
Chasing the (Literal) Dragon - benbreen
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/01/10/historical-fantasies/
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neaden
I don't really get this article. He wishes as a teenager he had spent more
time reading serious works of history, but that's just not really what
teenagers do. He talks about how most Fantasy novels are just escapism, but so
are more novels period along with sports, reality TV, sitcoms, and scripted
drama. Basically he's saying it would be nice if we didn't have to relax at
all and spent all of our time consuming educational media but that's not what
most people want to do to unwind.

~~~
aetherson
It's academic humble-brag. "I wish I had spent my teenage years reading about
queer domesticities in Edwardian England or Pan-Africanism" is just him
saying, "I now read about queer domesticities in Edwardian England or Pan-
Africanism, and that makes me a virtuous person."

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geofft
> _We escape to worlds that are safer and more understandable than this one,
> and nothing about, say, Ron Weasley’s casual racism can shed any meaningful
> light on our own, except to remind us that racism is pervasive. He’s an
> object in a wind-up world of one white heterosexual British woman’s
> devising; he cannot be the tool of anyone’s deliverance._

That is quite the unsubstantiated dismissal, and I think this author got a lot
_less_ out of the teenager's literary canon than I did. Maybe the self-anger
should be directed not at failing to read works worthy of serious scholars,
but at failing to recognize that the works that were read were in fact worthy
of serious scholars.

I will suggest to the teenagers reading this that reading these works in
community is very important (and the fanfic community is a great one for so
many of the works in the teenager's canon). If you only see your own
interpretation of the works, and your own interpretation is primarily about
family trees of obscure half-ogres, you're missing out.

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cestith
I read all that only to find that its author apparently misses being abused
and so does it to himself.

