Comment by scotty79
5 years ago
I think it's more of a rule than an exception. What makes a creation attractive is mixture of percieved veracity with addition of some oddity. So the most popular works of fiction mix some pretty accurate descriptions of reality with the oddity comming from the authors imagination. As such it attracts the reader with the promise of learning the truth about the world but instead it moves them away from the reality towards specific authors fantasies that are weird or gross enough to be interesting. What's more it draws more strongly the people who already share the same skew as the author and draws them even further from accurate understanding of reality.
Cat Person is great illustration of this, where it borrows endearing details from true healthy relationship but then serves the reader the image of exploitative and abusive, repulsive older partner. Furthering prejudices some readers already had and pushing them further away from accurate description of reality which is really varied as the relationship that was basis of this story shows.
Sometimes even though there's no repulsion, exploitation or abuse and older man just gets abandoned as the young girl finds new friends and there's just mature moving on without any abuse or retibution.
> So the most popular works of fiction mix some pretty accurate descriptions of reality with the oddity comming from the authors imagination.
Then eschew popular works of fiction. Talk to a reader or a book club, and get some suggestions, maybe? All books have this problem, but some less so than others. If you're aware of this issue, then reading a wider variety of voices can only help your understanding of the world.
I don't see it as a problem. It's just how human interest works. We are drawn to things that are similar enough to what we know and odd enough at the same time to be interesting.
If I wanted to read books that try to reflect reality as good as possible I'd stick to manuals and textbooks.
The problem is a general one that people are being tricked that purely entertainment pieces give them some insights into nature of reality and people. Fictional literature is held as a source of insight of human condition but the parts that make it interesting are pure fantasy of one skewed mind.