Just because you don't see the agenda

doesn't mean there isn't one. Yeah, pretty much any literature worth reading has some sort of political agenda, and just because you want to go "lalala that's not the point of literature" doesn't make you right. Every time an author makes the choice not to have any black people in a setting where black people ought to exist, that's their agenda you're looking at. Every time you watch a movie, and there's eight guys and two women and the women never talk to each other, that's their agenda talking. Every time you read a story about settlers in the West, and first of all there are no black people or Asians and secondly Indians are always either Chaotic Evil or just gone away somewhere, probably pursued by a bear, that's their agenda. If you don't want politics in your fiction, stick to Pat the Bunny.

Also, I don't believe for one minute that your book-diet as a child in the 1980s or whenever was chock full of a demographically appropriate amount of diversity. You can't say that with a straight face.

In other book related news, I read But Not The Aardvark, and it's a worthy follow-up to But Not The Hippopotamus. Some of us aren't joiners, and that's okay.

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