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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

Tell me about these rich, engaging worlds that are free of things like prejudice, wealth and poverty, class struggle…

There is wide chasm between weaving real world social problems into the story as part of worldbuilding and having the author's pet social problems be front and center the entire time. Some authors are so intent on propagandizing that they forget to be entertaining.

Are you saying these "pet social problems" and the like are not real world social problems?

I think / am assuming that you're so used to western/American comics that you can't see the underlying themes in them.

include as much real world problems in your fiction as you want. if you start pushing a political view point (communism is bad; capitalism is bad) without including the nuances of what you'd experience in a real world, then you get less good fiction. this is true of pushing political pov's, or other things when your fiction is out of balance. Author pushing a pov will usually degrade the quality of the work. just like contriving a plot to make it exciting debases your fiction. Generally speaking. in the end it's the delight in the spine the defines the quality of art.

Everything is pushing a political viewpoint.

Leave it to Beaver didn't consider the nuances of the impact on redlining and inequality in GI Bill benefits led to white suburbs it portrayed or whether the allocation of funding to car infrastructure rather than public transit left people behind, but it still pushed an idealized portrayal of suburbia regardless.

No, he didn't say that. He just said that sermonizing didn't make good literature. Have you not had that experience?

Propagandizing isn’t the word I’d use. I feel like we’re really watering down with propaganda actually is. If someone wants to write about a particular issue they can. You can prefer they don’t, which means you should buy it.

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