Fondue isn't French, love

Never read any King because idk I guess I always thought it was too middle-brow but just speaking generally, I prefer a book that is more fucked up vs one that is less fucked up. The idea that nothing sexually perverse, uncomfortable or immoral should be written in a book is dull. The story does work without that bit obviously since they nixed it for TV, and without reading it I can't really comment on whether it works in the book or not, but in the abstract, having all your child characters be forced to have group sex in a sewer to defeat an evil clown probably improves a lot of stories. Harry Potter woulda been better that is for damn sure

I'd let him run a train

Goopen is actually right in a lot of places but the weird sex stuff really discredits his analysis

Yeah, same with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is a thin veneer of a moral standpoint, the characters recieve ocasional comeuppance for their naked greed and capitalist ambition as small business owners, but ultimately the puppet-master production company behind all the decisions is obviously also trying to sell us on the glory of being an all-day alcoholic who goofs off with your friends and gets into bad-natured hijinks. The failure of both shows to be anticapitalist propaganda is why you can immediately disregard any leftwing 'activist' who claims to enjoy either

Idk. I know a few leftwing Czech and East German critics of capitalism who lived through the fall of the wall as adults and who talk about it. There are things they miss, but none take such a rosey view as you propose, for the most part due to the money and goods that flooded into both countries but also because of a sense of a new political freedom (illusory maybe). I think in the former USSR maybe there is more of a view that the 90s were an unambiguous tragedy