Spiritual Antithesis in Literature.
- Robin Hood was intended to be this to King Arthur. Compared with the latter appearing in the 6th century A.D. and representing the aristocracy in post-Roman Britain, the former would be created around eight centuries later to serve as a contrast to King Arthur, namely by stealing from a corrupt aristocracy and giving to the impoverished peasantry in 11th century Anglo-Norman England.
- The Jack London short story Batârd is this towards his more famous novel, The Call of the Wild. The "Rule of Club and Fang" from the novel isn't at all useful in training dogs of any kind, which is a criticism of the book. However, in Batârd, it's the exact opposite. Being horribly mistreated his whole life turns Batârd into a hostile, rage-filled dog that only stays with his abusive owner out of a desire to kill him. The short story is practically a deconstruction of Call of the Wild.
- Lord of the Flies is this towards the children's book Coral Island. Coral Island has young boys living on an island after their ship's catastrophe and working together to fight "the savages". Golding, having an issue with racist undertones and savagery being presented as an outside threat and not something that lies in human nature, wrote a book in which young British boys end up abandoning their civilized ways and trying to kill each other. The Lord of the Flies characters Ralph, Jack and Simon were named after the Coral Island main characters Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (as in Simon Peter, disciple of Jesus).
- Oddly enough, another writer, Robert A. Heinlein, took issue with that portrayal and wrote Tunnel in the Sky, which served as an opposite to Lord of the Flies: Boys end up on an alien world and work together for their survival. Some try to go the same way as characters from Golding's book, but end up quickly killed.
- Mira Lobe's Insu-Pu is another spiritual opposite to Lord of the Flies.
- John le Carré's George Smiley spy novels (of which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the most famous) are known for being the complete antithesis of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which were still being written when Le Carré began his career. Le Carré intentionally avoided glamorizing espionage with his portrayal of the Cold War, and his novels frequently examined the perils of government bureaucracy and the moral ambiguity of the fight against communism. Unlike Bond, Smiley rarely acted as a field agent or physically confronted his foes, instead relying on his intellect to unravel mysteries and beat Britain's enemies.
- Also notable, in that Fleming and Le Carré had very remarkably similar careers in MI6 prior to becoming writers, but chose to draw on their experiences in completely different ways.
- Frank Herbert wrote Dune partly in response to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series. He found the elitism in the latter grating, and questioned the assumptions about science, human behavior, and how the control of history by scientific prophets is seen as a good thing. So he took the same premise and elements—the decay of a galactic Vestigial Empire, a Secret Circle of Secrets seeking to shape the future, an extremely powerful psychic acting as an Outside-Context Problem to The Plan—and restated it in a way that draws on different assumptions and suggests radically different conclusions. Notably, the psychic is now the hero instead of the antagonist, although this is also Deconstructed."History [in the Foundation books] … is manipulated for larger ends and for the greater good as determined by a scientific aristocracy. It is assumed, then, that the scientist-shamans know best which course humankind should take. This is a dominant attitude in today's science establishment all around the world… While surprises may appear in these stories (e.g., the Mule mutant), it is assumed that no surprise will be too great or too unexpected to overcome the firm grasp of science upon human destiny. This is essentially the assumption that science can produce a surprise-free future for humankind."— Frank Herbert, in his essay "Men on Other Planets" (1976)
- Harry Potter and Ender's Game. They're two of the defining young adult sci-fi/fantasy series of the Millennial generation, and they have nearly identical premises—but they ultimately bring their premises to vastly different conclusions, and they lie on completely opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. In both, a bullied Child Prodigy with an unhappy home life receives an offer to leave home and enroll in a special school hidden from the rest of the world, where he learns that he is destined to come to the world's rescue in the latest chapter of an decades-old struggle against a malevolent evil (a Dark Lord in one, an Alien Invasion in the other), leading to a years-long Trauma Conga Line while he prepares for an inevitable Final Battle while bonding with a loyal group of True Companions; there's also an ongoing series of highly contested school games ("football on flying broomsticks" in one, zero-gravity laser tag in the other) that everyone takes really seriously, and the story repeatedly points out how much it can suck to be the Chosen One. The difference? One ends with an upbeat Earn Your Happy Ending where evil is vanquished through The Power of Friendship and the True Companions remain inseparable for life, with the protagonist revered as a hero. The other has far more of a Bittersweet Ending, where we learn that the whole conflict was based on a cultural misunderstanding, the protagonist is remembered as a monster who destroyed an entire alien race, and he ultimately leaves his friends and family behind to wander the universe in search of a way to atone for his crimes. Politically, one is also far more idealistic, ending with the heroes forming a La Résistance against their corrupt government, and ultimately reforming it through unabashed determination. The other ends with the heroes unwittingly causing the rise of a corrupt government, with one of the most unsympathetic characters attempting to become a benevolent dictator.
- An antithesis to Harry Potter can be seen in The Scholomance, which is clearly a next-generation response to the piece.
- Both of them are urban fantasies about a secret magical wizarding world, set an an Academy of Adventure where our school-age protagonists need to master their magical abilities. The Harry Potter series treats the Wizarding World in general- and Hogwarts specifically- as a space full of genuine wonder, and while there are some bigotries and dangers, ultimately worth it. In contrast, while Scholomance's magic isn't without its beauty, surviving to adulthood is an incredibly fraught experience. Deaths at the school are distressingly common occurrences, and heavily driven by the systemic inequalities in how the magical society operates.
- Houses vs. Enclaves. Hogwarts students are sorted into one of four school houses based on their personalities. While there's some talk throughout the series about how this system causes division and strife, at the end of the day, the vast majority of the protagonists are Gryffindors (with a few supporting members from Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff), most Slytherins are evil or at least self-serving, and ultimately no changes are made to the system. In contrast, the Enclave systems are highly elite groups of wizards who leverage their generational wealth and power to take advantage of the less well off wizards, both within the Scholomance and outside it. The protagonist, El, initially has her main goal to join an Enclave for the protection it offers, but ultimately rejects the system. A significant part of the trilogy's resolution is creating a coalition between a variety of enclaves, while also working to build a healthier long-term system.
- Both Harry and El are talented, albeit sometimes angry and asocial, wizards with prophesized magical destinies. While some speculated that Harry's prophecy meant he might become a dark lord, many interpreted it as meaning he'd defeat Lord Voldemort and save the world. By contrast, El's prophecy said that she'd become one of the darkest, evilest sorcerers ever known. While Harry was embraced by the wizarding world, El was deeply mistrusted and hated, and had to fight to prove her kindness and good intentions.
- The Harry Potter series often received a great deal of criticism for its vague world building, with questions regarding what poverty even means for beings who can magic up food, houses, clothing, etc. By contrast, the Scholomance series puts heavy focus on how the magical economy works, with the main resource everyone competes for being protection from monsters. Additionally, while the Harry Potter series kept its focus almost exclusively focused on the United Kingdom- with its depictions of other cultures, both in the original book series and its later supplemental material often accused of being shallow, inaccurate, or stereotypical, the Scholomance series set out to show a truly global magical community, with the protagonist being half-Welsh, half-Indian, forming close allies with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures.
- Chinua Achebe found Heart of Darkness to be racist and historically dubious. He was tired of it being used as a reference point by many readers and academics when discussing Africa. One of the reasons he cited for writing Things Fall Apart was to show that native Africans from traditional societies were intelligent and highly complex individuals and to show that Africa is not a dark place meant for European decadence but a place where people lived lives just like anywhere else.
- C. S. Lewis has one in the form of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, which is explicitly intended as an atheist counterpart to the Christian The Chronicles of Narnia. In a similar manner, astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle wrote Ossian's Ride, which was meant to be the antithesis to That Hideous Strength.
- Steven Erikson has stated that the impetus to fictionalize his and his friends' home brewed Tabletop RPG campaign as the Malazan Book of the Fallen came from having a very visceral reaction to opening the first Forgotten Realms boxed set, in essence saying "This is not what fantasy is supposed to be."
- The entire series is an antithesis to Robin Hood. The rangers' weapons and tactics are very similar to that of Robin's Merry Men, but they fight for the government, and often against insurgents.
- John Sladek's satirical Roderick series features a robot who views a corrupt world through innocent eyes. Sladek then turned the idea on its head in the novel Tik Tok: the world is just as corrupt, so its robot Anti-Hero decides to exploit it by being even more corrupt.
- Starship Troopers gets this treatment a lot, especially in the 1970s and 80s, with works like Haldeman's The Forever War and Steakley's Armor being the two most blatant. Even Drake's Hammer's Slammers could probably be listed.
- And Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
- Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None as an opposite philosophical story to the New Testament.
- When the Windman Comes is an antithesis to Bridge to Terabithia. In both cases a boy from a down-to-Earth family meets a girl with very wild and colourful imagination, who draws the boy into her world. Yet in BTT imagination is a liberating force, opening new horizons for the boy, and the girl is helping the boy to develop it , whereas in WWC, imagination is a destructive force, making the girl's life increasingly difficult and miserable (and even unnecessary dangerous), and it falls to the boy to help her and her mother to "get real".
- According to Word of God, the Red Room series began as this to Charles Stross The Laundry Files. More specifically, The Jennifer Morgue. After an entire book about glamorous superspies fighting monsters being made fun of, C.T. Phipps wrote a book about glamorous superspies fighting monsters and played it dead straight. The hero even has a preference for redheads and a nerdy pair of lesbian tech support compared to Bob Howard's wife and nerdy gay men tech support. The author has also stated himself to be a Laundry Files fan, though.
- Robert E. Howard's two Barbarian Heroes, Kull and Conan are this to each other. Both are Blood Knights who face a number of serpentine adversaries, and become kings by their own hands in nations not their own. Kull is older, introspective, melancholic, and completely uninterested in the pleasures of the flesh. Conan, while hardly The Brute, has no time for philosophy, is joyous, and knows the company of many young women in his stories. Becomes Early-Installment Weirdness, as Conan started off as a line-for-line Expy of Kull.
- Conan himself has an antithesis in Elric of Melniboné, envisioned as such by his creator, Michael Moorcock. Conan is a mighty barbaric warrior, shunning magic and hating sorcerers, growing from humble origins and rising into the king of the greatest empire of his time; Elric by contrast is a sick and frail sorcerer-king, ruler of the most corrupt and decadent civilization of his own world, then proceeds to lose everything and dies alone and unmourned.
- A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin was partially a response to The Lord of the Rings and its imitators. Word of God said he was always more interested in how Aragorn would win the peace after the War of the Ring (which is barely skimmed over in the epilogue) than how he won the war. He also wanted to know if fantasy could work if it had a more socially accurate examination of feudalism based on actual medieval history. Martin also said that it was also a response to Historical Fiction noting that he was tired of the Foregone Conclusion nature of the genre, and wanted to use fantasy as a genre to explore history via various events and historical figures having their Serial Numbers Filed Off.
- Richard K. Morgan intends A Land Fit for Heroes to be this to The Lord of the Rings.
- The Black Company by Glen Cook is this for High Fantasy genre - if one assumes that typical works of High Fantasy are propaganda of the winners, then this is closer to how those events really looked like.
- Vox Day wrote his novel A Throne of Bones (the start of his The Arts of Dark and Light series) as a "literary rebuke"
to popular fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. - Stephen R. Donaldson is most famous for writing Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a High Fantasy story about a man from Earth who is forcibly transported into another world and spends most of his time refusing to believe that anything he sees is real. An indication that he might be right is that the story is described mainly in cerebral terms, with things and people often coming across more as the personification of ideas than as real things. Donaldson later wrote Mordant's Need, a Low Fantasy story about a woman from Earth who accepts an invitation to go to another world, where she is told (and almost convinced) that she and her own world has no reality of its own but is purely the creation of Mordant's magic. The story is told in very naturalistic, sensual terms, with much emphasis on physical sensation and practical constraints, and characters are generally messy, flawed and very human.
- Lavie Tidhar's novel The Violent Century is a Spiritual Antithesis to Über, whether consciously or not. Both are very dark horror-tinged Alternate History stories that deconstruct neo-Golden Age "World War II would have been really cool with superpowered people" comics. However, Über has Nazi Germany developing supersoldiers in 1945 and coming Back from the Brink, launching a whole new escalation of horror, while in The Violent Century all the great powers already have superpeople at the start of the war due to a Mass Super-Empowering Event, and the horror for the reader comes in how little history is actually changed, demonstrating how powerless even superheroes and villains are compared to the real-world horrors.
- Matilda for Carrie. Both stories feature school girls as their protagonists who come from abusive homes and eventually develop telekinetic powers that they eventually use to punish people. Carrie White is a loner who gets bullied relentlessly and eventually breaks after being tormented too much — using her powers to get revenge on all her classmates, and eventually her entire town. Matilda Wormwood meanwhile is an Iron Woobie who tries to make the best of her situation, similarly to how Carrie does at first. But in this case, Matilda uses her powers to punish her tormentors in ways that get rid of them forever and prevent them from hurting other people (non-fatally of course, since this is a children's book). Both stories feature a Cool Teacher who stands up for the girl. Carrie's Miss Desjardin makes things worse for her - as punishing the bullies pisses off the Alpha Bitch so much she organises a prank that ends up starting Carrie's rampage. Matilda's Miss Honey eventually adopts Matilda to free her from her rotten parents, and they live happily ever after.
- The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is this to several other series by Kazuma Kamachi. The protagonist Kyousuke tries to save others regardless of the personal cost, like Touma, Shinobu, Beatrice and Satori. However, Kyousuke is a One-Man Army capable of beating most opponents with only his own skills, whereas most of Kamachi's protagonists need to rely on others. Similarly, while the other protagonists generally grew up in normal and loving families, Kyousuke's family only appeared normal - his father saw him as no more than a tool and carefully controlled his life to teach him his unusual skills. The main antagonists are also different. Most of Kamachi's other antagonists are Well-Intentioned Extremists with impersonal goals (like saving the world) who spend most of their time scheming from behind the scenes. The White Queen is active right from the beginning and has the entirely personal goal of making Kyousuke love her again.
- While in the level of dark themes presented one is Spiritual Successor to another, Jack London's White Fang, a story of a wolf slowly becoming domesticated, is the opposite of his earlier work, The Call of the Wild - a story of a dog slowly becoming feral.
- James Joyce's Ulysses is widely known for being a loose parody/retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, but it's also largely an antithesis of it. Much of the book's subtle humor comes from Joyce essentially zigging everywhere Homer zagged. The Odyssey is a story about the Ancient World that unfolds over the course of an entire decade, while Ulysses is a story about the Modern World that unfolds over the course of a single day. The Odyssey is about heroic feats, while Ulysses is about the minutiae of everyday life. The Odyssey takes place in the aftermath of the momentous events of the Trojan War, while Ulysses takes place in the early 1900s—just before the momentous events of World War I. Where Telemachus is The Dutiful Son who honors and respects his father and strives to live up to his example, Stephen Dedalus is a melancholy artist who rebels against his father and tries to escape his influence. Where Odysseus is a larger-than-life hero who's determined to get back home to his family, Leopold Bloom is a Ridiculously Average Guy who spends his day wandering the streets and avoiding going home to his family. Where Penelope is a chaste and innocent woman who stays faithful to her husband no matter what, Molly Bloom is a sassy and insatiably curious woman who casually sleeps around.
- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are arguably the most famous and influential dystopian novels ever written — and all three have been noted as being utter antitheses of one another in the nature of their broken societies and the real-world influences behind them.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four's Oceania is a world where the regime stamps its boot on the faces of the underclass, controlling them through state surveillance, endless war against foreign countries, and omnipresent propaganda that makes them question what is even real.note First published in 1949 in the UK, it reflected both the freshly-exposed horrors of Nazi Germany and the emerging division of the world into two hostile power blocs, both of which were at least somewhat dystopian (the East being outwardly totalitarian and the West risking falling down the same rabbit hole) in the eyes of the democratic socialist Orwell.
- Brave New World's World State, on the other hand, doesn't need to take such measures to crush dissent, instead having bred such ideas out of the populace through a mix of eugenics, Government Drug Enforcement, and Bread and Circuses, all while having long ago conquered the world. First published in 1931 in the UK, it reflected early 20th century concerns over the rapid advance of science and industry, from the assembly line to biology, and how those advances might reshape human society and sweep aside all those who tried to resist.
- Finally, Fahrenheit 451 envisions a future America where mass media has dumbed down the populace and caused them to decide that books were not only unnecessary, but actively harmful to society due to the dangerous ideas they spread. Published in 1953 in the United States, Bradbury was writing chiefly about censorship coming not through top-down state power, but from the ground up through public moralism and a culture of Anti-Intellectualism fed by the emerging mass culture of the postwar years, all while most people are too glued to the empty pablum coming from their television screens to care.
- In short, Oceania maintains control through fear, the World State maintains control through pleasure, and Fahrenheit 451's America maintains control through apathy.
- Huxley later wrote his own antithesis to Brave New World, the Spiritual Successor Island (1962). Whereas Brave New World was his envisioned dystopian society, Island was his envisioned utopia, with multiple elements of life on the island of Pala serving as direct counterpoints to elements of the World State.
- Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Peter Kemp's Mine Were of Trouble. Both are about Englishmen who volunteer to go to Spain to fight in the civil war, but that is where their similarities end. Orwell journeyed to fight with the Republican side and drifted toward the Trotskyist POUM militia, which was mostly made up of half-trained and badly equipped civilians; the presense of he and others like him ultimately makes no difference to the Republic's war effort, which was wracked with infighting, and he barely survives the Stalinist purge of the POUM and their stamping out of the Catalan Republic; he returns to England disillusioned and heartbroken. Kemp meanwhile joins the Nationalist side and while he at first joins the Carlist faction, which military wise was barely any different from the POUM, his battlefield prowess earns him a spot in the much more professional and better equipped Spanish Foreign Legion. He takes part in several battles and while he sees several atrocities, he maintains belief in the cause he fought for right to the end; while Orwell was forced to flee the Stalinists, Kemp was allowed to leave freely after taking battlefield wounds. After returning to England, he would proceed to enlist in the British Army to fight in World War II.
- Whether by coincidence or by intention, the Bailey School Kids books are essentially Scooby-Doo in reverse. They're both about four mismatched friends tangling with monsters—but instead of being about ordinary people posing as monsters, they're about monsters posing as ordinary people. Additionally: while every episode of Scooby-Doo famously ends with the kids unmasking the monster, most of the Bailey School Kids books end far more inconclusively, nearly always leaving it ambiguous whether the monster was really a monster. And while nearly all of the "monsters" in Scooby-Doo are unscrupulous criminals, most of the Bailey School monsters turn out to be perfectly nice and harmless, and they usually have mundane jobs and hobbies.
- The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr. was intended to be this to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, with Dixon having described his book as a sequel. Both were novels about plantation slavery in the Southern United States that inflamed public opinion, especially after they were turned into stage plays and, in the case of The Clansman, a feature film adaptation in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, was Stowe's condemnation of the horrors and barbarism of slavery, dehumanizing everybody involved with it and grotesquely undermining traditional values of faith and family, while The Clansman, by contrast, was about what Dixon saw as the horrors and barbarism of the end of slavery, shredding the fabric of Southern society and plunging it into chaos. In particular, the main slave characters in each are a study in contrasts: while Stowe presented Uncle Tom as a noble hero and a symbol of why slavery was incompatible with Christian morality, Dixon presented Gus in The Clansman as a violent rapist who never should have been freed and is given a righteous punishment by The Klan.
- The work of English historian Christopher Henry Dawson can be seen as this to that of another English historian, Edward Gibbon. Both English historians converted to the Catholic faith at one point in their lives, but Gibbon was pulled from Oxford to be taught under a French Calvinist minister, where his Catholic faith was extinguished, and he eventually wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wherein he also accuses the Christian religion of being a factor for the fall of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, Dawson remained a Catholic his entire life, based his work on exploring the role of religion in Western Culture, and was much more sympathetic to the Christian faith.
- Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness is the antithesis of his previous novel Lord of Light. The latter is a science fiction novel that reads like a fantasy novel — aliens are exclusively referred to as "demons", and the "brainwave transfer" technology is presented as indistinguishable from reincarnation, yet the "gods" are still regular humans abusing Clarke's Third Law to present themselves as holy. The former, meanwhile, feels like a science fiction story, including all the trouble involved in keeping a spaceship working, yet the characters in the crew really are gods, and their journey is eventually revealed to be supernatural.
- Ernest Cline's Ready Player One can be read as this to Carlton Mellick III's Cybernetrix, in that both are stories about virtual worlds that have a basis of sorts in '80s nostalgia but sit on opposing ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism with regards to such. Mellick's novel is set in a world where The '80s never ended, culturally speaking, and society has grown creatively stagnant as a result, with '80s film franchises still getting sequels despite having long since been run into the ground. The titular virtual world at the center of the story is where people go to escape the stodginess of mainstream culture. In Cline's novel, on the other hand, the OASIS is itself rooted in '80s nostalgia, and serves as a place where people can escape the bleak prospects of the real world by traveling back to a more idealized past.
- The second part of Gulliver's Travels is this to the first part. Lilliput is a land of tiny militant people who go to war for the silliest reasons, while Brobdingnag is a country of giants who are much more peaceful and enlightened.
- Astrid Lindgrens Pippi Longstocking can be viewed as an antithesis to Alice in Wonderland. Both stories have little girls as protagonists who on occasion argue with themselves (Alice telling herself off, Pippi telling herself to go to bed), contains humorous version of nursery rhymes and old song lyrics (in fact, Ur-Pippi, Astrid's first draft, contained a lot more of these than the final book) and a lot of wordplay. Alice has "uglification", Pippi has "multikipperation". The major difference is that Alice is a normal girl interacting and clashing with eccentric characters in a fantasy-world while Pippi is an eccentric girl with fantastical powers interacting, and clashing, with the mundane, everyday world of the little town she has moved to.
- Nos4a2 examines the disturbing implications of The Polar Express, and plays it for pure horror.
- Naomi Alderman's The Power is this to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale — incidentally, with Atwood's full blessing. Both are feminist dystopian novels about gender roles being taken to their Logical Extreme, but explore this concept from two completely different directions. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a No Woman's Land where women are treated as chattel and breeding stock, presented as the logical conclusion of the aims of the contemporary Christian Right, and one that is implied to eventually collapse under the weight of its contradictions. The Power, meanwhile, is a deconstructed Feminist Fantasy where, thanks to a biological mutation, women now wield greater physical power than men — but without an accompanying change in gender roles and stereotypes, women simply recreate the worst excesses of the patriarchy with themselves on top. What's more, this state of affairs is made even stronger by the collapse of civilization and a reversion to a barbaric Stone Age world where brute physical strength determined who ruled, because that is how human society used to operate and what informs our socially-determined gender roles to this day.
- Nathanael West's two most famous novels, The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, are considered opposite sides of the same coin: Locust takes place in sunny Los Angeles, with its spacious villas, wealthy retirees and movie moguls, artificial excessive decor that looks kitschy, and contrast with nature. Lonelyhearts takes place in crowded New York, in cheap apartments and bland-looking offices, with letter writers who are subjected to terrible disgraces. Yet, they're both critiques of the search for fame and wealth — Locust focuses on the emptiness of a life of luxury, and Lonelyhearts on the despair of trying to achieve it.
- After the Revolution versus Caliphate or Victoria. Similarly set in future dystopias but from opposite perspective on liberties, religion, race and plans for the future.
- Artemis Fowl could be seen as this for Harry Potter and similar middle-grade Urban Fantasy that were becoming popular at the time. In those stories, a seemingly ordinary kid is told that he's actually part of some sort of secret magical society, and is usually The Chosen One who needs to save it. Artemis, in contrast, is a Muggle but otherwise not ordinary (being a super rich Child Prodigy), discovers the secret magical society through his own initiative, and wants to exploit rather than help it. Granted, this mostly applies to the first book, before Artemis' Heel–Face Turn.
- In the foreword to The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix described it as this to his previous novel My Best Friend's Exorcism. Both are supernatural Horror Comedy novels set in Hendrix's childhood hometown, the Deep South Stepford Suburbia of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, in nostalgic time periods (The '80s in Exorcism, The '90s in Book Club), but whereas Exorcism was about teenage protagonists and took place in a world where Adults Are Useless, in Book Club the parent is herself the protagonist trying to protect her family.Hendrix: That novel was written from a teenage point of view, and so the parents seemed awful because that's how parents seem when you're a teenager. But there's another version of that story, told from the parents' point of view, about how helpless you feel when your kid is in danger. I wanted to write a story about those parents, and so The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires was born. It's not a sequel to My Best Friend's Exorcism, but it takes place in the same neighborhood, a few years later, where I grew up.
- The Goblin Emperor to A Song of Ice and Fire, as a fantasy series set in a historically-flavored world and much concerned with issues of succession, political scheming, and courtly intrigue, but with a much more optimistic stance on the issue of whether good men make good kings, and a gentler and more idealistic tone in general.
- Harry Turtledove's short story Vilcabamba is a spiritual antithesis to his Worldwar series. Both deal with an advanced alien race invading Earth and the humans attempting to resist, however, while the humans in Worldwar are able to fight the Race to a standstill and establish a negotiated peace, in Vilcamba the Krolp effortlessly roll over the world's militaries and Take Over the World. The major difference is that the Race are at a level of development roughly equivalent to The '90s, so their technology is understandable and replicable by WWII-era scientists, allowing the humans to eventually get on a somewhat level playing field; meanwhile the Krolp have Sufficiently Advanced Technology which humans have neither the understanding or manufacturing base to copy.
- The Lost Causes Of Bleak Creek to Reaper's Creek. Both have a plethora of similarities as books written by YouTubers: a retelling of the writer's youth but peppered with supernatural elements and focused on a character based on the writer himself, and quite a few thoughts on the theme of god and religion. The former, however, meditates much more on the effect that religion has on a small town community and how negative traits of it can become ingrained in people, as well as a less idealized protagonist (in the words of internet book reviewer Kappa Kaiju, who reviewed both books, the protagonists of the former are simply kinder versions of the people the writers were, whereas the protagonist of the latter is quite Sue-ish). The latter book, meanwhile, portrays god as an evil deity that the protagonist comes to defeat.
- Otherside Picnic is this to its main inspiration, Roadside Picnic. Beyond their superficially similar premises (explorers venturing into a dangerous, supernatural area and retrieving artefacts), the two are extremely different in pacing, style, tone and themes, occupying opposite ends on the idealism-cynicism scale. Roadside Picnic is a short, self-contained book about a man slowly slipping into evil due to financial pressure and trauma, with a bleak atmosphere and explicit political undertones. Otherside Picnic is a long-running series of light novels about two girls having a slow-burn romance while going on exciting adventures in a parallel world, written with a relatively soft tone and complete political indifference.
- Roadside Picnic questions anthropocentrism. The titular "roadside picnic" is an allegory for humanity's insignificance in the eyes of their alien visitors (Earth being the metaphorical ground on which the "picnic" was held). Otherside Picnic assumes anthropocentrism by having the Otherside's monsters mimic Japanese internet myths and urban legends. Kozakura even suggests that the Otherside might be trying to use fear to communicate with humanity.
- In Roadside Picnic, the discovery of aliens has wide-reaching social implications, drastically affecting science, technology and politics. By contrast, the Otherside is a hidden parallel world only known to a few people and organisations, and consequently, has basically zero societal impact.
- Roadside Picnic centres heavily on the town of Harmont and the cultural shift taking place within it. The place is depicted as rapidly transitioning away from industry and towards a tourism-oriented service economy, with large construction projects causing an influx of migrant workers. Otherside Picnic focuses almost exclusively on Sorawo and Toriko, with the human world relegated to the background and treated mostly as an intermission between ventures into the Otherside.
- Roadside Picnic's zone afflicts Harmonites with a mysterious curse, and the children of stalkers are at risk of being born with debilitating diseases. Otherside Picnic's UltraBlue Landscape gives Sorawo and Toriko superpowers.
- Redrick's character arc is partially fueled by economical precarity, with him returning to a life of crime after his job becomes automated. In Otherside Picnic, outside of a few mentions of Sorawo's student loans, money mainly comes up when the two heroines splurge on food, hotels and fancy equipment.
- In Roadside Picnic, the idea of using guns to combat incomprehensible, reality-defying phenomena is openly mocked. The book's only proposed use for firearms in the zone is to kill other humans, or, if the worst comes to pass, yourself. In Otherside Picnic, guns are much more viable, with Sorawo and Toriko regularly using them to defeat monsters.
