An Illustrated Guide to Self-Censorship | The Free Press
The article lengthy and it's filled with lots more illustrations and gibberish...
One day, Hypothetica’s king died, leaving the throne to his son, King Mustache. Unlike his father, King Mustache was highly sensitive to criticism. He issued a decree that made criticizing him illegal—an attempt to lay down an electrified “censorship fence” across the topic that would severely punish anyone who dared to cross it.
When I was in high school I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho because the cover was blurbed to kingdom come and back about how brilliant and deep it was and how it's touched the lives of millions. When I finished it and realized it was a poorly-written and overly long delivery of another New Agey "your dreams will come true if you believe them hard enough," I had a minor meltdown, :ohnoes: thinking that there had to have been some deeper meaning that I missed and that the rest of the world was onto something that I wasn't, and it took me a while to come to the realization that no, it really was that facile and people don't want to think about the complexity and incomprehensibility of modern existence and like simple stories that reinforce their biases. However, to this day, every time I run across another example there's that split second blip of :ohnoes: before that understanding reasserts itself.
That's pretty much every new age thing ever written.
True facts. It took a little while for high schooler me to get that figured out, though.
lmao that was the first book I read for school that I genuinely hated.