Perhaps the most peeving thing here is the way people keep jumping up to say, "you dont understand! I just want comforting narratives where people like me are embraced by society, as a break from reading stuff where I have to think about implications - you just don't understand the appeal of reading cozy mindless things to relax!"
And I'm like. Actually I really do! I often enjoy stories that are comforting and not emotionally challenging! I just dont find narratives of assimilation comforting. I don't find it reassuring or mindless to be shown a world where certain people have been moved from the "marginalized" box to the "normalized" box, and proceed to have a totally standard normal-guy low-stakes narrative from the lap of societal acceptance! I dont find it at all a balm or comfort to the struggles of marginalization. I find it grating and exhausting, and it makes me feel *more* aware of the forces of oppression and how they exist as the necessary inverse process of the forces of normalization.
There's a lot of political baggage here, obviously. Without digging too deep into that: if the type of story that gives you the least cognitive dissonance is one where you are - without changing in any way - allowed back into realms of "socially normal", what that means is basically that you consider your expulsion from normalcy an aberration, rather than a sign of deep flaws in the concept of social acceptance. You have not integrated your own experience of marginalization into a perspective on what marginalization says about society. You have not sought solidarity with other perspectives on marginalization, or if you have, it's still with the back-pocket loophole that you think you might, personally, be allowed back in. And that you're not sure you wouldn't take it, if you were.
And I get that for queer people right now, a lot of this is hazy. Maybe you would be allowed back in! Maybe you are! There's been a big swing in social acceptance, even if it's really unstable. Maybe the idea of a world where you, personally, can go back to being unmarginalized is a possibility that feels genuinely comforting.
But if you, or your friends, are a little farther out of reach of that edge. If the nature of society is so fundamentally hostile to you that simply being "accepted back in" would not meaningfully alleviate what hurts you about society - if the bare minimum for a world that isn't hostile to you requires deeper than a surface-level change - than playing pretend with that surface level change provides no comfort. If anything, it makes the cognitive dissonance worse - and makes you feel like your supposed allies are fairweather friends who would ditch you in the struggle if they were offered a bargain of acceptance. Which is very lonely and upsetting.
Or, regardless of how personal it is to you, if you've read and thought deeply enough into history or social theory to see how arbitrarily constructed the whole concept of social acceptance is - if you're a bit aware of the implications and underpinnings of things like family structures and divisions of labor and the like - the kinds of slight-of-hand shortcuts that are used to put those problems out of sight become very frustrating. Again it's a matter of cognitive dissonance: whether the typical fiction/fantasy "stock answers" to various concerns reassure your sense of how things normally work, or whether they raise red flags of horrors shoved out of sight.
Some people will act like you're "overthinking everything" and "actively looking for problems" if you talk about your emotional reaction to those red flags. But no: it's as direct and thoughtless as the reaction of finding them a comforting reassurance of business going on as usual. (You could say, the curtains are red at home. Comfort is a matter of perspective!)
Anyway, it comes back to a baseline of: what ways of conceptualizing the world feel easy, comfortable, and thoughtless to you? They may not be the same as the concepts you would consciously acknowledge, or agree with on a cognitive level! There are a lot of layers to integrating ideas into your worldview. It can take a lot of time and reflection for things to reach deeply, to the level of your intuitive reactions.
When people say, "I know it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but it's just really mindless and relaxing" - what that indicates, I think, is a certain particular position on that curve of conceptual integration. Where your deep emotional relationship to the idea of normalcy and assimilation is in a different place than the concept you consciously hold. And I can see where people get really upset when you push on this, because it feels like you're invalidating the things they truly and actively believe, by pointing out that the things they emotionally resonate with are in fundamental contradiction to those beliefs.
But it's also really annoying when people insist that you "just don't understand the appeal of mindless comfort fiction", when what you are actually trying to say is that you think it would be nice if people wrote more fiction that was comforting to people who find the idea of assimilation uncomfortable.
