[ordinaryradical]

Did anyone find it curious that the revision process highlights perceived moral impurities (immigrant deportation commentary, MAGA similarity) as story failures / problems?

There’s a profound sub-narrative here on self-censorship, what is or isn’t acceptable within the bounds of fiction, and how genre in-groups police themselves toward Acceptable Messages.

[m0llusk]

To me it seems conscientious. It is good to know if story elements are likely to trigger issues from some historical parallel or other such. This is kind of like taking a moment to consider any scientific experiment in order to check if it may approach or even exceed some moral boundaries. Everything is contextual, and these are not so much hard limits as they are social harmonics that one could tune into or reflect as well as avoid.

[ordinaryradical]

What you said I vibe with. But notice that even if it was presented in that precise context (“do you intend to invoke this theme?”) the author internalized it as story problems, hence we enter the territory of self-censorship.

Also, I think it would be very optimistic to assume an editor is deploying the word “problematic” about your story as anything other than an attack on its appropriateness and validity.

> where an eloquently written editorial review argued that it had problematic themes.

[notahacker]

I think there are plenty of reasons other than self-censorship why someone choosing to write about a whole bunch of touchy political themes might think that someone interpreting a draft of their story in an entirely different light from the intended one might be a story problem rather than an editor problem. Especially if their response is to issue further drafts full of commentary on respective cultures, the virtues of national pride vs assimilation etc, not to drop it and write a story about saving the planet or talking tigers. Similarly, it might be very pessimistic to assume a review awarding a story "Editor's Choice" is an attack on its appropriateness, not great idea, but a bit liable to misinterpretation in current form

Either way, the ending the author actually ended up with feels a lot stronger than it might have been had the protagonist concluded that rosy revisionist history actually was the solution to all a nation's problems or that he couldn't possibly feel any sense of belonging in the US.

[naasking]

> Also, I think it would be very optimistic to assume an editor is deploying the word “problematic” about your story as anything other than an attack on its appropriateness and validity.

It's also plausible that it's "problematic" because the white savior theme has been so overdone it won't make the story interesting or stand out in any way. That's certainly problematic from a writer's perspective.

[thrown_22]

Yeah, no.

I'm an award winning published author and wokeness has taken over the publishing space to the point where you can't publish _anything_ negative about a few sacred cows, which are obvious to anyone with a working brain.

I'll bet my bottom dollar it was a white woman lecturing to a brown man why he's being racist too.