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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2182694" data-attributes="member: 5171">So the whole "he wrote it around WW2 and lifted a whole mess of Wagner's Ring Cycle but with an entirely different moral message" thing doesn't fly with you?So if you read an interview with, say, Kristen Britain, in which she'd said that she had no intention of being politically correct or socially conscious, but was just trying to write an entertaining story, and her version of an entetaining story just happened to include women and men in roles of power equally, because that was the kind of thing she found entertaining and fun to read... would that make Kristen Britain an author of the well-wrought tale? What if it were an author saying, "Socially conscious? Politically correct? Hey, I just wanted an entertaining story of love and magic and villains getting defeated in the end. Just because the heroes had gay friends and the bad guys belonged to a church that believed in burning people at the stake doesn't mean I was trying to be preachy. I had gay people with the heroes because I've got gay friends, and my heroes are modeled after my friends. I had bad guys belonging to a corrupt church because I was trying to style it after the musketeers stories, and the musketeers stories always have a corrupt cardinal -- it's an intrinsic to a musketeer story as a chandelier and good boots. Really, I was just trying to write some swashbuckling fun."The problem I see with your definition of the well-wrought tale is that, except for the authors who go on record as saying, "Yes, I was trying to bring gay rights and religious persecution to people's attention through my fiction," the question of what is socially conscious and politically correct is answerable only by the reader. It also opens up the question of whether the well-wrought tale is defined simply by not having to be politically correct, or whether it must be actively politically incorrect in order to qualify. If I read Howard's Conan stories and said, "This is a man who is desperately trying to push his political views of aggressive libertarianism through power fantasies of strong heroes cutting through corrupt or unnecessary laws," that would make his work socially conscious and politically motivated... which would then invalidate it as a well-wrought tale, since its goal is not entertainment but wish-fulfillment of a particular political ideal. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to come down to one of those "I like this, and its political message didn't bother me, so I didn't notice it, and therefore it isn't politically conscious, whereas this other thing is, and ew," disagreements. Which is an awfully smug and self-satisfied version of "This is objectively good because it met my subjective requirements for enjoyment."</blockquote>

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