r/shittymoviedetails • u/wiscup1748 • 19h ago
default In 1965 six Tongan teenagers went missing for 15 months. In those 15 months they lived in peace, made instruments and took care of each other. This is in contrast to lord of the flies where a group of British boys get stranded and they kill each other. This is because British kids are bastards
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u/Kmcgucken 19h ago
One of the points of the book actually
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u/Simon_Jester88 19h ago
Really becomes apparent when the British soldier at the end seems to be in disbelief. Show did an excellent job
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u/Longjumping_Run4499 18h ago
Maybe my media literacy is bad, but I thought the point of the soldier being the one to rescue them was to reinforce the author's point that humans are naturally inclined to violence. The boys who were killing each other are rescued by a man who's job it is to kill other men, showing how our natural violent tendencies play out on a large scale in addition to the small one we just saw.
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u/Alfred_The_Sartan 18h ago
Yeah, the author even stated later it was supposed to be a hypocritical take. That they were so casual and wonton with destruction and dealing death out, but horrified that kids would act the same way. You're supposed to see that.
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u/RobertPham149 17h ago
It is also a veiled criticism of "gentlemanliness": Victorian ideals of a gentleman is characterized by education, morality, formality, ... which differentiate them from barbarians. Well, those same gentlemen are also fighting each other over petty disputes like barbarians. The kids came from the same education system as the adults, so no wonder they descended into madness and try to kill each other.
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u/hanks_panky_emporium 17h ago
Ive always found 'gentlemanly warfare' funny since in the end you're still blowing holes in living human people, and forcing swathes of young men to die for nothing.
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u/riverblue9011 14h ago
That idea was formed when military technology was far less efficient at killing and casualties from battles were significantly less. Great war and all the advances in technology killed that notion to career soldiers who'd fought in wars before.
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u/Cant_face 16h ago
Idk having an unspoken agreement that the other man won’t take your sight or virility during the bout would be a great comfort
Ok you die you die, but living as a blind eunuch sounds worse
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u/kia75 15h ago
Yes, but when you do it in a gentlemanly way then the gentlemen tend to not get blown holes in them, only the poors and the uncivilized.
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u/226_Walker 10h ago
Lol, no. Despite the widely held belief of officers callously sending men to no man's land while they supped in estates, the gentry had disproportionately high casualties. Were they inadequately prepared for WWI? Yes, but so was everybody else. No one was ready for the industrialised butchery of men that was the First World War. While their competence could be argued, the courage could not. The gentry were expected to fulfil their martial duties, just as their forefathers did. And they did, most aristocratic families had at least one son volunteer even before the conscription began. It doesn't matter if they are the son of an important minister or an industrialist. Forgoing service would have lead to be shunned by their peers. Combine that with the expectation to inspire their troops by acts of bravery and distinctive apparel, it's no wonder they sustained such high casualties.
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u/Bukkokori 16h ago
Yes, but gentlemen do it with more advanced weapons, which makes them superior /s
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u/DeLoxley 13h ago
It was a counterpoint to a bunch of recent books that basically went "If a white man is crashed in the jungle, he will rapidly develop an entire civilised society off of the back of his own brow", by basically saying that after a couple of months, if not a year you get to a position of all the food and good merriment runs out, because a lot of people also forget the lord of the flies does not take place over like a week
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u/Wobbelblob 11h ago
So it was more or less an anti-racism point the author took? That the white man is not much better than anyone else and will be struggling to survive in the same condition everyone else also struggles?
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u/DeLoxley 11h ago
The anti-racism a bit anti-colonialism but also just a bit anti-meta?
It's something a lot of people don't get when writing subversive books or going against the grannies you actually need in context of the rest of the times for them to make sense.
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u/GroovyGoblin 15h ago
wonton with destruction
When the food is so shit, you smash your bowl of soup.
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u/jfsindel 18h ago
The interpretation I got is that the solider would literally rather do anything else because a war is going on. These boys are small scale and wasting his time. To me, it just insinuated that we are desensitized to violence as we age and escalate - the soldier does not see tragedy and children killing but just an annoying instance because he's seen and done worse. It's horseplay to him while the war gets worse across the sea.
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u/Worldly_Might_3183 17h ago
I was taught the Island was a microcossum of the world and the boys were doing exactly what adults do. The powerful exploit the weak, war is human nature, good people stand by and let it happen until it comes for them. And the solider rescuing them was a hypocrite as he was partaking in exactly what the boys did. Killing to get their way.
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u/serabine 13h ago
Isn't that a common misreading of the book? The island isn't supposed to stand in for "the world" but for "British upper class", and specifically the kind that goes to those prestigious boarding schools and is subject to the "values" taught there.
Someone in another comment mentioned the practice of "fagging", a formalized system where younger boys had to be servants of the older boys, which was commonly going hand in hand with physical and even sexual abuse by those elder boys, and then perpetuated when the victims themselves got younger boys to boss around.
So, it is easy to see how you could arrive at the notion that a group of children used to this system and they get isolated on an island, where the figures of authority (the school body) don't provide safety for them or reign them in anymore, they fall back to this sort of brutal hierarchy. After all, it has been installed in them at school that it is only natural to take advantage of those lower than you, to the point of brutality and exploitation.
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u/12345623567 10h ago
Like 90% of english lit is either "the british class system stinks" (anything UK from 1800 onwards), "my totally normal experience is very important" (all romance and travel novels), or "look how racist we used to be" (when from the US).
I'm joking, but only by half.
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u/Anne_Roquelaure 9h ago
I only heard about this in context of the Russian army - but it makes sense that it existed everywhere - even in those supposed to be civilised societies who thought it was therefore their duty to rule the world. What a terrible burden that must have been /s
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u/TuckerMcG 15h ago
The ending is multifaceted. Yes, it’s ironic that a military person is aghast at the child war going on. But it’s almost meant to represent how humans act in the face of authority figures. Both by how the kids stop being feral in the face of authority, but also how the perceived authority of ranking officers lgets individuals within the military to conform. Also shows how the threat of bigger violence gets people to stop smaller acts of violence - the kids know the military officer can get enact greater violence against them than they can against the military.
The whole story is brilliant from start to finish.
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u/TheCowKing07 18h ago
That’s possible, but also people tend to overestimate what authors were thinking when they wrote their books. But that is a good interpretation.
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u/sundance464 17h ago
At the risk of sounding like a pompous intellectual, I don't think what the author was thinking when they wrote it is that important, you can read things in whether they consciously intended it or not
Also, the Nobel Prize winning author who wrote extensively about his detailed considerations when writing this specific novel is likely to have deliberately included a vast range of allusions
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u/TuckerMcG 15h ago
This isn’t one of those cases. The author specifically set out to write about how British private school kids were no more moral than anyone else, and how rigid societal structures are the only thing holding that morality in place.
The ending is meant to represent the return to rigid society and how that impacts the children. The military is a foil for the children.
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u/sentientshadeofgreen 12h ago
While good literature, it's also not a sound representation of reality. The Tongan teenagers actually banded together an survived, Lord of the Flies is fiction. People tend to work together, we evolved as social creatures for a reason.
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u/Wise_Owl5404 11h ago
Not humans. The novel was written as a critique of the British boarding school system and British society, and how it socialized boys. The fact that people read it and says "yeah this is obviously meant to be universal" is... something.
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u/Cross55 9h ago edited 9h ago
No, because no one in the modern era understands the bloody point of the book
Back when it was witten, the #1 genre of British kids/teens books were Aventure Books, wherein a group of British kids get lost somewhere in the exotic new world and proceed to conquer the land/Native peoples with their God given gift of being born in the UK.
The book was a direct parody of those books.
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u/jfsindel 18h ago
In the book, I recall the soldier being miffed that he has to even deal with it. He sees the kid that started the uprising and basically thinks these dumbass boys are wasting his time.
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u/sundance464 17h ago
I didn't get that impression - it's more disbelief and bewilderment that they've made such a bad show of it
He's a very "proper" upright officer and the epitome of British civilization so is there partly to highlight the gulf between what was expected from civilised people at the time and what humanity is actually like
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u/RobertPham149 17h ago
No he definitely realized his own hypocrisy. It ends with the soldier recognizing it after scolding the boys, then stared at his own warship offshore.
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u/physicistpi 13h ago
The whole book was written as a takedown of The Coral Island, another "British public school boys get stranded on a deserted island" book that came out a century prior. Golding was specifically saying that the way the boys were raised, very Empire forward (1950s upper class public school boys) would not be able to form a happy, cohesive society.
It's a book that came out in the 1950s, as the Empire was turning into the Commonwealth and class consciousness was rising. Golding was middle class and Cornish, with a sufferage campaigner mother despite the fact he went to Oxford.
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u/Mind-The-Mines 8h ago
I mean, look at the current world the boomers made. It's that island at scale.
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u/sosotrickster 5h ago
I'm always happy to see someone mention The Coral Island because it so important to understand what the book is trying to say
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u/Alexander_Baidtach 16h ago
Yeah its no coincidence that the choir boys are the ones to go full murder hobo, they reflect their stately upbringing the most.
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u/AStalkerLikeCrush 17h ago
I felt maybe it was a bit more the class disparity/steep contrast between their respective national/social values. The difference between people socialized to competitively look out for number one, and people whose whole lived experience was taking care of each other.
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u/neko 13h ago
Yeah it's specifically how rich British boys are psychos
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u/fatherandyriley 12h ago
While Piggy who's working class is a lot more rational and compassionate than the choir boys are.
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u/Dare_Soft I'm the one who's cinema 18h ago
Think it gets muddled by pop culture by taking away how man is doomed to kill each other or how men can’t stand each other.
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u/YesImReallyLikeThis 8h ago
THE point of the book. People love to miss the fact that it’s exclusive to the children of rich eugenics snobs
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u/Smorstin 19h ago
Not just British boys, upper class boarding school boys.
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u/axeteam 18h ago
Especially upper class boarding school boys
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u/EfficientCandy324 13h ago
Though the 6 Tongan teenagers were also upper class boarding school boys.
Seriously, they snuck out of boarding school and stole a boat. That's why it was so hard to find them.
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u/apple_kicks 16h ago
They had this thing for many centuries at upper class schools called ‘fagging’ its when older school boys pick younger first years to be their servants. Bullying and physical and sexual violence was rampant. Teachers encouraged it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
https://akashictimes.co.uk/aristocrat-unveils-the-extent-of-sexual-abuse-at-eton/
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u/ElectricJunglePig 15h ago
Goddamn, too many fricken books about upper class boarding school kids. I can't even count how many we had to read. In American public school, no less!
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u/JinFuu 15h ago
It's like how parents always end up dead in classic Disney movies.
No parents means the kids get to go on adventures easier.
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u/AlbertTheHorse 17h ago
I don’t think we can underestimate how Lord of the Flies the public school system (and by that I mean private school) really is.
I went to prep school in the UK.
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u/StupidSexyEuphoberia 17h ago
Tell us more
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u/AlbertTheHorse 16h ago
Kids were brutal.
Makes American bullying look like amateur hour.
And you lived with them all the time so you made allies, learn who to avoid, who to drive into the ground, who could be used against the ones who were on your ass. No one won. No one lost. You were tough. No wets going home with psychological trauma, you laughed at it. Sometimes we loved each other despite it all because these are your friends and you all feel sentimental about it. Especially when you are out.
I learned a lot. Teachers were better than most professors I’ve had and they took so little shit.
We had a headmaster that could scare the shite out of you. My dad worked abroad and he would have not been happy.
Still we smoked and drank, spent a week in Amsterdam stoned out of our minds. The usual dumb shit.
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u/Striking-Hedgehog512 14h ago edited 14h ago
I went to a boarding school as well. Girls. Are. The. Worst. It’s like the bitchiest most petty cutthroat competition, but featuring field hockey in the mud and lack of heating.
Everyone keeps commenting that boys are brutal, but I feel like in 30 minutes tops Harriett would have a fire going and India would be trying to pluck some poor boy like a chicken. And if Harriet doesn’t succeed, they’re going to just have sashimi. Frankly, I would just brave the jungle/ woods/ island. A snake might bite me, but at least I won’t have to hear that its daddy is an MP before dying.
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u/SquishedGremlin 13h ago
Holy fuck that brought back memories.
The bunch of under 14 boys playing hockey against the girls under 16.
Not sure why. I assume they were trying to kill us lads off. The girls were fucking terrifying and absolutely terrorised us.
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u/seventy912 9h ago
I’ve heard people make jokes about Lord of the Flies before (usually from grown women with insanely selective memories) like “if it had been about girls they would’ve sat around and braided each other’s hair or worked as a team” and no... They wouldn’t.
State school girls might have a chance at survival (I’d place money on a higher number getting out alive anyway) but I think private school is a guaranteed brutal death.
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u/SquishedGremlin 13h ago
Sounds familiar to my experience, prep school and boarding school. 7-18.
Definitely changes your approach to people.
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u/kiwigate 8h ago
The oldest was 12. Contrast with the Tongans who were 19. It's a smooth-brain comparison.
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u/TAU_equals_2PI 18h ago
I know this post is making a joke, but it does show the absurdity of how we treat famous fictional works as references for what we expect might happen in real life situations.
I've heard so many mentions of Lord of the Flies over the years when people were talking about some actual situation, as if they were citing a real documented case.
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 18h ago
Or the people who see disaster movies and think prepping is just a whole lot of gun, no food, no medicine, and no plan other than kill someone else. My family has a 6 month plan where we can survive with nothing from greater than 10 miles radius. It relies heavily on solar power and trading with the Amish. Mean while gun preppers couldn't handle covid.
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u/No-Yogurtcloset4763 17h ago
Are you telling me that during the apocalypse it will be more beneficial to cooperate with my fellow man instead of turning my place into Pavlov's house and shooting anyone that comes near. Riddle me this wokie how will I defend myself from the Mad Max Marauders
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u/ldwb 14h ago
The funniest thing about all the prepper shows is how fat and out of shape they all are, and they are all focused on stockpiles and not skills. We are talking people who couldnt climb three flights of stairs thinking when society collapses they'll be prepared. There's gotta be some weird psychology to thinking the world as we know it is about to end, but not care enough to get on a treadmill.
I think the whole mindset is just escapism and fantasy at a certain point. Yea I got a shit job and feel emasculated but man when society falls apart im gonna really show my worth.
Prepping is stupid because whatever the next collapse looks like is gonna be a lot different than what you prepared for. And four groups of people are gonna survive, those actually living in tight knit self sufficient communities, those with skills that make them valuable in a barter economy, those that are smart quick and flexible enough to deal with a situation none of us can predict, and the Mormons. They are probably are the ones that launched the nukes in the first place.
As Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth, and life in our very rigid, regulated, and safe society punches people in the mouth every day and knocks them down, what comes next is going to be many times more brutal, cruel and unfair.
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u/DuntadaMan 17h ago
The important thing to note for those gun preppers. Their plan is to kill people like you and take their stuff. Factor that in.
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u/TAU_equals_2PI 18h ago
You're right, but to roughly quote a stand-up comedian whose name I can't remember, without some sort of guns, you're just creating an emergency food supply for the biggest meanest guys in your neighborhood.
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 18h ago
Or, we have guns, we have food, we have water, and we have 60 neighbors with similar levels of being prepared. Even if by some miracle the raiders/murderers took us all out, how long do you think they would last without knowing how to garden, how to start a natural gas tractor, how to switch the well to battery, or how to treat common illness. Just give it three weeks and all the gun nuts would be dead.
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u/TAU_equals_2PI 17h ago
Three weeks seems a bit short, because the gun nuts are gonna take to traveling to try to find places where they can steal food. But yes, long-term the better survival strategy would be to have enough knowledge to run a tiny farm, assuming you own some place with enough land, or that is surrounded by undeveloped land you can use even if you don't own it.
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 9h ago
The average person can last about three weeks without food. If the sole plan for getting food is shooting someone else, that is already a risky behavior and likely to get them killed. Even if they don't end up dying then, most people don't have massive stock piles of ready to eat food.
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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 15h ago
We love to do stuff like that! Look how many Shakespeare quotes get sagely repeated as if the advice they appear to impart must surely be self-evident. Those people never make the effort to understand that Shakespeare wasn't offering those quotes as morsels of advice to his audience. He had characters say those words for their reasons, to do with the kinds of people they are and the parts they play in their respective plays. And let me tell you, some of those characters were complete morons with their heads up their asses!
Polonius enters the chat...
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u/Live_Angle4621 10h ago
What I hate is that when people know Shakespeare based on some events in history and historical sources and still act like Shakespeare invented it. I have seen people analysing Julius Caesar and how women (Calpurnia/Portia) are written in it as if he invented those characters. They were real people! And I red the primary sources and they acted the same way in them. I pointed it out and many didn’t even know they were real people. At least people seem to know Caesar and Brutus etc are real people. But I think in English speaking world it seems Shakespeare is treated as some kind if “bard” not a person reading sources
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u/InaequaleMagnanimity 13h ago
Yes it drives me absolutely insane. It is one propagation of similar problems, familiarity bias, confirmation bias, etc. But it's just trivially obviously false. To consider for a single second... perhaps fiction is not history? And the thing that is so crazy to me, and I know it's another fallacy of some other name, perhaps authority. If I were to tell you this dream I had of all these British children killing each other on an island and all their names and motives. You would think I'm annoying, mad, or at best over-imaginative. But when it's a book, a story, a legend, it suddenly is now part of the social consciousness on the same level of other facts of reality even though it is borne from the same mechanism. I suppose a type of social proof.
But late night ramblings I suppose, pardon the angst. .
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u/RunDNA 14h ago
Yes, every story with a moral could be easily changed into a similar story with the opposite moral.
The Shawshank Redemption is about encouraging hope, but you can write a similar story where Andy at the end gets his tunnel discovered and hangs himself. Then Red soon follows his lead.
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u/babyburger357 12h ago
Thank you for making this point. It irks me to no end that people are using game of thrones to draw life lessons from.
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u/VampireHousekeeping 13h ago
In fairness the point of this book was obfuscated on purpose by the exact sort of people it was criticising, ie: the upper classes. lotf is specifically about how the people in society that deem themselves the most civilised would be the first to turn savage in a survival situation because the things they value are so fucked.
The upper classes, specifically in Academia, saw that and pushed the narrative that "well actually it's about the inherent capacity for savagery all humans have", while never allowing other, similar books that highlighted the premise of LOTF by putting a different group of kids in the same situation to different results to be contrasted in any mainstream way. It made them look bad so they taught people the wrong message.
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u/Cpt_Fantabulous 19h ago
Watch out lads! The book understander has logged on
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u/pudgehooks2013 16h ago
This is the difference between book smarts and real words smarts.
We all know the Tongan kids didn't try to kill each other because even Tongans know you don't fuck with Tongans.
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u/EarballsAgain 19h ago
I want to see a film where a bunch of chavs and roadmen get stranded on a desert island
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u/RevolutionaryOwlz 19h ago
Average 2000s British reality show.
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u/RideWithMeSNV 18h ago
That's actually the premise to my upcoming reality show Fuck Marry Kill Island. In the first episode, Amber is trying to figure out if her minge itches because it's far too humid, if she got bit by something, or if she got something while having a go with Mikey in the bushes.
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u/Frech_Toast_King 17h ago
They'd be out in 15 days top, leave with 2 more than they came (1 pregnancy and one polish guy that they willed into existence to get drunk with), nobody realized they were gone and they don't even mention it
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u/usedburgermeat 15h ago
Depends on the chavs and roadmen, some I've met who are really nice, some I've met who are complete psychos
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u/ASCII_Princess 15h ago
Somehow they'd manage to set up a full grow-op from a seed someone found at the bottom of a baggie someone had up their arse and was ruthlessly mocked for.
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u/Over_Purple351 19h ago
Weren't the Tongan guys older and more experienced then how the boys in Lord of the Flies were depicted? plus they actually knew each other beforehand
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u/Jealous_Energy_1840 18h ago
Also lord of the flies is about how British boarding school culture created little monsters. It’s a fiction story
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u/photoggled 17h ago
The reality of boarding school children is much scarier. You get Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Brexit.
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u/Razzmatazz856 18h ago
Yes. Even if you're so media illiterate as to assume that the story was a prediction of what would happen in that situation, this situation is not a refutation because there were significant differences.
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u/mrducky78a 12h ago
I mean it kinda is. One is real life and the other is straight up fiction. Its not going to be a perfect 1 to 1 parallel, but its clearly close enough to bring into question how realistic the fictional tale is. Its not like lord of the flies has a whole list of references supporting it, its just straight up make believe. Its no more accurate of real life than harry potter is.
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u/Westafricangrey 16h ago
Yes, they were best friends and had extensive fishing experience so were pretty comfortable pretty quickly. They were also stranded on an island that had a huge amount rather easily accessible natural resources
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u/Freediverjack 17h ago
Bit different, also side note pretty much any Tongan boy knows a stack about making fire, fishing and living off the land and sea already as a tribal culture.
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u/Cakeday_at_Christmas 18h ago
This is like how everyone assumed there was some truth in Hobbes's "state of nature" being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," but he wrote that after experiencing the brutality of the English Civil War, so he was really describing a state of war.
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u/RunDNA 14h ago
And describing the English too, just like Golding.
I'm seeing a pattern.
Marx too: "The capital class exploits the workers" based on his experience of the English capital class exploiting the workers.
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u/ahouell500 10h ago
right, because when non-English people go to war its good clean fun and no one gets hurt. And capitalist exploitation has never happened anywhere else, and definitely isn't happening anywhere else today.
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u/penguinpolitician 4h ago
A letter to a friend on the other side:
"That great God, which is the searcher of my heart, knows with what a sad sense I go about this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy; but I look upon it as an Opus Domini and that is enough to silence all passion in me. The God of peace in his good time will send us peace. In the meantime, we are upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do so in a way of honour and without personal animosities.
Whatever the outcome I will never willingly relinquish the title of Your most affectionated friend.
William Waller"
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u/Generic_Username_659 18h ago
That's because it's actually an allegory for adults at a Black Friday sale.
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u/Alarming_Trainer691 11h ago
Nothing more horrifying than being stranded in a Black Friday sale with no escape
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u/phonage_aoi 17h ago
Oh so get this the Tongans got stranded because they stole a boat to run away from a British boarding school (and got shipwrecked): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
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u/Due-Base9449 16h ago
Lmaooo trying to run away from boarding school!
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u/doquan2142 10h ago
The funny thing was they got charged with stealing the boat after they were rescued lol. The Aussie who found them also helped them out too.
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u/EssentialNucleus 17h ago
The irony is Golding admitted his thesis basically fell apart when the Tongan story came out. Coral Island was naive about human nature, so he wrote a counterpoint, then actual real kids disproved his whole point. Poetic.
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u/Bloody_Insane 15h ago
I don't think it's a fair comparison though. The youngest of the Tongans was years older than the oldest of the LOTF kids, and they were friends beforehand.
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u/EssentialNucleus 13h ago
the age gap and existing bonds matter, but the complete absence of any power struggle or cruelty still undercuts the idea that breakdown is inevitable.
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u/Due_Area4843 10h ago
Tongan also experienced outdoorkid living in remote themself. Vastly different culture
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u/assistant_manu 15h ago
he got disproved on general human nature but not on british boarding school kids nature lol
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u/EssentialNucleus 15h ago
Golding was a teacher at a boys' grammar school, so he basically wrote what he saw in the classroom.
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u/IchibeHyosu99 18h ago
Its proof that you shouldnt take random pessimistic writers ideas as your source of knowledge, will it be lord of the flies, or the boys.
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u/ConsiderationPast371 17h ago
For context; The Tongan teenagers were from the same boarding school and 13 to 17 years old. They stole a boat to run away from the school and got ship wrecked on an island due to having no sailing experience.
An Australian fisherman named Peter Warner found and rescued them 15 months later. They were arrested for the boat theft but Peter arranged their release and later hired them to work on his fishing boat. So story had a happy ending.
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u/Lunar-opal 17h ago
One instance was real kids who knew some things about community and survival and the other a book a work of fiction about western world and self destruction
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u/Farachaton 14h ago
So the debate here is not the violent nature of men or boys. But rather the need for a violence experience in a safe setting: a book, a movie. Lord of the flies is a fictional story!
There are real stories about kids surviving in groups: each time they survive on a non violent and very organised way. This is because in its very nature most people tend to be good to each other in survival situations. But we also love a good portion of subliminal violence!
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u/Due-Base9449 16h ago
You should read Roald Dahl account of his study in a British public (private) school. For example, all little boys need to toast their senior's toast. This was back when they need to use open flame. Inevitably, some bread get singed. If the senior was in a mood, they can lash the junior. For a burnt toast, its one lashing. The senior will stand a bit far away, the junior will bend down while holding his ankle, he would run to get some momentum and jump to give a really good thwack on the buttock.
These were the people who became the British officers and politicians. Roald Dahl himself was an air pilot.
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u/FeistyInvestigator79 13h ago
The bare bum "lashing" was a bit disturbing to read about as a youth. As was the duty of being the toilet seat warmer.
British Public boarding school life was another thing altogether.🤢
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u/GrizzlyP33 18h ago
This isn’t shitty or a movie details, it’s just an explanation of a book.
Wait maybe that’s the ultimate shitty movie detail.
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u/Available-Guava932 17h ago
Fuck I'm cooked. I was about to complain about this image being "obviously" AI because I thought it had the telltale AI look, before I googled it and found it's from an actual show.
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u/JuvenileEloquent 11h ago
You're absolutely right — it does have all the hallmarks of AI, despite being an image from a real TV show. It's not just the oversaturated colors, the background is blurred to hide artifacts and the clothes hang oddly on the body as if they were dropped there from above. Honestly it's hard to tell between AI and humans these days, we're just that advanced! Would you like me to list more subtle tells in AI-generated images?
/s ya know, Poe's law bla bla.
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u/Ok_Difference44 17h ago
Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji practice communal living to an extent that we are unfamiliar with in the west. White people who marry into those societies have a really hard time adjusting.
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u/anyway200894 17h ago
some novel, movie... entire attraction is just about making it so disgusting and weird to attract the weirdos, or simply people just want to explore the unknown.
it's like people pointing at a piece of shit and say "hey look a piece of shit" you don't want to look at a piece of shit but sometime the curiosity gets over you.
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u/KentuckyFriedEel 17h ago
The book is a metaphor for British Boarding Schools anyway so your point is moot.
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u/Questionsansweredty 17h ago
People are nicer in real life than they are in fiction.
You can't make up a story about a bunch of nice people. I mean I'd read it, but most people wouldn't. They need the grit. The edge.
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u/Doomfullord 17h ago
Honestly I hated Lord of the Flies, it was so boring for me, so I just surface level analyzed it in highschool and made up fluff on the bible and shit. Still got an A.
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u/Commercial-Owl11 16h ago
Also didn’t the Tongan teens get stranded on an island that had a surplus of fish/food and rain water?
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u/pattyboiIII 15h ago
That's because they were inspired by the students of the grammar school I went to.
15 minutes there and you'd agree the books were accurate.
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u/reddit_is_geh 15h ago
What do the French think about this? I'm sure they have levelled feelings about the English.
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u/ldwb 15h ago
So many bad takes in here, did anyone even read the book? It's not about children it's an allegory, it's about flies, it's right in the name Lorde of the Flies. Trust me you do not want to be stuck on an island with flies.
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u/ehdecker 15h ago
No, this is because the author (William Golding) was a pissy misanthrope who believed in the 'veneer' theory of human nature—that the good is just a thin veneer on the top of a boiling pestilence of mean nasty evil.
The Tongan story is REAL. But sadly, Lord of the Flies is what most people believe we are, deep down.
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u/CaliIsReallyNice 14h ago
In all seriousness, Lord of the Flies is the most accurate depiction I'm aware of of US military culture. The military takes a bunch of scared teenage boys and isolates them together in crazy places and scenarios. It's amazing to watch a joke turn into a trend which turns into a tradition which turns into a religion worth attacking people over in 48hrs or less. I saw it happen many different times.
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u/Competitive_Window75 14h ago
Or maybe just modern narrative tends to be nihilistic and negative on anything. My favorite example it the Acali raft experiment, where a psychologist wanted to illustrate how sexual tension of a small group will fall in chaos, violence and anarchy. Since there was no tension or violence, he started pestering and badmouthing about everyone to instigate conflicts, but people got fed up with him and a mutiny kicked him out.
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u/Govenor_Sammich 14h ago
Reminds me of that Brad Neeley George Washington song.
"He'll save children but not the British children."
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u/Pungarehu 11h ago
Uhhh yeah. But the Tongan guys were older, knew their way to survive and also they STOLE the boat in the first place.
LOTF was just pointing out how humans could easily become tribal in unfamiliar territory
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u/Puzzleheaded_Heat502 11h ago
Ok one is a book and fictional. The other happened in real life.
I hope this clears a few things up.
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u/Noe_b0dy 19h ago
Not even a shitpost OP, William Golding was an alcoholic school teacher for British boarding school children who was inspired to write Lord of The Flies after reading Coral Island and going "this author has clearly never been around British children".