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Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard
They were flat because they didn't compell me, the story was good, the theme and the ideas behind it were good, but the characters could've died in the first chapter and I wouldn't have given a ****.
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Winston was portrayed as slightly flat to make it easy to jump into the character's shoe; which is a brilliant way to create a character. In addition to that 1984 isn't a novel where the characters are more important than the setting they're in, what happens to them, and the system that surrounds them.
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Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard
Guy Montag was a compelling protagonist and unlike Orwell who wrote the story just for the message, Bradbury wrote the story with the intention of "writing a good story."
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Here you go again with another sweeping (and wrong) generalization about Orwell. He didn't write just for a message. If you read some of his essays (like the aptly titled "Why I Write") you'd see he wasn't just some anti-totalitarianism activist who had to write to get his message across. He actually enjoyed writing even though he was far more pointed than your average author.
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Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard
The idea of censorship in terms of 451 is the head of the snake that leads to Big Brother, and that end is not very deep in the hat, America was perfectly okay with the banning of books deemed "morally unacceptable."
Bradbury's story was a more heated opinion than Orwell's, Orwell wasn't even a russian.
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For one, Orwell's book came several years before Bradbury's so your snake metaphor would reverse the roles. In addition to that 1984 wasn't some pleasant YEAH stick it to the Ruskies! kind of book. There's a reason its geographically based off the Western world as opposed to Russia world. At the time when it was written much of Britain was in poverty and the novel served as Orwell's prediction that Democracy wouldn't survive that war. That wasn't exactly a well-liked opinion you know. A big brother government is something that's far more scary (and more realistic) than Bradbury's extremist story. I can understanding using hyperbole to illustrate a point and I'm not trying to trash Fahrenheit 451 but 1984 is on a different level altogether.