escapist media in general is an ongoing fascination for me. media written with escapism as a main priority typically requires very little thought from the reader - the whole point is to kick back and live vicariously through a fun story, after all. they're narratives written to prioritize reader comfort.
but because they are written to be as unchallenging as possible, they often come with a set of underlying assumptions that can be just fucking fascinating to unpick. like yeah, why IS it assumed to be escapist and indulgent to enjoy colonial wealth without thinking about it in regency fiction. why IS the self inserty female protagonist, who is assumed to be as universally relatable as possible, written to be sweetly naive and sexually inexperienced. why does this "queernorm" contemporary world replicate patriarchial structures exactly but just with Gay People Allowed. why are these ideas assumed to be easy and comforting? can the writers not imagine anything better than the status quo but except maybe with more gay people and poc if you're lucky?
the fact of the matter is that "unchallenging" fiction tends to just simply replicate dominant cultural narratives as a point of comfort. we won't challenge the reader, so we won't think about the way we write certain things. everything we think of as comforting and safe are, of course, universal, and could not be founded on any harmful ideological assumptions. there is nobody who could be alienated by this.
and that's the sticking point to me, in terms of escapist fiction: it's always necessary to ask whose comfort is being prioritized. you've got to interrogate who gets to escape and the mechanisms by which that escape happens. escapism can be good and necessary to survive the current world, but it does not exist in a vacuum separate from the real world, even if it pretends it does!
I mean, a major part of why escapist fantasies tend to replicate familiar power structures but “Gay People Allowed” or more POC is because there is a certain amount of comfort in familiarity even when that familiarity is something actively harmful.
It’s part of there reason some people read genre romances where the love interest is a bouquet of red flags, and it’s all the same old same old – the “witty”/sarcastic, domineering and possessive Alpha Male that no one actually wants to date in real life, or even really be around.
It’s nice to be able to pretend you fit into the dominant culture that’s alienated you for your whole life, or dehumanized you or pushed you down, because we’ve been beaten over the head with how that culture is right and we’re wrong for not being like everyone who does fit in.
It’s not a sinister, “we just want to be the ones who get to abuse others now” kind of thing – it’s that familiarity and comfort are linked, even in cases where that familiar thing has actively harmed you. It’s not a question of “who’s comfort is being prioritized” (though the answer to that is, quite simply, the author’s “target demographic”, and every author is gonna have a different answer to that.)
