(no subject)

[feotakahari]

Something I’ve never seen addressed in fiction criticism: just because you have story element A doesn’t mean you directly planned it, rather than putting it because you needed to fill something in from story element B. Say your minor antagonist needs to be in college in order for your plot to work. Are they a literature major? A biology major? The plot doesn’t care, but you need to fill in something, so you randomly pick biology. Then someone with a bug up their butt says you’re intentionally demonizing biologists, and you had no idea demonizing biologists was even a thing until they started ranting about how bigoted you are. In between “the curtains represent sadness” and “the curtains are freaking blue,” there needs to be room for “the curtains are just a color contrast for the green carpet that represents nature” or whatnot.