Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
One of the other commenters here recommended the book Middlegame some years back, and I bought it and read it. I was disappointed and edified in roughly equal measure; the concept and writing and worldbuilding seemed quite excellent, but the villain was a naked ideological caricature to a degree that it deflated much of the climax for me, to a degree that the experience was itself likely worth the price of admission. The author was writing a wild fantasy, but they very clearly wanted core elements of both the heroes and the villains to be intimately familiar to both themselves and their audience, and so they wrote what I presume to be their ideological worldview straight in. Not sharing that worldview, the dissonance was sufficient to shake the whole narrative apart for me. Then again, maybe it's no worse than confirmed atheists experience reading Narnia.
I may be deceived, but my assessment is "pretty close". See various discussions of the Cardinal virtues versus the theological virtues; we Christians hold the latter to take precedence, but prize the former as close runners-up, indispensable, intertwined and of extreme importance. With regards to the Iliad, if you haven't seen it and don't mind video, this this seems a good summary of the consonance. for those who prefer text, the real kicker:
...And from the other side, I am a Christian, but recognize the glory in war and so on which he argues is the other half of the Iliad.
I've had a bunch of really good conversations revolving around this question and my own thoughts on it; I'll refrain from the usual link spam but this dialog seems on point, at least to elaborate my own perception. Suffice to say, I believe my thinking and values is in fact much more similar to that of a Bronze Age perspective (and a classical perspective, medieval perspective, and so on) than it is to what I understand to be central examples of Blue Tribe thinking and values. One of the reasons I think that is the contrast between my own belief that the wisdom of previous millennia has more-or-less undiminished relevance today, compared to the belief which seems normative among Blues that human thought has progressed, such that the things we know now have made the wisdom of previous millennia trivially obsolete. Likewise, their attitude toward perceived historical enemies, and their judgement against historical populations and their sins and crimes. I may be wrong about this, but I've put a fair amount of thought into it and really don't think so.
I haven't had the pleasure of the last two, but I'm saying I do enjoy them because I don't believe their values are very different. I reference Macaulay, who published his verse in 1842, near two centuries ago and an ocean away, written about a man two thousand years ago and an additional continent away; It seems to me that Macaulay wrote the verses because he perceived values-consonance with Horatius, and I quote him because I perceive values-consonance with both Macaulay and Horatius. Maybe this perceived values-coherence is an illusion, or maybe not. For what it's worth, I've dabbled in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and as far as I've gotten the values there seem much more foreign; there's plenty of what I might call "common humanity" still visible, but there seems to be a strong emphasis on a flavor of might-makes-right pragmatism that I don't recognize in western material till, say, Machiavelli. Those parts feel much more modern than the rest.
But this is what I mean by "having our cake and eating it too"; in general people love novelty, but are comforted by the idea that while the details can vary wildly, there's a core nature that remains the same. It seems obvious to me that when Blues write feminism into a post-apocalyptic fantasy, they're aiming for basically the same thing.
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