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YMMV / Nineteen Eighty-Four

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  • Adaptation Displacement: Despite being credited as the Trope Codifier for dystopian fiction, George Orwell was inspired to write this novel after reading the Russian novel We. He also cited Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Jack London's The Iron Heel, among others, as major inspirations. None of these other stories are nearly as well known.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Given that the Party's doctrine is that of Alternate Reality Interpretation, and that the viewpoint character is repeatedly mind raped in the end, it can be argued that we don't know what really happens post-Room 101. All that can be trusted is what Winston sees with his own eyes up until the cage snaps shut.
    • Also, since he doesn't leave Airstrip One, we have no clue as to the state of the world — is Oceania real? Is it the entire world? Is there a Brotherhood after all? Nothing can be taken for granted, even the Info Dump book that pops up halfway through (especially the book, given that one of the Inner Party members claims credit for its authorship, and hands out copies). In fact, it's a little bit of a stretch but we can't be exactly sure if the Party even controls all of the British Isle. Could be half of it, just England, or hell, maybe only London and its imminent surroundings. Which might explain the whole "running out of resources" thing.
    • A common suggestion is that the 'scholarly' appendix on Newspeak is written in a manner that deliberately subverts this Downer Ending, given that it is written in the past tense... When 1984 was to first be published in America, the publisher wished to remove the appendix, but Orwell refused to have it published without, saying that the book would have to be reworked if such a large chunk was to be cut out. This incident, along with a few hand-picked statements of Orwell around the time the book was written, form the basis for including the appendix into the work.
    • We explicitly never do learn if there's a Brotherhood or not. An alternate, admittedly optimistic interpretation would be that the Brotherhood did exist and that O'Brien was part of it, and that Winston and Julia's capture and death were in fact due to the latter's refusal to give up everything for the Brotherhood (though, granted, that'd just make the Brotherhood no better than the Party). Or, alternatively, they just messed up somehow and got caught, and O'Brien couldn't say anything, because Big Brother is watching. Yet another possibility is that their affirmative responses to questions about whether they'd do things like deliberately infect people with STDs or throw acid at children marked them as the kind of recruits the Brotherhood didn't want. Or perhaps the Brotherhood is real and O'Brien is simply not a member, but elsewhere there are real Brotherhood recruiters setting up a real plot to overthrow the Party.
    • Is O'Brien Big Brother, living as a Higher Party member and a Brotherhood leader, giving him the perfect alibi? Or is there no Big Brother at all, no single leader, with a group of mutually-controlled Higher Party members who doublethink the existence of a higher tyrant being the only tangible government?
    • O'Brien lied about having written The Book. He wants Winston to feel completely defeated, that there is no organization out there that opposed the party. And having lied about it, he doublethinked himself into believing that he wrote it. In reality, the Book's denunciation of the Party's workings is too clear to have been written by somebody whose brain is addled by Newspeak. The real writers are still out there.
    • The Ministries may actually be true to their names from a certain point of view, and using The Party's way of thinking. The Ministry of Truth can be justified with doublethink, you may be able to consider the rations you are given by the Ministry of Plenty to be "plenty" from Big Brother's logic, the Ministry of Peace is justified through "WAR IS PEACE" and the Ministry of Love is where you learn to love Big Brother. Alternately, the Ministry of Truth manufactures truth as defined by the party, and the Ministry of Peace makes a state of internal peace in Oceania by depleting resources.
    • O'Brien is a cynical mid-level bureaucrat who doesn't actually know what The Party truly wants in spite of his villainous monologue that the Party is operating on Dystopia Justifies the Means- perhaps he is just a broken pessimist who sees the world through Jade-Coloured Glasses and thinks that the only way for Big Brother to make any sense at all is if they are as pure evil as he claims, but in truth he is as much in the dark as everyone else; alternatively, perhaps O'Brien is just a sadist who either doesn't know or doesn't care what the Party truly wants, he just wants to break Winston by painting the bleakest picture imaginable for him about Big Brother and its supposed intentions. Either way, by the end of the book, we still cannot say that we truly know what Big Brother wants, even if O'Brien seemingly spelt it out for us.
    • Based on O'Brien's line "they caught me a long time ago", is he lying or was he a rebel until being caught and brainwashed? Is that why he's so good in catching rebels? Is he also a dead man waiting?
    • The look on Winston's face when the film ends after a flashback of Julia mouthing "I love you"... is he regaining his humanity after his time in Room 101?
    • Well, not so much a specific character but more the setting as a whole. As one comment on this video put it, "One interesting thing about 1984 is that it's not entirely clear that Ingsoc actually exists outside of the British Isles. All the claims made about territory, about the endless wars, are the product of Minitruth propaganda. One character even hypothesizes that the bombs being dropped on London during the book are simply part of the effort to keep the Proles scared. For all we know, Airstrip One is just one giant North Korea, cut off and isolated from the rest of the world, the party projecting its illusions of grandeur and power onto a populace too broken and controlled to even know any better." Also, the beam coming from the eye in the picture up top could either be a spotlight to represent Big Brother watching you or a Doom Ray to represent their annihilation of society and those who oppose them.
    • Is Julia in love with Winston and a fellow rebel or is she actually an agent of the Party (perhaps even the Thought Police)? After all, the Party needs enemies to justify its existence and using her as a Honey Pot to root out dissidents is a perfectly likely act from them and not even unlike the RL Soviet Union.
    • Parsons in the Ministry of Love. Was he thrown in the same cell as Winston by coincidence? We don't know if he actually spoke out against the Party in his sleep. Was he then arrested purely to demoralize Winston? And seeing how people tend to not be who they look like at first, was he secretly working with the Thought Police?
    • We see all the other characters from Winston's perspective. He frequently informs us that various characters are stupid, but it's not hard to imagine that many of them are just better than him at keeping their heads down. His view of the proles as "distracted" by trivial matters falls somewhat flat when you remember that (by the standards of his society) Winston is a single, childless, middle-class man looking down on people who are struggling to feed their families.
    • The old man whom Winston talks to in the prole pub about life before the Revolution: genuinely senile and drunk or Obfuscating Insanity because he fears what Winston, a Party member, may do to him for telling him the truth?
      • Alternatively, he might not have been afraid of Winston, but of who else might have been listening. While this may seem like a slight variation, his actions could be taken as a hint that Winston should REALLY learn when to keep his mouth shut. If he'd truly believed Winston was simply Thought Police he most likely would have simply recited some Party talking points and insisted they were all true.
    • Was Syme really purged, as Winston believes? Or was he just moved elsewhere and given a new identity for some other purpose?
  • Awesome Music: Totalitarian, yes, but stirring.
  • Common Knowledge:
    • While often claimed to be a warning about fascism, communism, and/or socialism, the story is intended to speak out against totalitarianism in general rather than any particular political ideology. Orwell was personally a socialist, but detested authoritarian regimes that had been put in place in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague, and their sole concern is retaining power — no more, no less, as stated In-Universe by O'Brien near the end.
    • The book does actually not have the ultimate Downer Ending as most people would think. There's an often overlooked appendix talking about the history of Newspeak referring to it in the past tense written in Standard English, implying that the Party did, in fact, eventually fall. While the final message is left open to interpretation, many people are completely unaware of the appendix's existence, which can be considered relevant to the story. There's at least somewhat of a "Ray of Hope" Ending.
    • The word "wrongthink" is never used in the book. It was likely inspired by "doublethink" or "crimethink" which it does use. In fact, "wrong" is probably among the extraneous extra words "Newspeak" is intended to remove.
    • Lots of people think this book depicts a society where you're under surveillance all the time. You aren't, not all of the time. You just don't know when you're being watched and when you aren't. However, one could argue this creates the illusion that you are being watched all the time out of paranoia. Effectively, it is all in your head.
    • There's also the misconception that everyone is watched and under the government's heel. Only government officials are watched; the 80% of the population that is the Proles are essentially "free" (hence the slogan "Proles and animals are free.") Though the misconception about Proles being spied on is not completely unfounded as it is stated that the Party finds the brightest and most troublesome Proles and eliminates them.
    • The "We've always been at war with Eastasia" scene during hate week is often held up as a major Wham Line. However, the concept of the alliances shifting suddenly and being instantly Retconned is brought up early in the book and intermittently until that point. The Hate Week scene is just when the reader can see so for themselves. In fact, the real wham line involving this phrase is when Winston begins to think it himself, and again in the final chapter when the narration casually remarks that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, signalling his complete transformation.
  • Discredited Meme: Comparisons of real world current events to this book in general, especially without referring to a specific concept. "Literally 1984" is more often used ironically than not, and captioning a gif of Big Brother from the Apple commercial with common sense advice has itself become a meme.
  • Fair for Its Day: The book is one of the most referenced pieces of literature in the world, and one of the Trope Codifiers of the dystopia genre. So perhaps it's not surprising that compared to a lot of its more modern contemporaries, 1984 not only doesn't do a lot that's different, but arguably has less to say about society beyond the concept of Newspeak and a basic, milquetoast "authoritarianism bad" message.
  • Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
    • Mistaking the book as a Take That! to either Those Wacky Nazis or Dirty Communists will attract criticism. One of the villains of the story even specifically demeans those two ideologies, claiming that the fact that they cared about things other than remaining in power is the very reason both fascist and communist regimes eventually fell.
    • Making poor real life comparisons to the setting or themes in the book is also a good way to annoy the book's readers, especially if there's no elaboration on why nor evidence of any exploration of 1984 beyond knowing that there's a Dystopia in it. Oceania is a dystopia written with nuance, built on surveillance, psychological manipulation, and an iron grip from the government, so citing it as just a generic "bad place" to inappropriately use as a comparison for any single possible bad thing is a disservice to the book's themes.
  • Fan Wank: Much has been made of the Newspeak appendix being written in the past tense. Many think it points to the eventual fall of The Party (Thomas Pynchon even supports this interpretation in an introduction included with some editions), but Orwell never confirmed nor denied it.
  • Friendly Fandoms:
  • Genius Bonus:
    • In the final scene when Winston is playing chess in the Chestnut Tree Café, he picks up a White knight from the board and contemplates a move. The arrangement of the pieces on the chess board suggests that he is considering the tactic of going around and hitting the opposing Black army from behind. Only minutes later, the telescreen announcer reports that the Oceanian forces had just defeated the Eurasian enemy in Africa by using the same tactic.
    • Winston's ulcerated ankle is a metaphor for repressed sexual energy.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • By 2007, Britain was home to more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras monitored by government or civil authorities. 32 of them are within 200 yards of Orwell's London flat, and at least four have a direct line-of-sight to his property, including direct views through the house's rear windows. These numbers have certainly increased since then.
    • China has created an even more thorough system of government surveillance, the Social Credit System, that allows the government to spy on its citizens and manipulate them by punishing and rewarding unfavorable behavior.
    • The totalitarian society the book describes has been more or less realized by North Korea, which managed to create a state similar to the condition of Oceania a few years after the book was publishednote  Christopher Hitchens used to joke that Kim Il-Sung got a hold of a Korean translation of the novel and said to himself "Well, I don't know if we can make it work, but we can always give it the old college try!"
    • One of the 3 super states in the book is the superstate of Eurasia, which practices the ideology of "Neo-Bolshevism" which, as per the themes of the book, is a totalitarian ideology disguising itself as a populist one. As of now, there is an ACTUAL movement in Russia called National Bolshevism which not only sounds similar, but seeks to create a Eurasian super state led by Russia while maintaining a pseudo-communist government. They've been disowned by Marxists and ultranationalists alike.
    • Plenty of people have commented on how the constant monitoring and citizens spying on each other makes Oceania look a lot like North Korea, but Winston's backstory also bears some disturbing similarities to the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to ever escape from a North Korean labour camp (having been born there because of the crimes of his parents or grandparents, he isn't sure which) and escape. Shin claims to have turned in his mother and brother for execution when they tried to escape. He did this because he saw them as competitors for food, and was hoping the guards would let him eat a full meal for the first time in his life (to this day he says he doesn't know what "love" means, and his entire concept of "freedom" is based around being able to eat as much as he wants.)
    • With a dose of Reality Subtext thrown in, Richard Burton was dying as the film was being made and his health was so bad that he had to wear support braces during rehearsals. It makes O'Brien's speech to Winston about the frailty of the flesh and the strength of the Party much sadder in the case of Burton and more terrifying in the case of O'Brien.
    • The revelations in the 21st Century that Orwell himself composed a list of suspected subversives for an anti-communist organization around the same time he finished 1984 has left many people noting that Orwell himself came to love Big Brother and approved some measure of surveillance on targeted citizens, such as "anti-white" Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin and others who are potentially "Jewish". Later revelations have likewise exposed that for all of Orwell's criticism of language creating propaganda and hiding the truth in 1984, he himself has a huge history of exaggerating and outright lying about some of the events he covered. As they say, Write What You Know......
    • Amazon once slipped some users' Kindle copies of the novel down the memory hole (they deleted them and refunded the customers the money) after a copyright dispute. This similarity to the events in the novel was not lost on a lot of commentators.
    • On a corporate level, certain companies have adopted AI-powered apps to monitor their employees even in the privacy of their own homes.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: When Orwell published the book, half of Europe was under the heel of a totalitarian empire and he feared the rest of the world would become totalitarian by the end of the 20th century. By the 1990s, this empire crumbled relatively peacefully, and much of Europe became democratic. Granted, post-communist Europe hasn't lived up to all of its promises, and places like Belarus and Russia have become authoritarian, but even Putin's Russia hasn't reached the level of totalitarianism Soviet Russia did.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • It's briefly discussed that the Minitrue has a section dedicated to producing pornography, which Julia works for. The porn is barely considered sexual or erotic, and is more So Bad, It's Good than anything else. Then the internet happened, giving people access to more bad porn than they could shake a stick at.
    • So what does the future feel like, according to O'Brien? A boot to the head.
    • In the 1984 film adaptation, John Hurt plays Winston, a man oppressed by a totalitarian government. 22 years later he plays Adam Sutler, the head of a totalitarian government in the film adaptation of V for Vendetta.
      • And then, he played the role of Big Brother himself in a 2009 stage adaptation of this novel.
      • Come 2013 in Doctor Who, he regenerates into Christopher Eccleston. In the same year, Eccleston provided the voice of Winston Smith in a BBC radio adaptation of the book.
      • Later in Snowpiercer, Hurt plays an elderly man in the lowest social class who later incites a revolution. Then, his character was revealed to be cooperating with the antagonist the whole time, to ensure the planned Staged Populist Uprising among the lowest social class.
    • The rat torture in the climax is reminiscent of a noticeably less scary scene from the extended cut of The Wicker Man (2006), involving poorly CGI'd bees and Nicolas Cage hamming it up.
    • Someone thought "Big Brother" would be a good concept for a Reality TV show, and considering it's a Long Runner, millions of people agree.
    • In the 1984 film, Parsons marvels at the fake meat in the stew. Modern products like Beyond Meat that mimic the taste of actual meat have become popular, and some people (such as vegetarians) would very much prefer it over actual meat.
    • At one point it's mentioned that The Party has computers that automatically write novels for the Proles to read. Now we today have deep learning algorithms that can do exactly that if fed a sufficient quantity of reference material, but let's just say that it would completely ruin the tone of the book if Winston were to actually read us one.
    • When O'Brien has Winston and Julia busted for thoughtcrime, he declares "You are the dead!" Which sounds a lot like a later memetic character's catchphrase.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Winston is pretty obsessed with O'Brien.
      • To be fair, Winston was fairly certain O'Brien could get him out of Hell on Earth.
    • The feeling can be seen as mutual, particularly after it's implied that O'Brien has been working on Smith as his "pet project" for seven years.
      • In the 1984 adaptation, Winston looked genuinely heartbroken after the reveal of O'Brien's role as The Mole. He later hallucinates about O'Brien, saying I love you to O'Brien, before he turns into Julia.
  • It Was His Sled: O'Brien is a government agent who tricks Winston and Julia into trusting him. Since he's the one who delivers the Party's messages to the readers, his betrayal is freely discussed as part of the greater debate on the themes of the story. Many modern introductions that display the characters freely spoil that he's the Big Bad.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • This is the work that informs modern life, with "Big Brother" and "Big Brother Is Watching You," "Double Think," "Unperson," "Thought Crime," "thought police," "2+2=5," and "Room 101". While we're at it, there's the the war with Eastasia Eastasia is our ally. We were always at war with Eurasia. Really, the government in the novel communicates to the public almost entirely through memes.
    • Artifacts of the pre-Party times survive as memes too: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's..."
    • "1984 was not an instruction manual!"Explanation
    • GroupThinkExplanation
    • "Wow, this is just like 1984!"/"Literally 1984"Explanation
    • "This is just like Animal Crossing by George Orwell!"Explanation
    • "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a(n) [insert something here] - forever"
    • This scene featuring a crowd of people while juxtaposed to a large static image of Big Brother have been used as an exploitable Image Macro in which the context will involve orders forbidding acts that are considered stupid, pointless and/or downright dangerous.
    • A comedic version: Margaret Atwood, creator of another famous dystopian fiction, is of course familiar with 1984 and said in an article about Orwell that, in her family, Do it to Julia! had become the standard phrase people used whenever they were told it was their turn to do the dishes, take out the trash, etc.
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • If you think Orwell was solely attacking communism, socialism, liberalism, or almost any other political ideology, you've missed the point. The Party's only motivation is staying in power, and everything they do is in service to that; even if Ingsoc is Newspeak for "English Socialism", that's just part of the Party's effort to control people through language, for Orwell himself considered Ingsoc to be everything that socialism wasn't.
    • Relatedly, if you compared the setting or characters of this book to your own least favorite place or political figure, chances are that you've went exactly opposite to the book's message. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about a totalitarian government holding control by warping the English language to their own ends and writing propaganda loaded full of lies, relying on reduced intellectualism in the population to go unchallenged in their rule. As TED-Ed points out, trying to spin this book to represent something it doesn't, or repeating what someone else says about it without critically thinking about if it's true, is falling to the exact thing that Nineteen Eighty-Four warns against.
    • Some people consider the character of Emmanuel Goldstein to be a symbol of rebellion against tyranny because of his status in the book as a boogeyman for the Party. However, it's likely Goldstein was based on Leon Trotsky, whom Orwell considered not much better than the Stalinist regime, whose ideology he famously advocated against.
    • The book is unfortunately popular among some real life totalitarians, with Stasi chief Erich Mielke even naming his office Room 101. The Bad Guy Wins, after all.
  • Music to Invade Poland to: Oceania, 'Tis of Thee from the 1984 film.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Being one of the codifiers of the Totalitarian Dystopia, it should be no surprise that it has its own page.
  • Older Than They Think: Many of the themes from Nineteen Eighty-Four appear earlier in Orwell's work. The idea of "the truth" being whatever the ruling elite says (including the specific example of '2+2 = 5')? Chapter Four of Looking Back on the Spanish War. Political jargon constricting thought? Politics and the English Language, and before that, his As I Please column for March 17, 1944. The world being divided between a small number of super-states? He cribbed it from James Burnham. History being an endless cycle of the "Middle" deceiving the "Low" in order to depose the "High?" Ditto. Doublethink, 'the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out'? In Front of Your Nose. The aversion of Evil Will Fail? Chapter Four of Looking Back on the Spanish War, again. The working class (Proles) as the only hope against a totalitarian government, but also very stupid and shallow? Chapter Five of Looking Back on the Spanish War. The metaphor of a totalitarian government as a boot stamping on the face of humanity? From Jack London's The Iron Heel.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Syme is a fascinating character who while clearly intelligent is devoted to Big Brother due to the interest he has in his job. The one chapter he appeared in, he brought up many interesting ideas that english classes love to analyze.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Almost certainly, the worst part of 1984 is that it's plausible.
  • Praising Shows You Don't Watch: Ironically, especially given how often just about any development in how the government works will be met with comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four, according to a British survey it's also the book most people lie about having read.
  • Realism-Induced Horror: The scary thing about the Oceanian Superstate is that its evil isn't anything out of the ordinary: regimes that censor language, torture dissidents, and spy on citizens have existed throughout history.
  • Sci Fi Ghetto:
    • Many literature professors and some science-fiction writers as Isaac Asimov will get very angry if you call this "Science Fiction", even though it's set in the future, with a level of surveillance impossible at the book's writing central to the plot and tone and the climax clearly relying on some sort of ultra-sophisticated psychological profiling.
    • The otherworldly pyramid architecture of the Ministry buildings. While not necessarily containing an outright sci-fi element, their description evokes a futuristic, sci-fi feel.
  • Sliding Scale of Social Satisfaction: Solidly placed in the "Controlled But Well-Fed" category. The average person will not starve but has no commodities and must toe the line, else nasty punishments await. All in all, there's no freedom or safety.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A lot of people report struggling to finish the book or abandoning it altogether due to how pessimistic the story is.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: While the book's overall message of things like mass surveillance, the manipulation of language, and torture were (uncomfortably) prescient, some of the other messages haven't aged well.
    • The book is set in a late 20th-century world that is entirely under the rule of totalitarianism. While this fear was plausible in 1949 when much of the world's population was under the thumb of the totalitarian Soviet Union, it became less so since the 1990s when the Soviet Union and its bloc collapsed, and the number of democratic nations grew, albeit not everywhere.
    • Although Orwell couldn't have predicted them, his futuristic world of total surveillance lacks computers or cell phones.
    • The geopolitical state of the world also counts, given that the book was written in post-war 1948 and was based on the dominant world powers at the time; Oceania is meant to represent a merger of the British Empire and the United States; Eurasia used to be the USSR after they annexed most of Europe and west Asia; Eastasia is Japan, China, the Koreas, and southeast Asia. However, this preceded the absolutely monumental changes in the world order that would come as a result of the Cold War:
      • Most of Europe would end up aligning with the USA due to the encroaching influence of the USSR, namely France, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and the Nordic states (Finland, Sweden, and Norway), while Germany was split into West and East Germany, aligned with the USA and the USSR respectively. Additionally, the dissolution of the USSR and the Balkanization of Yugoslavia also led to states that were part of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, such as the Baltics (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), the Czech Republic, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina firmly aligning themselves with the USA. And on top of it all, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent war in 2022 caused Ukraine to align itself with the USA and the west after decades of being under the USSR/Russia's sphere of influence.
      • The Levant as a whole is part of Eurasia; the Indian subcontinent has India as a "disputed territory", modern-day Pakistan as part of Oceania, and Kashmir as part of Eastasia; and the Koreas are still united. These would become outdated by the formation of Israel and the outbreak of the Israeli-Arab conflict; the rise of India as a geopolitical great power, Pakistan as its historic rival, and the Kashmir conflict between them and China; and the division of Korea into North and South Korea. Suffice to say, it's hard to imagine the territorial conflicts encompassed by all as having absolutely no affect on the geopolitical arena of the world at large.
      • Japan and China both being part of Eastasia makes no sense when Japan would end up aligning itself with the USA and NATO, while China would end up being forever changed by the reign of Mao Zedong and its eventual growth into a global superpower, which itself would lead to neighboring countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines aligning themselves with the west.
      • The end of Apartheid in South Africa, as well as the dissolution of Rhodesia and the independence of Zimbabwe has led to both South Africa and Zimbabwe becoming more aligned with Russia and China than they were with the west, mainly due to the west's support of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia.
      • Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula being part of the "disputed territories" now seems incredibly quaint and outdated after the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser turned Egypt into a regional power and led to the rise of Pan-Arabism across Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as the Gulf states becoming major economic powers in their own right; namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
      • New Guinea as a whole being part of Oceania, when the New York Agreement in 1962 resulted in the handover of Western New Guinea from the Netherlands to Indonesia, while Papua and New Guinea merged into one administrative territory in 1949 and eventually gained independence in 1975.
      • Cuba being a part of Oceania, which failed to account for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that resulted in Cuba becoming aligned with the USSR and was preceded by the severing of ties between the USA and Cuba for over fifty years, as well as the onset of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
      • Venezuela would shift in its alignment from 1999 onwards as a result of a Bolivarian Revolution and the election of the socialist Hugo Chavez, leading to a deterioration of relations between it and the USA and Venezuela gradually realigning itself with Russia and China after the Turn of the Millennium. In addition, the reign of Nicolas Maduro and the flare-up of the Guyana Esequiba crisis in 2023 has further isolated Venezuela from the USA and its sphere of influence, while worsening relations with its neighbor Guyana.
      • Probably most relevant to 1984 itself is the decline of the British Empire; while the UK was weakened in stature after World War II, 1984 was still written with the idea that Oceania was made as a result a merger between the British Empire and the United States, to the point where the dominant ideology, Ingsoc, is an abbreviation of "English Socialism". However, the independence of India, Pakistan, Israel, and Malaysia; the Suez Crisis in 1956; the decolonization of Africa; the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and the handover of Hong Kong all contributed to the end of the British Empire and of the United Kingdom as a world superpower, with the Brexit referendum in 2016 further weakening the UK's international standing as a power player in geopolitics. All of these events make it incredibly unlikely that the United Kingdom would ever return to being a dominant enough power to turn a third of the world into a one-party totalitarian state under its rule.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • The Party's arbitrary changing of their enemies and allies in the possibly-fictional war makes sense both in-universe and out, as a display of their power, and refers to how the USSR went from being stridently anti-Nazi to neutral with friendly leanings during the M-R Pact to being fiercely anti-Nazi again (which to be really fair, is something they only did once, briefly, and that after many years of anti-Nazi coalitions formed with the West fell on deaf ears). However, even vaguely insinuating that in a wartime context based off of World War II, that all sides are the same and the war crimes of one state are merely propaganda would probably, and ironically, get Orwell compared to Nazi apologists and possibly even Holocaust deniers today.
    • Indeed, Orwell in one of his letters, believed that Britain after World War II would either end in fascist or socialist dictatorship, which considering how British resolve during the war where they defied Nazism before the USSR and USA got involved, is rightly seen as its Glory Days, is a rather weird judgment on the events and needless to say.
    • Despite its strong female lead, the novel has been accused of misogyny in how Winston notes that the Party's most fanatical followers are women, and how even Julia's appearance is so often emphasized as very important, the "a-political" cog in the wheel of the system does reflect some of Orwell's gender biases. In one particularly disturbing moment before Winston and Julia start hooking up, Winston worries that she'll never fall for him, and his bitterness over that curdles into fantasies about torturing, raping, and killing her! However, some have defended this as being an examination of how some people's attitudes towards relationships and the opposite sex have been warped by the IngSoc regime.
    • The idea of Newspeak, and how some languages or dialects are inherently superior to others, is Science Marches On at best, and elitist/imperialistic at worst. Much of which was inspired by Orwell propagandizing Beige Prose in his essays and this attitude would be criticized, then and later, by writers like Julian Barnes, Will Self, Salman Rushdie among others, for its schoolmarm-like recommendation of linguistic purity and discipline, of the kind that Orwell was supposedly railing against.
  • Values Resonance: The rise and spread of mass media politics, consumerist advertising, PR-Based politics that emphasize image over content, and the new technologies that rose during The War on Terror such as government-enforced surveillance makes Orwell's overly paranoid satire relevant and applicable even decades after the USSR and fascist states that Orwell was targeting had fallen. The fact that the novel is a best-seller in The New '10s vindicates its strength.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The bleach-bypassed cinematography of the 1984 movie adaptation that gives it a dark and desaturated coluors close to black-and-white elevates both the Scenery Gorn and Scenery Porn of the movie and truly brought Oceania to life. It was one of Roger Deakins' early work, and it showed how much grit he already has in the field. The strength of the cinematography can be especially seen in The Criterion Collection restoration of the movie.
    • This extends to the actual visual effects of the movie itself, as all of them were practical effects. This includes the explosion, which was an actual explosion, and scenes of Winston and O'Brien walking in the corridor where the door leads to the Golden Country, that was actually shot on location as well, with the corridor actually being built on location.
  • The Woobie: Winston and Julia, especially in the movie.

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