Good writing doesn't solve all problems

Off metafandom, a very good post : I Didn’t Dream of Dragons. An indian fan (and possibly writer?), deepad, talks about her experience reading sff in english about european people in an european world, and how a lot of the arguments white american etc authors make about "Writing the Other" are flawed. EDIT: She responds to some common criticisms here.

EDIT: Disclaimer 4a applies *sighs at self*

Something she said which touches on a topic I've been thinking about for a while is "I have spent a lifetime reading well-written books with nuanced characters that hurt me by erasing or misrepresenting me".

One of the axioms a lot of creative types seem to work from is that their only priority should be The Art. Great Art broadens the soul and civilises society etc, so an Artist should not let themselves be swayed by worries about social responsibility/hurting people's feelings etc. Any times questions like this come up they are either dismissed as making false assumptions (which is often true: playing violent video games does not in fact make you a murderer, and it is very hard to predict what effect if any a work will have on the population as a whole etc) or it's argued that these consequences only happen as a result of bad art, and the solution is to work even harder at making True Art. Which is what the artists were doing anyway, how convenient.
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Schroedinger's Author

(This is a tangent I got into while writing Good writing doesn't solve all problems and decided needed it's own post. EDIT: Disclaimer 4a applies *sighs at self*

Something I find annoying in these sorts of discussions is that people act like there's either there's a single objective "goodness" that all works are judged by, or the perception of a work is almost random and completely out of the authors hands.
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Just be glad I don't drink

So I realised I need another disclaimer (4 and 4a)

The trigger for rant-and-crash today was the adrenaline from feeling (irrationally) stressed about going into work again for the first time since October. I will be starting again at two part days a week from next week, ee!

Not that I take back anything I said, necessarily, but it could have been better expressed and at a time when I was more up to dealing with the comments. Also I think the fact I know I'm going back to work means I feel the need to get all my posting done now so I'm not distracted later. I have an equally troublesome rant about racism I've been putting off posting for several days since I'm still catching up on comments from the sexuality post a few days ago. Life would be much easier if I only felt like talking about maths and wire crochet...