> I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging. Does nobody read with a critical eye? I know s

> I'm slowly coming to the highly unpopular view that all fiction is essentially a lie, and therefore damaging. Does nobody read with a critical eye? I know sometimes I have to give up on a story or series if the things I'm asked to accept pass a boundary, and they're kept consistent. > Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them. It's impossible to convey with absolute accuracy any event. I would hazard that any representation no matter how accurate it tries to be will be riddles with inaccuracies or assumptions that are represented through bias. We're screwed from the outset because we're incapable of accepting all the possible stimuli of a situation (and so are recording devices), and any event is also only a part in a series which adds context. To that you add that it's impossible to impart your own experience without bias (and the imparting of personal experience is the only way to get details other than what we can record automatically), which adds quite a bit to any event. Everything is something we're getting through a skinner box, and whether marketed as fact or fiction, you have to make choices on what is true or not. Painting fiction with a broad brush as negative likely won't help in the end. All you're doing is taking the inputs that tell you up front they're not necessarily true in the sense of real events (even if they may try to make you think about fundamental things in ways you didn't consider, which is useful) and removing them to prioritize things that are also untrue in some way, but don't have the decency to own up to it.