The impetus for this post involves some spoilers for The Silent Patient: >! I looked up some r/books posts about The Silent Patient because I wanted to know what other people thought about it. Many people seemed to be disturbed that the author himself had worked as a therapist in some capacity. While the protagonist, a therapist, does some terrible things, I think it's pretty obvious that we the readers are not supposed to condone or agree with his actions. Some people seemed disturbed by the author's poor depiction/understanding of therapy practices and what that means for the author's capacity to act as a therapist, which would be understandable, but I don't think that was the main critique. !<
Aside from that example in particular, I've seen many posts and comments here criticizing authors for depicting immoral behavior, as though the author was condoning that behavior or fantasizing about behaving that way themselves. It seems some readers are eager to clutch pearls and throw accusations at the author. These types of critiques strike me as poor critical thinking, but I'd like to hear others' perspectives.
by galactictock
2 Comments
there was an author that i really liked, i still do but i used to too. i read like 5-6 books written by him. in every single book a little girl, about 5 years old, would be spanked or a grown woman would recall being spanked as a little girl. little girls would be kissed on the lips by their parents, which is common but not universal. every female protagonist would have a story of being sexually abused by her grandfather/father.
do i think the writer condones such behavior? no. but after book 4 i started to wonder what the hell was going on.
The question is how common is this element and how does it fit in the genre.
In some genres some things are just there. For example, if you read older romances there is a lot of rape. If you read a lot of shifter romances now there will be a lot of forced sex via hormones. This is just a genre convention that needs to be followed.
The issue gets troubling when certain views form the center of a work and are not examined. Looking back the amount of incest and odd relationships in Darkover and Mists of Avalon by MZB was a clue. I would put a lot of Piers Anthony in general in this camp.
However, showing someone doing evil is not condoning it.