A Gen X Take on "Problematic Faves"

This post is for whoever needs to hear it. I just want to share that it's possible and okay to both enjoy a work of art, fiction, entertainment, and critique it or find it wanting or problematic in some respects. It's okay to say, "Hey, this story really moved me, for this reason. Wow, I'm so glad I read that. And in this other way, it's a hot mess. I'm glad there's another story for me to read next that avoids that mess or repairs it. Or I am so hopeful that there will be another story like that to read tomorrow."

It is also okay to honor your younger self's love of a story or of music that the older you no longer enjoys to the same degree or sees in the same light. That is okay; that story you once reveled in was a part of your imaginative life, a part of how you became who you now are.

There is a cultural belief in my country that something must be perfect in order for you to have permission to enjoy it. We don't talk about that belief very directly, but it's there, underlying many of our conversations about art and about stories. It's motivated by our American utilitarianism - the belief that art must perform a particular function efficiently and perfectly in order to have value or in order to give pleasure.

Because of this belief, some (though not all) of my Boomer friends feel that stories, movies, music, and books they grew up with now have to be defended at all costs against the ravages of "cancel culture."

Meanwhile, because of this same belief, some of my Millennial friends (though not all) believe that if a story or an author is problematic, their enjoyment of the story is no longer possible, and in fact may be culpable; I have friends who feel guilty for having enjoyed Harry Potter, for example.

Harry Potter arrived while I was in graduate school; I liked how the fandom used the mechanics of the four houses (Hufflepuff for the win, my friends), but it was never my fandom the way Middle-earth and Earthsea were. I found Earthsea less ethically objectionable and more fascinating, and was a little mournful that no one seemed to remember the wizarding school I grew up with. But I understand the disillusionment some readers feel, because I went through all of that decades ago, with other authors and their stories. And because I did, I want to offer a brief Gen X perspective on the possibility of learning to both enjoy and critique the things we love or once loved. Gen X has been through this before, but because Gen X is rather solitary and also extremely outnumbered, no one asks us for advice. And that's okay. We're more likely to have a story to share than advice to propound, anyway.

Gen X grew up differently - at least, some of us did. I was laughing the other day because a younger critic said that the most unrealistic thing about Stranger Things is that the kids roam the forest and the town without parental supervision; I laughed, because that was the most realistic thing. Welcome to the eighties. We roamed the woods and the bog behind the house unattended. We ransacked the local corner store and the used bookstore in the warehouse for anything with dragons, barbarians, spaceships, or elves on the cover.

Some of us just shrug or look a bit wry when we overhear our elders' concerns about "cancel culture" because our parents and their friends cancelled everything. The music we listened to, the games we played, and the books and comic books we read had people in their thirties convinced that we were consorting with demons. (Literally.)

My own parents were more permissive than most, and to my great fortune my parents valued a house packed with books, but some of the Satanic Panic made it to my home, too; I vividly remember a trip home from college for the holidays, when I received as a Christmas gift a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Kindly Ones to my great joy, and immediately afterward received a stern family intervention, because my parents believed that my choice of comic book meant I had surely "joined a cult."

In childhood, we didn't have Google yet. We didn't have streaming video or Wikipedia. (We did have Ataris and then the Apple IIe and then, at last, the alien screech of the dial-up modem.) We didn't have the explosive libraries of content that we have access to now; we had our small town library and interlibrary loan and the long search in old stores (across years, sometimes) for book three of an out-of-print series of novels that we badly wanted to finish. (The advent of online used bookstores made these treasure hunts a lot easier later!) We were a generation that searched hungrily for nerdy content and made do with what we could find. We passed bruised old paperbacks around from reader to reader.

We didn't share many of our elders' love for institutions and their instinctive trust in the canon, because the institutions our parents were embedded in let us down. And when we got to college, we were ready to talk about what should be added to a canon or what a canon should be in the first place or whether there should be one at all, because we had each grown up having to make our own canon, constructing our own tentative and temporary mythologies along the way. Because of the makeshift nature of that, we didn't need the art or the texts or the music we enjoyed to be perfect. We just needed them to be exciting, to do unexpected things, and to include something we could relate to, something that helped us understand our own journeys better, something to provide us with a vocabulary for naming our fears, wounds, desires, and dreams.

It's different for many Millennials I know. Where some boomers need institutions, some of my Millennial friends desire and need a tribe, and where an institution requires a canon ("these are the Accepted and Unquestioned Texts Whose Value is Immutable"), a tribe needs a shared vocabulary and a shared lore, from which items are added or ejected by consensus depending on whether and to what degree they suit the needs and serve the health of the tribe.

My friends and I didn't grow up like that. We didn't trust the canon fully and we didn't receive a shared lore from a numerous tribe. In small pockets of bright-eyed nerds, in tiny found families whose few members were both fiercely independent and fiercely loyal to each other, we had to construct our lore as we went, out of very few materials. Because the grownups cancelled everything all the time, we don't believe in censoring what we enjoy; but also, because our grownups were sometimes blindly faithful to things that hurt us (and them), we also don't believe in shying away from critique of what we enjoy.

Any story that is beautiful or strange can yield pleasure and enjoyment, but these stories are part of the scrapbook of our lives; they're not sacred texts. Everything might be enjoyable, and everything is contingent - too much so to make any of it sacred in the old sense. And that's okay.

I know that the in-between space I grew up with may be foreign to some (not all) of my older readers and to some (not all) of my younger readers. But in case it's helpful at all, I just want to say: It's okay to love something (or love part of something) and also see that some of it is suspect, or to recognize and discuss things we need to do better in the stories that are yet to come.

I can enjoy Lovecraft's imaginative prowess and command of mood (and learn from it) while deploring his xenophobia and his over-the-top racism. I'm certainly not going to demand anyone else read him (that's the way of some Boomers), but I'm not going to censor my enjoyment of some of his work either; I'm not a Millennial. I'm going to say, "I enjoy X and Y and I can take delight in how Y was done so well, and wow, Z is a major problem and we can talk about that too, and by the way, I'm so glad we have other amazing weird fiction authors to read and learn from too - thank you Internet and online libraries and online bookstores and expanded access to stories!" And I will go enjoy Lovecraft Country, which features both brilliant homage and scathing critique. And I'll read Borges' "There Are More Things" (again, homage and no-holds-barred critique, and a very good story).

When I glance at my bookshelf and see Dune there, I can find so much delight in Frank Herbert's worldbuilding and in the things he had to say (and show) about ecology, climate change, and historical consciousness in Dune. And also, I can see that his portrayal of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is homophobic and fat shaming, and that his attitudes toward gender are more essentialist than I'm comfortable with. And I can laugh, cringe, or shake my head in astonishment when we get to the part about the sex witches who manipulate the universe with their vaginal pulsing.

Dune is amazing and fun and profound, and sometimes it's wrong. And that's okay.

We'll enjoy it and learn from it, and we have different stories to tell next.

I will likely reread Ender's Game, which I love. Orson Scott Card, however, became a raging and rather obnoxious homophobe midway through the eighties, and has often been very public about it. But I'm not going to let Card's bigotry take away my enjoyment of Ender's Game. And my memories of enjoying it as a young reader are my memories. They're part of how I became the writer and the reader I now am.

Love Hogwarts? Rowling's transphobia can't take that from you unless you let it - because your memories of growing up with Potter, Granger, and Weasley are your memories. They're a part of how you became who you are. You can choose to enjoy as much or as little of those stories now as you want to, and you can also choose to discuss some of the small-mindedness and failures of empathy written into them, because in discussing that, we grow as readers.

Each time we read and each time we discuss what we've read, we learn more about what we want in stories and about what we can do with and for each other through stories - and about how better to listen to the stories of others. What you choose to do with the story or your memories of it isn't up to Rowling, and it isn't even up to the tribe of one's peers, unless you want it to be; it's up to you.

It doesn't need to be "I used to enjoy this, but this is a hot mess."

Instead, it can be "I enjoyed this when I read it, and also, this is a hot mess. I enjoyed X and Y; maybe I still do. And also, Z is something our storytellers need to do differently."

Saying "and also" gives yourself permission to enjoy what you've enjoyed and learn about it, learn from it, or learn what needs to be different next time, too.

A story's job isn't to be perfect.

A story's job is to move us, to provoke thought, to evoke scenes we wouldn't otherwise imagine or experience -- or that we might forget to imagine or experience, if it weren't for that story's intervention in our imaginative life.

In Gen X, some of us became scavengers. We scavenged for stories and we scavenged in stories for what we needed. Our libraries are a mismash of mismatched stories - including some stories that are just a hot mess, but man, that one scene or that one thing the author did is something we'll never forget. It had a formative impact on our imagination. And that's okay.

Some stories age well. Some don't. Some age well in part and horribly in other parts. Some authors travel in the wrong direction, getting more loudly bigoted as they age; some reveal themselves to be abusers, people who hurt others. (My own generation had lots of those, too. Anyone remember Marion Zimmer Bradley?)

Other authors (I could point to LeGuin) deepen their empathy and wisdom over time, growing and revising the stories they tell as they revise their thinking and their understanding of our world and the people in it.

Some authors died twenty-five hundred years ago, and we can revel in some of what they achieved without needing to pretend (as some past generations did) that every line and every stanza of their work can offer authoritative and insightful input to our lives in the present. Some of it can, some of it can't. And that's okay. All of it is part of the story of how we got here, and in all of it, we can scavenge for pieces to take with us, like memories, like yellowed Polaroids, like chips of a mosaic, as we construct, piece by piece, the mosaic of tomorrow.

And that's okay.

That story you used to love? Loving it helped you become who you now are. Don't enjoy it anymore? That's okay. Still enjoy it? Also okay. You can enjoy it for what's right for you in it without ignoring what's wrong in it. Scavenge some of it and take it with you. We've still got a long ways to go and many wonderful stories yet to hear, and the stories we've already stuffed in our backpacks as we hike through the dark wood of this life don't define us or limit us; they're just some of our supplies on the journey, a snapshot of what's been available to us so far. There are other wonderful stories yet to tell, and there's still more room in our backpacks.

Stant Litore

P.S. I hope you'll come enjoy my stories, too. Here they are: www.stantlitore.com.

When I look back -- as a reader -- at my first book, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, most of which I wrote in 2009, I realized I've grown and changed since I wrote it. There's a gender essentialism in the story that is the main character's and not mine, but that I didn't have other characters challenge in the story. That's something I would write very differently today; it's something I see a problem with.

On the other hand, there is also much in that first book that I still enjoy, today - its unique handling of a story about a prophet in love with his city and in love with his God while watching them both suffer; its relentless concern with justice and with the effects of poverty; its handling of horror. The ending still strikes me as beautiful. One reader told me that this book forever changed his way of understanding homelessness and our responsibilities to our homeless neighbors.

The book I wrote in 2009-2011 has examples in it of things I still strive to do in my fiction and expresses things I still feel so deeply, and also it has problems in it that aren't repeated in my recent fiction. And that's okay.

As a writer, I hope that a few decades from now, many things in my books will appear problematic to readers. I hope so. It will mean that we've changed - hopefully in a positive direction, though nothing's a given. For all I know, readers will find my books problematic because they aren't prejudiced enough. But hopefully, readers will find them problematic not for that reason but for the opposite reason, because they could have done representation even better. I hope so. That will mean that in the intervening years, we have become better readers, more kind and empathetic and less limited in how we imagine and perceive our neighbors.

And I hope, if I have done my job well, that readers will also find much to enjoy in the books, too.

If looking for a place to start, I highly recommend Ansible: https://stantlitore.com/product-category/ansible/ It's amazing. You'll love it. It's the kind of science fiction I wish I'd had with me to read while I walked home from the bus, through the woods and past the tadpole pond, all those years ago.

Or, try On the Other Side of the Night. It's a love letter to science fiction and fantasy, and it's also a story about growing together as readers, and it's about the relationship between imagination and kindness. You can find it here: https://stantlitore.com/product/otherside/ Or here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732086990