@vifetoile replied to your post “While weirdos are pretending they’re special or “gifted” for refusing...”
The pendulum of discourse has swung back. It was “reading for escapism is bad” and then “escapism is good actually, if you’re in a prison it’s your duty to escape” and now “I read and have read escapist books because I am a sensitive genius too pure for this awful world”
I feel like this kind of discourse is like, the worst of both worlds. There’s still this notion that you have this moral obligation to watch certain kinds of “progressive” media but it’s only stuff made by large corporations for focus-tested ideas of what women/minorities like, maybe by a female or black male director but with heavy Disney Company watchdog involvement... never anything genuinely outside of the Hollywood studio system and certainly nothing outside of the Anglosphere (except, maybe, anime, and even then, never the truly challenging or weird stuff). If you actually do encourage people to challenge themselves in any way, even if it’s something as mild as “maybe grown-ups should read at least some books actually written for grown-ups, or at least not go on and on about how Deep they are if they don’t” or “maybe supporting female creators is more important than championing shallow female characters written by men” ... then you’re the meanie bear who is ruining their escapism and trampling on their sensitive souls.
Also I wish I could say this is new but I realized in writing this, these are actually the same grievances I’ve had with bad Tumblr Woke Fandom Discourse (TM) since about 2013 or so. Since as long as I’ve been talking about this stuff on this horrible website.
