[yamtaddle]

You appear to have understood the movie.

> One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.

Yep, lots of people... don't understand the movie.

You'd think when it came to creating a strict cult and cutting people's balls off and shit, people'd start to go "wait a minute... wasn't this about escaping the media- and corporation-driven rat-race for freedom, and, uh, masculinity or something? WTF?" and start to get a clue that they maybe shouldn't trust everything this Tyler guy says because a lot of it might just be nice-sounding bullshit, let alone where it goes from there—but, shockingly, no.

On the one hand, if so many people get it wrong, maybe that's the movie's fault; but on the other, it's not like the movie's subtle.

[filoleg]

Agreed. To add to it, the movie has some even more obvious things that make the actual message clear.

The narrator keeps talking about how "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy", and Tyler keeps advocating for "breaking out of the system" to become individuals. Only for everyone to join project mayhem, shave their heads, dress in exact same clothing, get rid of their own names, and to obey every command of Tyler without questioning. None of it was subtle at all, it was as thick as it could possibly get. And there are plenty of examples in the movie that reaffirm those points too.

I don't think of any way they could've made the entire message of the movie any more obvious, other than explicitly spelling it out.