Science Fiction or Fantasy literature with a political agenda that beats you over the head with it, and adds a kick to the groin for good measure.
Even if I agree with the message I'm being cudgelled with, when it completely overshadows the narrative to the point that I want to beat my head against a wall, then the message itself is discredited as being extreme.
Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind come to mind immediately, but I've been reading some 70's and 60's new wave SF that make me horribly misanthropic, depressed, and just generally disenchanted with ideologies in general.
Yah, Terry Goodkind is the first person I think of when I see the words 'fantasy' and 'political' in the same sentence. The Faith of the Fallen and Pillars of Creation sealed it for me. I hated those books so much that I dropped SoT after that.
Unfortunately I had essays to write, so I read the whole series up to ninth one with highlighter in hand. As I did with Tolkien, Moorcock, and Le Guin. The political aspect of it, and the unrealistic lionization of the main character to the point of Nietzschean-like moral supremacy, actually became kind of funny. In a sort of ironic style you get with particularly badly written B-movies, especially with a strong subtext of masculinity, paternalism, or patriotism.
Actually, what got my proverbial goat was his abuse of the fantasy genera. Every book, every aspect of it, just cries out in hatred of magic and magical forces. It's a tool of violence, oppression, self-destruction, and distasteful outcomes. I don't know why that bothered me, but it was like crushing Tinkerbell underfoot just for the sake of stripping the world of joy. This is particularly plain considering how much the protagonists openly loathe the expansive power they have.
Perhaps I was overly critical of that, because it was the subject of my essay.
@Nikkoru The worst part is that sometime the bad guys are the smart one.
Yes, this encapsulates my annoyance. I hadn't thought to put it in terms of a logical fallacy, to me it's more of an issue of literary criticism. Still, value/moral dissonance is precisely the argument I'd use on C.S. Lewis' works and other heavy-handed psuedo-religious fantasy texts.
I' don't think I've seen a more extensive use of a strawman argument than Goodkind's
Faith of the Fallen. One of the characters has flashbacks to her life under the uber-depressing socialist state that's the major antagonizing force to the freedom-loving independent kingdoms in the novel. This character willingly accepts being molested by street people as a child, for the sake of Goodkind's impression of what socialists believe. After all
her body doesn't belong to her, and if it gives the wretches of the world happiness then that's what she had to do, lest she be selfish. Besides, your life doesn't have any value..
Actually, there is a lot of rape or suggestions of rape in his novels. One could read into that quite a lot if they were so inclined. I personally find sexual abuse in literature or other mediums to be repugnant when there isn't any real significance to it beyond twisted titillation or to represent someone as being super-duper-mega bad.
