#especially to

Not to sound like a bloody snob, but I can tell who reads "literary fiction" (aka the books that are just about people and not really a plot, or about a plot but its not a conventional heroes journey or romance plot structure) and who has not with how they engage with media.

Sometimes, Main Character is a fucking awful person who makes awful choices and everyone around them is awful too. This does happen in Fantasy, in Dark Fantasy especially because the point of dark fantasy is 'horrible world with people making decisions within its its context to survive'.

If you dont like reading that, cool, but dont say the author did a bad job because you dont like the characters or the plot based on how much you want to fight the main character.

The author has done a bad job if the character is a cardboard cutout or just bland, a strawman or just a walking blob of exposition with no personality. If there are plot holes, or if the prose is just boring and clunky. Those are bad things. But the character being an awful person with awful beliefs? Thats on purpose.

And no, you're not supposed to agree with them because theyre the main character, youre not even necessarily supposed to like them. A character is a 'story-telling device'. Theyre just there to make you think about the story and about them. What conclusions you come to are your own. The book has made you think. Your brain has gotten excercise.

If you dont like that. fine, no one is forcing you to engage with media that makes you feel like shit.

I dont read a lot of litfic because of that. It took me half a bloody year to get through 'Disgrace' by JM Coetzee because its a hard read, not because of the prose, but because of the main character (He's a lame ass white man who feels sorry for himself all the time and is basically a giant loser).

But here's the thing, i get why Coetzee got an award for it. Because its a very accurate portrayal of a white-middle aged loser-man in post apartheid south africa and the technical skill to pull of a believable portrait of this man (I feel like a I know him, Like Ive met him) was there. The point was NOT for me to like him.

And if you're wondering what the point of even writing about something like that was, then I ask you why does art depict anything, and why you feel like depicting the uglier side of humanity is a waste of time or a bad thing? Art holds a mirror to the world, and explores it. Fucking hell I read 'Tender is the Flesh' this year and its a book about society deciding cannibalism is okay (because all the animals got a virus or something) and you follow the POV of a guy that works in a processing plant. The choice he made at the end of that book was so disgusting but it really drove the point home, of how he had become part of this system even as he analyzed it from within. And a fucking goodreads review said something like "This book is so evil and dumb why would we eat people" , like idk maybe thats what the book was about and attempts to answer that? It answered the question not in a way to justify it, but to show how it could be possible and we need to think about how we are as society that could allow that to happen (long story short the answer the book gave was 'capitalism and human greed')

You know how dumb of a critique it would be to say 'I dont like Tejo (main character) because he's weird and gross, how could he do that to a person" ?

Its not about "did Tejo do the right thing"? its about "Why did Tejo do that?" How well has the author explored and explained this mindset.