800: Beautiful Dream

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 18:57, 12 December 2012 by Lcarsos (talk | contribs) (ADDING THE DATE, replacing the explanation with an explanation from the blog, fixing wikipedia links, removing paragraph tags (this is a wiki, there's a whole markup engine you can use! /sarcasm), fixing the transcript, adding character categories)
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Beautiful Dream
Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.
Title text: Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

Explanation

The Rules is a reference to the book that is pretty clear when you read the sub-title: "Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right". And naturally, The Game is also given away by the sub-title: "Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists". There is some social commentary there about how the men's book is about pickup artists and the women's book is about "finding Mr. Right." But, you'll find that out on your own because that has nothing to do with the comic.

The title text takes the comic one step further as it is what Cueball responds (or would respond) to Megan. The Giving Tree is a children's book by Shel Silverstein about the relationship between a tree and a young boy who grows to be an old man. The Metamorphosis is a work of fiction by Franz Kafka in which a travelling salesman wakes up to find that he has been turned into a nondescript giant bug. Those two books have obviously no connection to each other, which is why the title text has the joke of the comic.

Transcript

[A person with disheveled hair stretches their arms. A sunburst indicating sleepiness is above their head.]
<<YAWN>>
Person: I just woke up [...]
[The person continues speaking from off panel, to a second person who's sitting at a table with a laptop and cup. They've leaned their elbow on the chair, turning to face the first person.]
Person: From the most beautiful dream.
Second person: Which was?
Person: All the girls who read and follow The Rules and all the guys who swear by the techniques in The Game paired off with each other and left the rest of us alone forever.
Second person: Mmmmmm...


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Discussion

I lost the Game. 108.162.215.84 09:47, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

same here!108.162.249.220 01:55, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm seriously surprised. I only discovered it ~4 comics ago. 108.162.238.187 11:59, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
How have you not gone start to finish by this point? Are you bogosorting the comic??108.162.215.156 21:31, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/391:_Anti-Mindvirus 172.68.154.88 15:23, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
Wrong version of "The Game."108.162.216.116 19:00, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Me too. I had been winning for several hours!
Darn, I lost it too! KirbyDude25 (talk) 19:44, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I do not get this comic explanation at all. Can someone please clarify? What are the subtitles?? WHY DO THE NAMES OF THE BOOKS SEEM COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING AT ALL??? I know a little bit about what The Game is. I do not care about losing it, I just want an adequate explanation. -- 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The books and the important sentences need more details -- but wikipedia links are common.--Dgbrt (talk) 15:31, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I added some explanation of the books, but didn't address the discussion of the alt text. 108.162.245.136 02:54, 4 April 2017 (UTC)