Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died

The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.

If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.

This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.

Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

That was a fun sentence!

What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal metaphors and narratives supplied by Rambo? That's an absolutely fascinating point of view.

However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of Alien Nation (also fictional) reference a famous scene from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com/series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-... https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):

> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine until after they've given birth.

> I'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.

> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?

Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:

> If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself up.

> George, have you had your lead supplements today?

Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".

A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.

Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.

Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.