But if the book had been written that way, could it have been a bestseller? Is stupid moral oversimplification necessary in a mass-market bestseller? E.g., Tolkien, Narnia, Star Wars.
It is if you are writing children's stories!
Is this a teddy-bear effect? Weird possibly NSFW ads on website; critical part quoted:
...Since a teddy bear is often a child’s first toy, one hypothesis that teddy specialists wanted to test was that they evolved to please infants or young children. Researchers offered 4- to 8-year-old children their choice of teddies with adult features or ones with infantile features. The four-year-olds chose the adult-featured bear almost two and a half times more often than the baby-featured bear. Among the older children, 6 to 8 years of age, the babyish teddies were
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread: