Hey, so, did y'all know I'm a folklorist? Not currently working in the field, did not actually finish my degree (ran out of money), but I went to school to learn about the structure of stories and how we pass them down and pass them along.

And where they come from, how they accrete, how they change with time...it's a whole academic field that I am woefully simplifying for the sake of a tweet.

Saying "you have to read Heinlein because you keep retelling Snow White" isn't just an over-simplification, it's like saying "you have to make me a sandwich because you made this puff pastry filled with minted rabbit."

The oral tradition does not give a FUCK about the author. I mean, the folklorists do, and if you gave us a time machine, we'd be happily filling out academic footnotes for the next century, but the oral tradition does not.

If you want to put Heinlein, or Asimov, or any of your heroes on the same level as Snow White, forget their names. Wash them from your mouths. Throw their biographies into the sea.

Then burn the books. All of them. Every single copy. You get nothing, because you're trying to insist that their stories are the same as these stories that have been passed down for centuries, not starting from one true text.

And once you have divorced yourself completely from these lions among men, from these heroes, sit down and start telling those stories yourself, in your own words. They will change and twist in your mouth. They will ripen and they will wither and some of them will die.

And if some of the people you tell the stories to tell them in their turn, and if someone eventually starts writing them down, you will have proven your point. Your stories have the core of universality and human experience necessary to endure.

But while you're still saying "Lovecraft is a genius, not centering yet another WFC program around him is a crime against genre!", you're also admitting that you cannot separate the story from the man. And if you can't, when you love him, why should I?