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I happened to find this counterpoint

Hm. That's very well written, and I totally agree that's it's inappropriate to pretend that all kink is like the ideal of how kink should be, and that there definitely ARE people like Christian -- I say so in my post that it's plausible.

But I also think that "it happens in real life so it must be ok in fiction" is not magic pixie dust that stops novels being offensive.

It's plausible that an IRA member might think that members of the British police or army are not people and that gunning them down is morally positive.

It's plausible that if ancient history had happened differently, there might not be any Native American culture[1] in North America.

It's plausible that someone might think they were gay/bisexual/asexual for various social/medical reasons and it later turned out they mostly weren't.

But novels are not pure fiction, they contain extra-textual cues of the sort you describe to say which bits you're supposed to take seriously and which bits you're not.

Dan Brown is an especially egregious example because he doesn't beat around the bush implying that he believes all the Holy Blood, Holy Stone bullshit is true in real life -- he explicitly comes out and says it in the forward.

But it's true of other books. If you read an obscure and intricate literary novel where the characters all have complicated prejudices and misconceptions, you may well expect that one character's representation is intended to be taken critically.

But if you read an accessible fun ride, and the villain is an evil Muslim, and you read several other books the author wrote and recommended, and they ALL have evil Muslims, you start to say "Is this just coincidence? Or does this book actually have a GIANT HONKING EXTRATEXTUAL STICKER SAYING 'ALL MUSLIMS ARE EVIL'?"

And sometimes you genuinely can't tell -- this was rysmiel's problem, it wasn't clear how to signal to the reader that the main character's bigoted view of an alien race was non-realistic, when in most similar novels it WOULD be representative of how the aliens really are. But most of the time you can tell.

So, I don't think it's implausible to write about a fucked-up abusive dom, or a gay/bisexual/asexual person who gets "cured", etc. But I think it's inadvertantly offensive not to suggest in the text that this isn't representative of the wider culture of bdsm people/gay people/bisexual people/etc.

Does that make sense, or have I hared away on completely the wrong track again?

[1] American Americans? non-European Americans?