Fandom: How to be a fan of problematic things

[nebroadwe]

As someone who enjoys Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Scott's Ivanhoe, and Steve Sommers's Mummy, among other things, I find myself having to skate through or contextualize as Values Dissonance problematic scenes and characterizations in a not inconsiderable fraction of stuff I like. Which is why I found this blog post interesting:

How To Be A Fan Of Problematic Things

There are a few works that I've given up because the enjoyment of the cool bits was finally outweighed by the "ARGH. NO." of the dissonant ones (Anne McCaffrey's adult Pern books, frex, or most of Piers Anthony's oeuvre, and Patricia Kenneally's Keltiad trilogy is kind of circling the drain these days), but not many; usually I'll grimace and pass on, sometimes with a bit of litcritter analysis. (Which reminds me that I quite enjoy works written explicitly to counter or interrogate popular-but-problematic stuff, like Philip Pullman's Tin Princess for Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda, or a good deal of Terry Pratchett. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you can take the pattern of the sow's ear for your purse and turn out some remarkably silky things, if you have a lot of imagination and a little moxie. :-)