Am American, so I'll jump in and try to explain the "romance and heroism" aspect -- it mostly hinges on how Gatsby reinvents himself from scratch. He started out as a nobody in the middle of nowhere, but a few years later he has a new name and a fancy swingin lifestyle, all of which he conjured out of thin air. He has no history to hold him down; he is that self-made man which seems to be irresistable to the American mindset. Plus, he has a romantic mindset, pursuing his lady love like some kind of poetic hero.

The novel of course puts a spin on this by having him "conjure all of that out of thin air" by cozying up to existing rich people, and then just straight-up crime. He then blows all his riches in the tackiest, dumbest way possible (the party scenes are supposed to be pretty over-the-top and ridiculous). Finally, even with all this in mind, his "lady love" is a good deal worse, which he is completely blind to.

Of course, a large number of people miss the point and enjoy the tacky and ridiculous displays of wealth completely for their own sake; most of the movie versions owe their success to this.

Feast your eyes on these refined and elegant French covers: https://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=7462

Or, possibly, whole countries don't have set styles in their book publishing, you're just generalizing off of a few examples.

His family once subjugated 1/4 of the whole world -- how dreamy!

This country's founding documents specifically mention them as examples of what not to do -- oh to live such a life...

A memoir from a generally idle offspring of a super old-money but irrelevant family, about how mean they are -- DROP EVERYTHING BREAKING NEWS

A quick "parody" cash-grab of same -- OMG MOAR PLEASE

Not a "book", but these karma-farming r/books hate-threads are pretty throwable.

I kinda figured this would happen when I saw what ChatGPT was doing, and here we are. Please remember that it is not actually as smart as it appears.

Basically, what it is doing is stringing words together which statistically often go together, and then stringing those sentences together because they often go together. It is basically Google search suggestions, on steroids. You'll notice that it starts to lose the thread of what it was supposed to be saying after a couple paragraphs, and just rambles in bizarre digressions after that. One poster here, as a joke, had it write a short novel inspired by the comedy series Black Books, and discovered that they had to work on it chapter by chapter, regenerating each one until they got one which made some sort of thematic sense rather than just being idle rambling -- this was actually a pretty useful experiment for showing the limitations of the tool. Arguably, that poster was still "the real author," or at least a very heavy-handed editor, and the chatbot was a tool.

No, AI is not going to be writing novels anytime soon, unless you are fine with novels which are just meandering, unedited thoughts off the top of The Internet's head. So far it is just generating low-quality, 3-paragraph filler content which people were not expected to read in the first place, like press releases and reddit posts. People whipping up books and loading them onto Amazon are just looking to make a quick buck selling cheap junk, like they already did in previous years by just copy-pasting someone else's fan fiction.

ETA: I searched high and low for that post because credit is due, and apparently it was removed. Whatever, I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

If you want some grim multi-generational blood feuds, there's always Njal's Saga. Stupid and petty spats drive reasonable friends into into murders and pitched battles, and for poignancy, there's evidence that at least some of this stuff really did happen, around the year 1000.

There is no way burning books will ever look like anything but a bunch of nazis dancing around. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Burning it just makes you look like a dangerous imbecile, full stop. (Doubly so if you bought it, and then burnt it.)

This hinges on whether the monster has sufficient capacity to be responsible for its own actions. An animal, a child, or an insane person does not have the reasoning capacity (under the law, I'm not looking to get into a scientific discussion) to weigh consequences and make choices accordingly, and therefore be held responsible for their poor choices. Frankenstein certainly INTENDED for the monster to be more reasonable than an animal, a child, or an insane person, and the monster's monologues would seem to indicate that he succeeded. I'm trying to recall one of his final monologues, where he (the monster) seemed to display a knowledge of right and wrong; if this was the case, this would mean he 100% had the ability to tell right from wrong, but just chose not to, and ergo, he is responsible for his own actions. This is the crux of the case.

Questions about "should Frankenstein have ever created him in the first place" are a giant strawman, since no criminal, or saint, ever asked to be born they way they were, either.

So, you find out people are getting exploited by sketchy companies, and your reaction is to become afraid?

Don't ever read anything on the agricultural industry.

> The world only appears to be a dystopia from the 20th century perspective in which the novel was written, where we value individualism and freedom of choice. Other societies may value social cohesion and individual self worth is derived from performing a specific useful function in society.

"Individual self-worth" doesn't even enter into it, nobody ever asked how the deltas and epsilons feel about their life because the whole system is set up so their opinion cannot possibly matter. Self-worth is a meaningless concept, their only worth was assigned by the state from birth, and they were engineered by the state to not be able to have an opinion on it at all.

Since you played the "that's just your 20th century western viewpoint, man" card, I challenge you to provide an example of one of these alternative societies you mention, where everybody is fine with the state (not "tradition we all share," the full force of the state) allocating everyone's roles from birth to death. If you go for something like the historical Chinese empire, you'll have to account for why it collapses every few centuries - almost as if everybody wasn't completely happy with it, and "freedom of choice" is a more universal value after all.

Everybody seems to forget that the easy drug-addled leisure in BNW is only available to a small segment of society; everybody else is intentionally brain-damaged and shunted into dead-end jobs they cannot leave. I don't recall anyone arguing "but is it really a dystopia??" for the Deltas and Epsilons.

That's...just called fanfiction.