YMMV / Who Goes There?

• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Sun Maiden and Crescent Moon similarly features a shapeshifting horror who kills and replaces her victims in a polar setting. How old the story is is hard to say, but the Ket people have been around for thousands of years so most certainly its Older Than Dirt.
• Informed Wrongness: Blair calls out the other scientists for automatically assuming the Thing (while it's still frozen in the ice) is malevolent simply because of its' facial expressions: 'If men can have different customs, why can't a so-different race have different understandings of facial expressions?...You are displaying the childish human weakness of hating the different...Just because its nature is different, you haven't any right to say it's necessarily evil.' John W. Campbell was a fervent segregationist and likely didn't believe this in real life, plus Blair is decidedly proven wrong when the Thing runs amok by killing and replacing several men and dogs, but he still makes some very valid points about assumptions and discrimination based on ones' own cultural or aesthetic standards.
• Narm: In the original novella, the Thing has an actual real form, which it reverts into instead of assuming the Body Horror posterior movies have shown. Said real form is a blue, worm-haired muppet with red eyes. (The illustrations, mostly for cover art, have variable degrees of success; not so much with a 1976 comic book adaptation◊ which even makes it green to up the ridiculousness.)
• Paranoia Fuel: Yeah, trapped in the middle of nowhere, stuck in an ice base surrounded by storms and cold, with a shapeshifting alien that can eat you and duplicate you while making multiple copies of itself. There's a good chance you won't be getting any sleep tonight while you're clutching a weapon glaring at the door.

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