“liking something in fiction doesn’t mean you condone it in real life” but instead of dark fanfiction tropes it’s about liking jeeves and wooster while being a socialist
Jeeves and Wooster are somewhat easy in this regard, because in addition to being a sort of fantasy world where aristocrats are slightly more harmless, the humor is very much at their expense (most of the time)
Discworld is a little more complicated, because it has moments of being more seriously sympathetic to… almost all the characters, even some of the worst
…and it’s not even really a fantasy world where cops aren’t bastards. Vimes would be among the very first to admit what a bastard he is
But it’s maybe a world where cops are somewhat more capable of not being bastards. Or at least being more likeable bastards.
You know, it’s interesting that so many people have been saying Discworld on this post. I’ve only read a couple of the Discworld books myself, but everything I’ve picked up through osmosis seems to indicate that they’re very progressive. I don’t know whether Terry Pratchett was an outright anticapitalist, but I assume it’s safe to say that he was pretty left-wing. I wouldn’t have expected to see a lot of left-wing people bringing him up as an example of their fiction tastes not necessarily aligning with their real-life politics.
Whereas Wodehouse, while perhaps not rabidly right-wing, clearly wasn’t very interested in challenging the status quo. In Comrade Bingo, which a few people have brought up, he’s clearly making fun of the communists. He was quite upset when post-WWII social revolution caused much of the aristocracy to lose their wealth. Although he pokes fun at the aristocrats, he still generally portrays them as mostly harmless.
For me, I think the lack of dissonance I feel enjoying them as a left-wing person IS, like you said, down to the fact that they take place in a fantasy world version of England where nothing really bad ever happens. Add to that that human psychology in Wodehouse is a very simple and predictable system of inputs and outputs that doesn’t really require you to consider how situations would affect a real human being.
It sounds like the Discworld books, even though they obviously take place in a fantasy world even less like our own, might be more realistic on the score of people acting like real people? As well as the fact that bad things can actually happen to those people, so if one of the characters is a cop, you might see that character performing acts of violence that you then have to square with your feelings about real-life cops.
all very very true, this analysis.
I do remember (and remember being pretty uncomfortable with) the Comrade Bingo story. It was one of the moments where too much awareness of authorial intent got in the way of my usual preference for reading the whole thing as lighthearted fun poked at a not-very-real depiction of aristocracy.
Discworld also had a story about an attempt at Communist-like revolution, which also rubbed me just a bit the wrong way, in how it showed both sides of the conflict. (Though it absolutely did it in a more thoughtful way than Wodehouse did anything, LOL).
Pratchett absolutely was progressive by the standards of his generation. But current standards of progressiveness regarding cops are… fairly new, from what I can tell.
I mean, the ACAB viewpoint has existed for a long time, but it’s closer to being mainstream now than it ever was in my childhood. (I’d say Pratchett was ahead of his time just for how much he did show of the corruption within the police force.)