Dear Reader,
Why do some young Millennials and members of Generation Z have such a puritanical attitude about literature? To be clear, this isn’t a universal truth—I actually think it’s probably a minority opinion among young people! And my perspective is from the Global North (specifically, the United States); I doubt this is a truly global attitude. But I’m really curious why there’s a small rising trend wherein young people can’t understand why a character might do bad things—they think it reflects the inherent morality of the book and the author. Often, they even misread the text in the process.
There are two issues with this attitude:
1. It’s wrong to say that a character can never do bad things.
Characters can have a little moral complexity, as a treat! Maybe an author is using the character to make a point. Maybe the character isn’t supposed to be Good™. Maybe the character even makes amends. Maybe it’s a fictional character! Characters don’t have to be morally good, they just have to be good characters—and good characters often do bad things. It would be very boring to read a story in which no one ever did something wrong. Authors don’t get paid enough to withstand puritanical misreading of their books. Of course, sometimes the issue isn’t the fictional character. Maybe the author did make a misstep, which brings me to…
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