[hildea]

fabricalado: I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding DiapDealer. They aren't saying that all actions are motivated by love, but that all types of actions can be motivated by love. In other words, if we make a list of all possible actions -- committing murder, creating art, getting house insurance, making a cup of tea, and so on -- DiapDealer's claim is that each of those actions has been performed for love at least once.
DiapDealer's claim is somewhat tangential to this discussion, after all noone's claimed that love as a motivation (or tomato soup) doesn't exist, they're claiming that it's overdone as an element in fiction

Originally Posted by fabricalado

To qualify: I was thinking of shows like Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away With Murder when I wrote that.
It's hard for me to get into them cause the love-is-the-reason trope comes up so much in every episode it starts to feel like there's no other emotion that could make for an interesting narrative.

And yet there is.
See, for instance, Little Fires Everywhere, which deals with themes like race, surrogate motherhood, gentrification and class division. Or American Gods, which subtly deals with multiculturalism and change in America.
All themes I'm way more excited to read about. But hey, you do you and I'll do the same.

In American Gods the love between Shadow and Laura is a powerful thread in the story, and a strong driver of the plot at least in the first part of the book. I haven't seen those shows you mention, though, and if they use love as the only significant motivation and theme, that seems likely to get boring. I really like stories where love is one of the motivations, especially if there's a conflict between love and other motivations.

Originally Posted by meeera

I think that after everything that's happened this year, I will never again believe any zombie/plague fiction that has people making sensible decisions to protect themselves and their community.

Yes. It strikes me that Pratchett's Guards! Guards! was spot on: There's a dragon threatening the city, and lots of people are saying that dragons aren't so bad, as long as someone else gets eaten, and someone's selling dragon repellents with a guarantee of your money back if the dragon kills you

I also saw someone recently commenting that the most unrealistic part of the film "Avengers" is that when government is found to be infiltrated by nazis, there's a huge uproar, and the nazis get expelled from government and prosecuted. (I'm probably tiptoeing close to the Politics and Religion subforum now.)