Work Text:
A good phrase to have in your Fiction Engagement Toolkit is "I could have done without that."
Listen. Listen. Nothing's perfect. Especially when you broaden your horizons and experience stories from different times and places than the one you grew up in. And when you get old enough, works from that time and place, too. You are going to run into things that make you uncomfortable, and you are going to run into jokes and blithe statements that piss you off.
And maybe those things are offensive enough to make you drop a work on sight or never pick it up in the first place. That's perfectly fine! I've done that. I have my set of Things I Could Have Done Without that will make me put the work itself into the pile of Things I Can Do Without. Sometimes one too many small Things I Could Have Done Without pile up in one work to cause this reaction.
Sometimes the author is an ass and I decide that, no matter how good the work itself is, I Could Do Without It because of that. Not just the ones you're likely thinking of, in this time and place of English-speaking Tumblr in 2025; I have a shitlist that includes them but extends to several others.
But sometimes - oftentimes - I might think, "Eh, I could have done without that, but it was made 20/50/100/1000 years ago." Or, "Eh, I could have done without that, but it told me a little about what the author and their people were thinking about in this time and place, and it's valuable for this reason."
And it may be things that aren't really offensive, either! It could be, "I could have done without seeing the strings on the bats in this old movie," or "I could have done without that obnoxious level in this old videogame."
Many of my absolute favourite stories have bits in them that I could have done without. And the more I catch up on older, influential works, the more I find myself saying "Mmm, I could have done without that bit."
But I'm not going to throw them away over it.