My Weird Fictional Hangup

[unspeakablehorror]

I have kind of a weird hangup about fiction where I can have a negative reaction to associating characters or events in fiction too closely to  particular real life people or events.  I tend to prefer to make more generalized associations about behaviors or personalities or repeated  historical trends.  And I do understand both that this is a common thing to do in meta-analysis and why one might want to draw such specific parallels, but for reasons I don't quite understand, I feel immense discomfort doing that myself.  So if anyone wonders why I tend to avoid making specific comparisons like that when I write meta on fiction, that's why.  I don't necessarily feel this is something I need to get over any more than I feel that other people need to view fiction in this abstract way.  And as long as I can interpret it differently, I have no difficulty reading or watching things with such a specific interpretation, and am well aware that I do so regularly.  I just a.) don't interpret them in that way myself and/or b.) avoid thinking about the specific real-life interpretation when I'm actually reading/watching the work in question.

Comments

[unspeakablehorror]

Yes, I agree that fiction and nonfiction can complement each other in terms of improving our understanding of the world outside ourselves. It all depends on how it's applied.

And I certainly do agree that being open to alternate interpretations of fiction is important. The fact that there are bad readings doesn't prevent there from being good readings that simply make us feel uncomfortable.