Right-wing conventionals see moral instruction as paramount in a story, and left-wing conventionals see immoral instruction as paramount to avoid in a story. Both positions can only come from the heads of poor readers. It is useful to point out “preachiness” on the one hand and potential offense on the other, especially when the author may not even realize that they are either preaching or offending, but conventionalists rarely stop at the text. Every story in a workshop is some sort of ethical litmus test, and even when there is no outrageous content there is often outrageous aesthetics. Is first-person fascist because it TELLS the reader WHAT TO THINK?? Certainly not, but I’ve heard this declared from liberal nitwits. Is anything other than third-person objective point of view in past tense told with “plain language” somehow sign of a homosexual/Communist plot? Anyone who has ever read one of the rambling semiliterate editorials in Tangent knows the answer to that! And let’s not forget the tyranny of “story” which conventionals always chirp abut. The morons even go on about Shakespeare as some sort of populist cartwheeler, as if people still look at Romeo and Juliet for the plot, which is “spoiled” by the author himself anyway in the Prologue. (“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”)