From the Slacktiverse: Transformative art/commentary/stuff

[Originally posted at the Slacktiverse as what was to be an open thread prompt that got out of hand.  It is here.]

It looks like everyone's crunch time hit at about the same time, so with the exception of a post written a while back tentatively scheduled for Wednesday this could end up being the week of the open threads.  (As a reminder, the moderation discussion is still ongoing.)

If it does I'd kind of like to arrange them around the theme of writing since it is National Novel Writing Month (next open thread will ask you to weigh in on that) but today, being as it is, the fifth of November, it seemed worth remembering.

Guy Fawkes doubtless saw himself as a freedom fighter or political/religious reformer, the gunpowder plot failed, he was caught, and thus was a traitor.  Guilty of High Treason he was tortured and executed.  (Strangely he managed to earn the respect of the king he tried to assassinate, though that did not stop the king from ordering him tortured.)

Novemeber the 5th had been transformed from the day a group of Catholics hoped to overthrow Protestant rule, to a day that Protestants celebrated those Catholics' failure and burned the Pope in effigy   With the passage of time that too would (largely) pass and, instead of the Pope, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy.  The word "guy" entered the English language via these effigies.

From 1982 to 1989 Allen Moore published V for Vendetta, in which the ambiguous title character and, after his death, sympathetic second lead, don Guy Fawkes masks, completely altering the perception of a Guy Fawkes mask.

In 2006 a film was released.  Allen Moore charged that it transformed his British story into an American one.  It seemed to present Fawkes, the attempted mass murderer, in a positive light and definitely presented the characters who put on Fawkes masks (with one exception) in positive lights.

I've just listed a lot of transformations, some through circumstance, some through time, and the last two through works of fiction.

I've previously mentioned that I think part of what makes deconstructions so appealing is that they're transformative.  Start with the World's Worst Books, end up with Fred Clark's brilliant commentary.

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This was supposed to be a lot shorter, the open thread prompt is:
What do you think of transformative work?  What are some transformative things that interest you?  Stuff?

Open thread, run wild.  But within reason.