# Fiction which is misrepresented in pop culture **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 23, 2013, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683 "2013-06-23T03:17:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2013, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/181 "2013-11-10T23:11:30Z")
To be fair, not _all_ the characters in _Rent_ had AIDS - only half of them. My sympathies were decidedly not with the hippies in _Hair_. Of course, I’m not sure they were supposed to be. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2013, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/182 "2013-11-10T23:24:50Z")
Is karma considered fiction? As I understand it, karma simply represents fate or destiny, so it’s worth pondering and analyzing. But in my country, karma is taken to mean what goes around comes around. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2013, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/183 "2013-11-10T23:42:33Z")
> [@Rysler](#): > > Disaffected youth are disaffected. It’s a major theme in _Rent_, _American Idiot_, _Spring Awakening_, _Picnic_ and probably a number of other musicals and plays. Maybe even an update of _Catcher in the Rye_. > > It’s just a trope, guys. > ? It may be just a trope, but I still want to whack them in the head with a brick and tell them to deal with it. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2013, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/184 "2013-11-11T15:58:32Z")
> [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](#): > > The portrayal of Don Quixote as an idealist. The books portray him as just plain out of his mind. The musical _ **Man of La Mancha** _ had a lot to do with this interpretation. More people have heard the song “The Impossible Dream” than have read Cervantes. As you say, in the books, even the Don eventually realizes he was just an old fool. But in the musical. the Don inspires all the losers around him to follow their dreams. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2013, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/185 "2013-11-11T18:35:08Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > I dunno. It seems pretty ambiguous. It does strongly imply that the “fiend” is being “created,” and from that we can infer that [in some undisclosed way] he is creating the tissue, but I don’t see where he mentions anything meaningful. He does mention collecting bones to study the human body, and probably from there we get the idea of grave-robbing to stitch them together–but I think Shelley (as Frankenstein) left out the details on exactly how he made his creation deliberately. I know this is several months late, but he also mentions visiting a lot of charnel houses. And he clearly needed body parts - late in the novel, when the monster demands a wife, Dr. Frankenstein has to run around collecting female body parts. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2013, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/186 "2013-11-11T19:41:04Z")
> [@seal\_cleaner](#): > > I seem to remember Frankenstein’s monster’s name as “Adam.” as we’ve hashed out above, Mary Shelley never names the creature, calling him by a number of epithets (such as “the wretch”). He’s never called “Legion” or “Adam”. There is some point to calling him Adam – he’s the first being created by his Creator (although Shelley’s parallel is from Classical Mythology, not the Bible – Frankenstein “The New Prometheus”, as the subtitle tells us). But Shelley doesn’t make it. Some dramatic version may have – there were a lot of them in the 19th century – but I can’t recall now, and my references are at home. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2013, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/187 "2013-11-11T19:49:43Z")
> [@bup](#): > > I know this is several months late, but he also mentions visiting a lot of charnel houses. > > And he clearly needed body parts - late in the novel, when the monster demands a wife, Dr. Frankenstein has to run around collecting female body parts. I talked about this above, as well. I agree that there’s no indication of how the body was created, and certainly no suggestion that Frankenstein was merely sewing parts of bodies together. I always assumed he was rendering down bodies to their basic components and assembling it from those, as in Clark ashton Smith’s excellent story _The Colossus of Ylorgne_. Shelley definitely says that slaughterhouses provided some of his raw material, so unless the people of Ingolstadt were cannibals, he was getting some of his material from animals. When they went to the idea of Sewing Bodies Together\* they produced The Problem of the Brain. If you used body parts, shouldn’t the brain belong to somebody, with all his memories? So the original 1931 film had to have the Bad Brain. Later versions still continued to use this – in the Hammer version “Horror of Frankenstein” from the 1950s, the brain gets broken glass shattered into it. Even in Kenneth Branaugh’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” you see the Creature being hit in the head as it’s created, as if to explain its aberrant behavior. None of this is necessary if you interpret Frankenstein as making everything, brain included, from scratch. It’s not anybody’s brain. it’s a _tabula rasa_. (In “Bride of Frankenstein” they sort of went back to this notion – Dr. Pretorius creates the brain of The Bride “from seeds” – she has no one’s used brain.) \*Why bother stitching the body together if you’re not going to make it from scratch? Just get a convenient Dead Body and rescucitate the whole thing. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2013, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/188 "2013-11-12T22:31:28Z")
IIRC he’s likened to Adam as a new creation, but I don’t think he’s ever actually called Adam or an Adam. With regards to sewing parts together, the novel never gives any indication of how he’s created, just that he is. Sure, there are parts sourced from charnel houses and crypts, but there’s no explicit description of anything like a mechanism. Certainly sewing together parts strikes one as most plausible given the time frame. Alternately, mixing up the constituent components/chemicals in some sort of vat and then growing a new being seems a bit ill-suited. There is a description that the creature is large, and that is due to Frankenstein’s needs in being able to do some of his work. Thus the oversized Frankenstein’s monster has roots in the novel. I could certainly see a means of using charnel house parts in a humanish creation by sewing together. When one needs muscles and tendons, does one really need _human_ parts, or merely parts with an appropriate shape and length? ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/189 "2013-11-13T00:33:29Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > With regards to sewing parts together, the novel never gives any indication of how he’s created, just that he is. Sure, there are parts sourced from charnel houses and crypts, but there’s no explicit description of anything like a mechanism. > > Certainly sewing together parts strikes one as most plausible given the time frame. Alternately, mixing up the constituent components/chemicals in some sort of vat and then growing a new being seems a bit ill-suited. > ? Could he have used the bones of a really large man for the size, and grown the flesh onto the framework like a homonculous? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/190 "2013-11-13T01:27:32Z")
For what it’s worth, in the cartoon parody of the Frankenstein story _Milton the Monster_, the titular character was created by pouring a liquid mixture into a mold and letting it set. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/191 "2013-11-13T05:22:48Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > For what it’s worth, in the cartoon parody of the Frankenstein story _Milton the Monster_, the titular character was created by pouring a liquid mixture into a mold and letting it set. ♪ Six drops of The Essence of Terror, Five drops of Sinister Sauce… ♫ ---
**Author:** ![AppallingGael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9bd4f/32.png) [@AppallingGael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AppallingGael)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 10:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/192 "2013-11-13T10:34:02Z")
> [@the\_diego](#): > > Is karma considered fiction? As I understand it, karma simply represents fate or destiny, so it’s worth pondering and analyzing. But in my country, karma is taken to mean what goes around comes around. In my country, karma means the sum of one’s acts. So doing bad things is bad for one’s karma, meaning that your next life might not be what you’d have hoped for. It is not destiny, though. You can control it. ---
**Author:** ![AppallingGael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9bd4f/32.png) [@AppallingGael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AppallingGael)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/193 "2013-11-13T10:46:24Z")
Adding to the above, because it’s too late to edit: It always annoys me when the phrase “karma is a bitch” (making nice use of the fact that “karma” has the ring of a girl’s name) is dumbed down to “payback is a bitch”. If you think your audience does not understand “karma”, then look for a different expression entirely. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/194 "2013-11-13T13:12:43Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > For what it’s worth, in the cartoon parody of the Frankenstein story _Milton the Monster_, the titular character was created by pouring a liquid mixture into a mold and letting it set. Yeah, and you see how well THAT turned out… If they hadn’t bumped in too much Essence of Tenderness they woulda had Robert de Niro-stein earlier. “Are you lookin’ at me, huh? You lookin’ at ME?” ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/195 "2013-11-13T13:52:58Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Could he have used the bones of a really large man for the size, and grown the flesh onto the framework like a homonculous? Ever see Thomas Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein movie? You almost described the creation scene. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/w-fM9meqfQ4/hqdefault.jpg "FRANKENSTEIN (1910) HD") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-fM9meqfQ4) ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/196 "2013-11-13T13:54:55Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > IIRC he’s likened to Adam as a new creation, but I don’t think he’s ever actually called Adam or an Adam. > > With regards to sewing parts together, the novel never gives any indication of how he’s created, just that he is. Sure, there are parts sourced from charnel houses and crypts, but there’s no explicit description of anything like a mechanism. Mary Shelley in her 1831 foreword to that edition does suggest some sort of machinery… "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion." ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/197 "2013-11-13T15:02:58Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > Mary Shelley in her 1831 foreword to that edition does suggest some sort of machinery… > > "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. > > Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion." I’ve always liked this quote – her “student of unhallowed arts” is _kneeling_ beside his creation. No lab table or hospital gurney – Frankenstein built his creature on the floor. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2013, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/198 "2013-11-13T21:34:59Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > Ever see Thomas Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein movie? You almost described the creation scene. > > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-fM9meqfQ4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-fM9meqfQ4) No I hadn’t seen it, but it is nifty 🙂 Now I have seen another version of Frankenstein 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/199 "2013-11-14T00:01:17Z")
> [@AppallingGael](#): > > Adding to the above, because it’s too late to edit: It always annoys me when the phrase “karma is a bitch” (making nice use of the fact that “karma” has the ring of a girl’s name) is dumbed down to “payback is a bitch”. If you think your audience does not understand “karma”, then look for a different expression entirely. I don’t think it’s a matter of dumbing anything down. They’re two different phrases with different connotations. “Karma is a bitch” applies when there’s no direct connection between the wrong, and the punishment, implying the actions of a universal principle. “Payback is a bitch,” on the other hand, implies a direct retaliation by the wronged party. If you’re a nasty, hateful person who comes down with heart disease, some might argue that’s karma. If you rip off Big Tony, and he sends some guys around to adjust your kneecaps, that’s payback. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2013, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683/200 "2013-11-14T00:08:56Z")
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “Karma is a bitch.” I’m sure it’s said all the time, but if you gave me \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ is a bitch and told me to fill in the blank, my first thought would be “payback.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fiction-which-is-misrepresented-in-pop-culture/661683.md?page=11)