of the worldview, thus different values, thus different reprenestations of these values shown through heroes.
We don't realize what are foundations of our worldview as they aren't appearing in a contrast-enough setup.
- Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.
- The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
by nickdothutton
0 subcomment
- The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
by RcouF1uZ4gsC
1 subcomments
- I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture.
Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation.
You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Fleming and James Bond. *
See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby.
What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
by wodenokoto
0 subcomment
- Someone mentioned Charlie Brown as a counter example, which lead to an insightful discussion.
Similarly I’d like to ask about the Simpson, which in the early 90s was seen as the worst role models on TV for being losers, but still incredibly popular. I guess Bart started out as a proper hero, but Homer being a loser and idiot pretty quickly became the mainstay theme of it all.
by alex_young
0 subcomment
- While there is something here, I don’t think it’s quite the stark difference stated.
Go watch a Coen brothers movie and tell me why it’s funny. We mostly all agree that these “dark” comedies are funny, and it’s precisely because nothing good happens to the protagonist that makes them funny.
- As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
- Don’t forget “Eddie the Eagle”. Quintessentially British.
- This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
- This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.
(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
- > Stephen explained this to me by saying that you cannot make jokes about failure in the States.
This does not ring true to me at all. The overconfident idiot appears all the time in US and UK comedy.
by oracle2025
0 subcomment
- Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
- DA quote from the linked Slashdot page:
> any model which fundamentally prevents people getting something they want is going to fail
I want to crossstitch this quote and hang it up on a wall where I would frequently see it.
- What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
- There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
- Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
- > Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore to name a few.
What about real people (not animation characters for children)?
Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his
U.S.-American counterpart?
- "Keep Calm and Carry On" is very much the British way, even though us Antipodeans refer to them as whinging Poms.
Keep a stiff upper lip chaps.
- I think it's fantastic that Douglas Adams was on Slashdot.
- Brits are self-deprecating to a fault.
You can be successful, but you have to attribute it to luck. It's not the done thing to try too hard.
Tall poppy syndrome is also alive and well.
by PaulHoule
1 subcomments
- Explains why Sir Keir Starmer is so relatable.
by marcus_holmes
0 subcomment
- I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago.
In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.
Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.
It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.
I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.
As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"
[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
by rbbydotdev
0 subcomment
- Do English tech interviews emphasize heroic gusto or post-mortems?
- I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
- It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
- Some of the best US standup comedians I know don't fit this narrative.
by bethekidyouwant
1 subcomments
- Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
by curiousgal
0 subcomment
- Okay, literature aside, I've often discussed this with my SO. I feel like Americans are obsessed with heroes/villains. Every single issue that arises and is discussed online, is always viewed from the angle of "who do we support and/or who do we hate". During COVID it was Fauci and Dolly Parton, now it's Bovino and Good. I feel like Americans often have a need to put a single person on a pedestal as if they yearn for a symbol. A true cult of personality, for better or for worse.
by vanderZwan
0 subcomment
- Speaking as a Dutch person who lives in Sweden and who has traveled a lot within the EU, I'm pretty confident that the sympathy for "loser" heroes is not limited to England, but broadly applies to most if not all of Europe.
The way this is expressed however varies a lot depending on the local culture, and the English sense of humor around it is particularly loved (at least in the Netherlands, I can't really speak for other countries).
I suspect that these cultural differences have a strong connection to the flavor of Christianity that historically was more dominant in a particular European region. More specifically: how bleak their takes on predestination were[0]. That relates pretty directly to the question of "are we merely victims subject to winds of chance and external circumstance, or are we powerful agents fashioning our own stories, making our own luck?" after all.
Getting side-tracked for a bit, I've also seen this argument used to to explain why Donald Duck is more popular in most European countries than Mickey Mouse. That is actually a fun little rabbit hole to dive into too[1][2].
Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have had their own weekly Donald Duck magazine since 1948, 1951 and 1952 respectively, producing a lot of their own stories with their own established canon. Italy used to have a Donald Duck weekly from 1937 to 1940, but then it got merged into their weekly Mickey Mouse magazine. It still creates monthly Donald Duck pocket editions (which are translated and sold all over Europe).
Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse has weekly magazines in Italy (1931), France (1934), Germany (1951), Greece (1966), and was even very briefly published in inter-war Poland (1938 to 1939). I can only confirm that Italy produces most of its own comics.
Now I could argue that this confirms my claim, since Donald Duck appears more in the protestant side of Europe and Mickey in the catholic/orthodox side. Having grown up reading these comics I know better: in reality the magazines in different countries have been exchanging Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories (and others) for many decades already.
However, those stories definitely have a different flavor to them depending on which country they are from. One big example: in the Dutch comics Donald Duck is not just often the loser at the end of a story, but his misery is usually self-inflicted. Meanwhile, the Italians came up with a superhero alter-ego for Donald Duck that started out as a revenge fantasy against his horrible boss (Scrooge McDuck) but that quickly evolved into actual an actually superhero comic[3]. Make of that what you will.
PS: As a tangent on a tangent, if anyone from South America wants to comment on 1971's How to Read Donald Duck I'd be very interested, because I just discovered it on Wikipedia[4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_in_comics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_comics
[3] https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Duck_Avenger
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
by lighthouse1212
0 subcomment
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by nephihaha
1 subcomments
- [flagged]
- I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.
Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).
You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
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