Talk:Room 101

message: I don't think that the use of the term "101" for a basic introduction to a topic has ANYTHING to do with Orwell's Room 101. I may be wrong, which is why I haven't changed the entry - but I have never understood the two to be at all related. 101 simply comes from conventional college course numbering, where the first topic of the first subject is 1.01. It could be that Orwell was making use of this when he chose 101 as the number of the room in which Winston Smith is tortured, but it seems a bit tenuous. Certainly the use of 101 for courses predates Orwell's use, not the other way around. Can anyone shed any light on this? GRAHAMUK 11:09 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
:Room 101 is supposedly named after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where Orwell used to sit through tedious meetings. -- The Anome
There is also a Room 101 in A Beautiful Mind (film) 91.50.192.54 (talk) 20:16, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Orwell's use of "101"

message: I have reverted the edits by Samuel J. Howard whereby the page was re-ordered to move the spoiler section to the bottom.  The change placed the least relevant information at the top, and the only real information (what is in Room 101) at the bottom and caused the article to make little sense.  --HappyDog 19:40, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page Order 

message: The article says it´s not clear in the book whether Julia had her face gnawed on by rats or not. Is this really true? Because I remember reading they meet after the tortures, their relationship all shaken up, and all. And that would be strange if Julia had been killed by ferocious rats. More than that, she says something like "they torture you with things you can´t resist", which never suggests she was tortured with the same thing  that Winston had been. Did I get it all wrong?
--Alvim.
:That sentence could certainly be cleaned up a bit.  I'd say it is reasonable to suppose she was tortured with her own worst fear, as the article states. ∴ here…♠ 23:25, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone ahead and changed it. It's certainly implied that Julia was sent to Room 101, and her worst nightmare definitely wasn't rats — she was quite calm when she and Winston discovered one in their room above the bookshop, while Winston nearly went into hysterics. Deadlock 15:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Now it says it was "never suggested" that she was tortured with rats. That's not true. Winston screams, "Do it to Julia!" and Julia has conspicuous scars where they would be if it had been done to her and it is "never suggested" that it was rats? Of course it's suggested by the text, whether or not Orwell meant it. It's not unreasonable either: if they wanted to destroy Julia's love for Winston likewise as they did for Winston, the Ministry of Love could've unleashed the rats on her explaining, "This is what your lover who promised to never betray you pleaded desperately for us to do." —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.192.252.76 (talk) 08:55, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That makes no sense- the Party doesn't need Winston's approval to sick rats on Julia, they would have done it anyway. Regardless, Winston had already been told Julia betrayed him. But the Party's lies don't matter. I was just voicing my opinion on something- I think it likely that Julia had a frontal lobotomy as her worst fear, because of two things- the scar on her forehead, and Orwell's choice of words while they were speaking- blandly, baldly (she hates him, but that's not so much of an emotion, more of an instinct). ... -Panther (talk) 03:37, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the fate of Julia 

message: *How is the "101" in "Room 101" pronounced? Is it "one-oh-one" or "one hundred and one?" 67.171.163.212 07:20, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronunciation

message: :and the original intent of threatening Winston with the rats probably was not actually to go through with the act, but to force him into betraying the only person he loved and therefore break his spirit
This can go, IMO. It seems to be thinking that the miniluv officers were real, in order for them to have some sort of "intent". Of course, they were merely a made-uup story and not real at all. In any case, I'll bet that they were perfectly ready to go through with it. Paul Murray 03:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speculation 

message: I don't think that Orwell had any involvement with MI5 but one cell at Camp 020, where MI5 interrogated enemy spies, had a similar reputation to Room 101 even though it was a perfectly ordinary cell.  "Often used as a last resort, the interrogator would say "you will now be taken to Cell Fourteen", at which point the prisoner would, more often than not, cave in".  --jmb 11:32, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Cell Fourteen

message: [Copied from User talk:Jtir and User talk:Nanobot recurve to maintain context.] --Jtir (talk) 11:10, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! That's perfect (and bizarre, I might add). The para may need some minor copyediting to conform to the source (e.g. he didn't move his office, but had the floors renumbered). I'll do that. Thanks for your help with sourcing articles. --Jtir (talk) 10:35, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, again. After looking closer, ISTM that the source supports only the first sentence, and not the second. I did a search of Stasiland () at amazon.com and found Orwell mentioned, but not as a subject of Mielke's admiration. --Jtir (talk) 12:39, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've had another little look at google, all the claims I can find of Erich Mielke being an Orwell fan (so far, I've yet to examine all of the german language text via google translate yet) seem based on this blog post , interpreting the quote from stasiland. I feel you'd have some issues with its usefulness as a font of academic knowledge. I'll see if I can find anything else over the next few days, but I suspect this is about as far as websearching is going to get on this subject. Oh well, at least there's a little new supporting material there, yes? Nanobot recurve (talk) 16:51, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: We can probably find a more authoritative source than the blog post, since there are several bios of Mielke (all of which are in German). This may require some library research. --Jtir (talk) 11:28, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  source for Mielke being an Orwell fan 

message: The page list several references to popular culture where a room 101 is found. But I feel that these are relevant only if they can be shown in some way to have been based on 1984. For example it is entirely possible that Bill's apartment from Kill Bill 2 happened to be 101 and has nothing to do with Orwell and 1984. Some citation is needed to show that it indeed is a reference or else it should not be on this page. Catradar (talk) 01:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Also having completed Half Life 2, several times, I found no Room 101, and on a web search, the only refrence is this page, and a copy on wikimoble. Its essentially unsorced. --99.185.0.29 (talk) 11:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, I'll delete this as well.  I didn't remember a specific Room 101 reference either (although I can see the parallel that's being drawn).  --PLUMBAGO 10:33, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Cultural impact

message: Have removed the following - and it stays out until suitably referenced - and even then am not sure it belongs here:
Conservative columnist Mark Steyn compares the world's view of America to Room 101:
Fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist. 
Too Christian, too Godless, too isolationist, too imperialist, too seductive, too cretinous, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear, you will find it therein - for the Continentals, excessive religiosity; for the Muslims, excessive decadence; for Harold Pinter, excessively bleeding rectums.
--Technopat (talk) 16:56, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed unreferenced edit 

message: Shouldn't this page include a disambiguation link that lists Neo's Room 101 from The Matrix? ~RayLast «Talk!» 03:19, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neo's room 

message: Room 101 is in the mind. It is how you torture yourself with the pre-conceived ideas that what you want is all that counts. As I am British, male and middle aged, I recognise that the psychology of the next man say from South America, will have been created differently by his state, and so his Nationalism, biases and needs are different to mine because his indoctrination is different. Neo wakes up from the fake world (is pulled out by Morpheus (reason)) and fights Agent Smith (his ego). He wins in the end and threatens to bring down the card-house. Take this principle and apply it to yourself. You will see it is true.81.155.214.186 (talk) 17:06, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neo and where this fits in with 1984/reality 

message: The comic in question actually identifies Room 101 as being in MI5. Here's a direct quote:
"The records of these various teams are rumoured to be gathered in a single file, the legendary BLACK DOSSIER, kept in MI5's impregnable H.Q. at Vauxhall Cross". The comic later depicts the titular Black Dossier being removed from room 101 of said building.
While the identification of the building at Vauxhall Cross being MI5 is of course 'incorrect', so much as a work of fiction can be incorrect, that is never-the-less how it is identified, and the entry here should reflect that. 81.153.168.46 (talk) 08:09, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier