Re the strain of nerd anti-intellectualism where people say they just want consumable good versus evil plots - I actually think this is a case where people misunderstand what it is they are actually getting out of their fiction and therefore associate it with the obvious bits

Escapist fantasy stories are designed to be fun and exciting, with high stakes and characters actually doing stuff, but also a feeling of safety so they never get too hard work. There are stories in other genres which also fit all of those aspects (e.g. light comic novels)

But of course people assume the other stuff has to always be there because it's always in the stuff that they like - that they like for its outrageous, exciting characters, or its ability to get you lost in it, or because they can talk about it with their friends...

Instead people glom onto what is most obvious and that's how you end up with takes like "fantasy books should always be about a kingdom and a quest to go and find a magic amulet"

Star Wars! It has amazing production design and is able to create a whole universe into which we see only a sliver of it! It's got swordsmen and robots! And also a tedious good vs evil morality system that doesn't reflect human emotion... but it works, in Star Wars

And so now it's part of the formula, it's an Expected Trope, and you just don't know how fiction can give you that moment of empathetic pain you feel as Luke dangles on the side of the ship feeling helpless about the loss of his father outside of the context of neo-Campbell

You think that Dads in fantasy books are like Darth Vader. (No human being has ever been anything like Darth Vader, that's not what he's there to do.) But it's really Luke's pain you're feeling, and while Luke isn't exactly a realistic character his struggles allegorise reality.

People are instinctively a lot better at understanding how this fable-like storytelling works, how it is meant to have the shape of our emotions rather than revealing them directly (and, therefore, feeling purer and truer and more universal)

But if you spend enough of your life being a nerd, you begin to think of the story as being a documentary of imaginary things that happened. You pull literalism from allegory. Now you have a false understanding of how stories work and you call LeGuin a hack for departing from it

Fandom, especially in the commercial, non-transformative sense but also in the areas of the transformative fandom world where the aim is, "I want to spend more time hanging about with my imaginary friends", is very good at teaching you that allegory is literal

If I was more cynical I would say it was doing it TO poison people so they don't leave the big commercial genres of escapist science fiction and fantasy (which have only become the big escapism genres since the 80s - it was not always this way!)

And it is definitely true that once you start forming real parasocial relationships with characters, you tend to stick around for them even when their stories suck.

But ultimately, you loved that character to begin with because they did stuff that was exciting and fun.

It is true that a lot of literary fiction is not very exciting and fun on a plot level. But there is plenty that is. There is plenty of astonishingly trashy escapist pulp which has complex moralities and characters who, while archetypical, have emotional complexity

There's a ton of great detective noir fiction out there where there is a conflict of a hero versus a villain with lots of humour and excitement and a feeling of coziness, but also ambiguous morality and more adult themes. And this is stuff that was written as commercial trash.

Basically I don't imagine anyone reading this thread is a nerd anti-intellectual, but if you recognise yourself in this, just branch out. Reading is fun and there are astonishingly fun books with lively characters, plenty of conflict and excitement that don't have fantasy at all