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WhenRobLoweRobsLowes t1_j4q0iyp wrote

I have no specific insight, but maybe I can back into it this way: do books with female protagonists feel less real to you because you're female? Because, in essence, you have lived a female experience and it does not relate to your own?

Closest I can come is that I dislike protagonists with specific professions, particularly reporters and lawyers. Having been a reporter and worked with lawyers, I can say that their experiences, however fictional or fantastical they are supposed to be, don't click with me because it's so much easier to see the bullshit behind it.

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ZeeMastermind t1_j4s1c9q wrote

You know, working in cybersecurity, I almost prefer when books go completely off-the-wall unrealistic with how things work. If we're doing things a la Neuromancer or Snow Crash where you can walk around the internet and things work a bit like magic, then it doesn't bother me.

But if we're talking Digital Fortress, where NASA's supercomputer just isn't capable of cracking a password which turns out to be one digit long, then the attempts at seeming realistic just seem annoying.

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WhenRobLoweRobsLowes t1_j4sclwl wrote

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Sitting in a newsroom for ten years taught me one thing: nothing fun happens to reporters. You don't investigate cold cases or get anonymous tips that break things wide-open. You just slog through the day and report on other people's misery.

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ZeeMastermind t1_j4swla7 wrote

Well, it'd probably be pretty depressing to read a story about a workday slog where the employees slowly become more overworked because whatever hedge fund bought up their newspaper is now laying people off in the name of "efficiency." Not much escapism there.

Similarly, I bet you'd be equally bored by someone reviewing dozens of emails each day to determine which are "spam," which are "phishing," if any user clicked on them, and so on.

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happy_bluebird t1_j4sw7xd wrote

I teach young children and I find the way most young children are written to be inaccurate or just bad

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