Though we know in our heart of hearts that the true meaning of Valentine’s Day is all about brutal martyrdom, it’s a little disheartening that the common reaction to the holiday is often kind of cynical and negative. While we’re not recommending that you go read a Nicholas Sparks novel or spend a bunch of money on bad chocolate or greeting cards, we do wonder: what’s so bad about romance? Or to put it another way, aren’t we allowed to love good love stories? In that spirit, here are eight love stories in science fiction or fantasy narratives that still make us weak in the knees (even if those knees are robotic).
There are those among us who remember when the “real” Transformers had nothing to do with Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, or Michael Bay. This was a more innocent time, when instead of cynically trying to sell us Mountain Dew, Fords, or Burger King, Transformers was just trying to sell us some Transformers toys.
Published in 1976—a full six months prior to the release of the film it was adapting—the novelization of Star Wars titled: Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker was billed as “a novel by George Lucas.” We now know (as Lucas freely admits in reprints of the book) that this book was in fact written by Alan Dean Foster, who created several specific aspects of the Star Wars backstory, many of which remain canon to this day. However, despite the wealth of terms and ideas that stuck, there are many, many differences between what we would come to know as Star Wars and what is contained in this book. Here are a few inconsistencies, differences and other curiosities originating from the first glimpse the public ever got of Star Wars.
If all of our angst and private suffering were broadcast out through our pores and into the air as invisible vapors, then George Saunders would figure out how to bottle it all up and sell the stuff back to us. He might even run the vapors through some sort of 
Though I’ve been complaining lately about the stunning visual and thematic 
In 2008’s middle-grade chapter book Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman took Norse mythology, commonly depicted as dour or Shakespearean, and gave it a unique spin, including talking animals and a protagonist with a serious amount of pluck. What results is a successful re-weaving of classic Norse myth into a tale that feels contemporary, without sacrificing any of the complexity behind the myth itself.
When I say A Muppet Christmas Carol is sweet, I don’t only mean the movie is heartwarming and saccharine. It’s those things, too, but it’s also a film that delivers a uniquely badass adaptation of Charles Dickens’ ridiculously famous novella. Darker and less goofy than other Muppet flicks, A Muppet Christmas Carol manages to capture the phantasmagorical texture of the source material while at the same time turning out a bonafide family film, though not necessarily a kid’s movie. While you might read a child A Christmas Carol aloud, you probably wouldn’t give them the original novella for them to read on their own. And it’s the same with this movie. Despite its Hallmark Card exterior, A Muppet Christmas Carol might be the most adult of the Muppet films.
