My childhood special interest series, Redwall, gets yelled about a lot that it's supposedly teaching children to be racist because it's set in a world of talking animals where good guys/bad guys are determined by species. Aside from the fact that Brian Jacques didn't invent folkloric shorthand, it's the BAD guys who are the white people analogue, as they practise colonisation and chattel slavery while the good guys are the Indigenous peoples defending their land and wanting to be left alone. Also, why are the complainers apparently teaching their children that different-coloured humans are comparable to animals? (Not that you can't find plenty of problematics if you look, it WAS written in the 80s-90s. But that particular thing is not one of them IMO.)
This is really interesting to me, because I can kind of see how a bad faith interpretation of that premise could be considered one with unfortunate implications (ie; race determines your morality), but if the premise is still "racism = bad" then I really don't see how it's worth getting upset over it. This is something I run into all the time with fiction, especially with authors who have good intentions but who also have biases they haven't unlearned or addressed; Is it not enough that someone tried and mostly succeeded? Isn't that better than being a full-blown white supremacist? Like, credit where it's due! Right?
It's a really interesting thing I've noticed since the rise of social justice; People started getting praise for calling someone out on their bad behavior, so to chase that high, people started picking apart literally everything as much as possible just so they could keep getting those sweet sweet internet brownie points even when the target was literally just ignorant and even when the slight against that person didn't exist or wasn't as bad as the accuser was making it out to be. There's even a name for that kind of dynamic; It's called a persecutor complex (in the same vein as a victim complex or a savior complex).
I like how I can talk about this shit analytically when I'm a detatched observer, but when some hater comes blazing into my replies with an absolutely frigid take worded as rudely as possible, my anger takes over like the spirit of Wrath Itself has possessed my mortal flesh prison.
What worries me about this fixed approach to any and all fiction is that people end up getting so many things wrong. It's actually a detriment to your critical thinking skills to apply the same cookie-cutter approach to any and all fiction regardless of actual content, and this isn't just a thing where people didn't get that the narrator was unreliable or just missed a key detail here and there; This is people getting entire swathes of canon just completely wrong. This may be fine if you're only analyzing fiction, but this approach does bleed over into real life, and that's the troubling part. How far does the logic go? Does it ever stop?
Just something to think about.
