And then there was the time Rowling proudly declared that werewolves are a metaphor for AIDS. As she explained on Pottermore:

Lupin's condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.

If you've never dated a goth, werewolves are people who turn into violent beast-human monstrosities during the full moon, then stalk the lands attacking anything with a pulse. Sound like any AIDS victim you know? And the insulting comparisons don't stop there. One of the only two named werewolves in the Potter canon, Fenrir Greyback, is an evil creep who purposefully preys on children to "convert" them. Is that also part of the metaphor for an epidemic mostly blamed on gay men?

Or what about the fact that there's a treatment for lycanthropy, while in the '90s (the decade the Potter books are set in), AIDS was still mainly a slow and painful death sentence? Maybe stick to figuring out wizard poop. At least that's only harming the incontinent. And hygienic wizards.

This enforced politeness was so ingrained into Roddenberry's vision of the Federation that it even affected things like the technology of the setting. Because "heroes don't sneak around," he had them bound by a treaty forbidding the use of cloaking devices, which was just tough titties for all those unarmed colonist ships. Nor was the Federation government allowed to be anything less than utterly infallible. So when the writers created a story about corruption in the Federation, Roddenberry insisted that it be revealed the corrupt officials were actually being controlled by evil parasites that ripped them to shreds long before too much PR damage was done to his perfect civilization.

Writers were able to find loopholes, and after Roddenberry's departure, the "Be nice" rule was abandoned altogether. It's ironic that in his attempt to conjure a Utopian society, he had to act as a sort of despotic god who enforced civility at the cost of personal freedom. Sounds like a pretty good Star Trek episode, actually.

For the rest of his life, Dick tried to figure out the truth about this revelation. He wrote an 8,000-page manifesto about his experience and narrowed it down to aliens, ghosts, alternate dimension versions of himself, KGB telepaths, or the small, super remote possibility that he was on drugs. But he also had another task: to warn people of our veiled Roman overlords. After '74, every novel Dick wrote was a fictionalized account of his divine messages.

Radio Free Albemuth is about aliens organizing a resistance movement against a corrupt U.S. president using narrow-beam radio transmissions from satellites orbiting Earth. The Divine Invasion is about an exiled god trying to retake Earth, inspired by his best bud Zebra. VALIS is directly about a man named Horselover Fat who gets visions of the Roman Empire in the present day thanks to a beam of pink light. (It's pretty rad, actually.)

Of course, Dick didn't write those novels under the influence of a pink light, but a pinkish pill. For most of his career, the author was on amphetamines, gobbling speed like Pez. This made him terribly paranoid (not necessarily a bad thing for an author of dystopian sci-fi), and likely caused him to be an unreliable narrator about his own life. But it wasn't all bad. The vision made Dick feel less alone for the first time, easing his worries and freeing his mind. So we should be grateful that all he did with that was write a bunch of great fiction. Imagine how powerful Scientology could be if it had been founded by a competent writer.

But if Captain Mullet is just an allegory for five determined teens working together, then what about all the straight-up superhero stuff? Did the power of teamwork stop bridges from collapsing? Did a metaphor for environmental responsibility throw a spaceship into a volcano? We get that Pyle wanted to teach kids that the power to improve the world comes from within, but in order to rip a giant robot in half, you still need an off-brand X-Man on your side.

And what about the countless times people were talking to this imaginary super friend? Was that also part of the Planeteers' shared hallucination? Did the villains just see five kids talking to a street sign while laughing and high-fiving? No wonder no one wanted to listen to those lunatics talk about recycling.

A linguist, Tolkien also based the dwarven language on the Jewish experience. In a letter to a fellow author, he noted that like Jews, dwarves were "at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue." And while three generations of fantasy nerds have interpreted them as speaking with a thick Scottish accent, it should actually be closer to Hebrew; Tolkien intentionally "constructed [the Dwarven language] to be Semitic."

Miraculously, despite being a white Christian from the early 20th century (and one slightly iffy passage in The Hobbit describing dwarves as "calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money"), Tolkien wasn't an antisemite. If anything, he grew more and more fond of his "Semitic" dwarves as time went on. When the Nazis insisted that Tolkien prove he wasn't Jewish before he could be published in Germany, he replied, "I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." But only after pointing out to them that "Aryan" actually meant "Indo-Iranian."

Abraham is a Mexican lawyer when he isn't doing law stuff he writes comedy! You can say hi to him on Twitter here.

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