I'm sure y'all have heard a lot of modern day sci-fi/fantasy authors or comic book writers sneer whenever someone critiques them about injecting politics into their work. Or they usually say "they have always been political" or like Tanahesi (not sure I spelled it correctly) Coates said that he writes his comic books (I'm sure Marvel hired him for his passion for comics) to make us feel uncomfortable.
It has been said time and time again that with good writing you can address any theme and since people started writing stories different themes have always been addressed. I just think it is absurd for them to get mad if you say you want to read a book and just escape. I mean who isn't familiar with left wing talking points by now?
Why do they get so upset if you critique the injection of modern day politics or lack of escapism? I think it is a valid critique.
Gramsci? We’re they an author? But yea sometimes I’m thinking you know you can just have a basic story about good and evil
He was an Italian ne'er-do-well criminal scumbag who would have died in obscurity if he didn't manage to trick early 20th century communists to deify and immortalize him. He was (justifiably) imprisoned for being a violent shit-stirring punk. The bulk of his "intellectual" output were schizophrenic scrawls of a madman desperately trying to keep his mind busy while he had nothing to do but navel gaze in prison. He died at 46 of the same dreadful conditions that countless underactive miserable citizens in modern society are currently being subjected to due to lockdowns.
It's the whole "the personal is political" thing. If you're not pushing the Revolution you're an enemy of the Revolution, and enemies of the Revolution have a habit of getting canceled by mobs on social media. Ever notice how whenever a rare piece of entertainment excludes politics or includes it tastefully it gets accused of X-ism and Y-phobia? It's about enforcing the Permanent Revolution, as well as insurance for the enforcers against being the mob's next target.
But unlike them, I still watch some old biblical movies because it's so well done and the christian overtones are more like a setting rather than a overwheming moral lesson.
So when have the fundamentalist religious types ever been associated with "fun"?
Good point
Yea good point. Someone brought up to me the current state of sci fi and I was looking thinking about things like the Hugo’s but you are right
They were never total escapism. They always had politics inserted in them. It is only that there were more subtle about it. Or maybe we have become more aware and notice it more easily
Another difference is that politics or ideas were presented and explored, and the reader left to come to his/her own conclusions. Golden Age SF, for example, didn't generally make a habit of beating the audience over the head with the author's chosen Right Answer(TM).
Because I'm broke and I grew up in fandom, I still read fanfiction over original writing. It's free, so I'm not worried about having wasted my money on something I may not finish. I've noticed in the Star Worts fanfiction, there's some with "she/her" in their stories and quickly noped out of that shit. One bitch I even left her a note about it, and she did the "it's aliens" but ended with "it's only right/to be expected/considerate" type shit I deleted before finishing. There's no reasoning with a moron and it wasn't worth trying to finish her response.
At first, I thought it was an alien thing, a way to give her original species/characters an alienness to them. Instead, it kept cropping up with each alien species. The worst part, it started only half-way through and it had been a good story with a great plot to that point.
I like Steven King books and he was pretty good about not injecting everything with politics but you are right about social media. The man drones on and on about it now
Because isekai is low effort wish fulfilment fantasy.
The only title in the last ten years to actually do anything creative with the concept was Log Horizon.