Another characteristic of early-aughts criticism was the tendency to demand that characters should be perfectly rational actors at all times - as defined by the critic, who may not make allowance for the fact that the character, say, does not know she’s in a horror movie, and therefore has no reason to believe going into the basement is a terrible idea. I’ve come to see this as an invidious kind of criticism: it locks readers into their own narrow viewpoint, instead of approaching books with openness and curiosity.

YES. Indeed.

I love the S&S Emma Thompson movie, but one very amusing thing about it is how very capital R-Romantic it is!