Unless you are very lucky you'll get nailed on something (even sometimes because someone skipped what you actually said, or read it and didn't get what you were saying or...I got mullered in one review for not mentioning the heroine's hair colour till the last chapter. Which was odd because I'd mentioned it half a dozen times before then. Or "classic damsel in distress, wallbanger" when the narrative states very clearly that at that point she saved the Male MC)
You cannot control how people read your book, you can only control how you write it.
So I say do it anyway.
Completely. For instance, I just discovered that a pov that I enjoy reading (first person) is irritating to many readers because it tends to make characters sound whiny. I guess I like whiny.
I also was told once (by someone who hadn't read my ms) that an epiphany that my male MC had--that he can't be responsible for the choices made by the people he loves or protect them from all of the consequences of these choices--is emasculating, because the cardinal male value and function is protecting others, especially your womenfolk (and I got a mini lecture about how modern men rape, harass and disrespect women because feminism has devalued sex and stripped men from their protective purpose). So rape and sexual harassment are modern things, and feminists are responsible for them. Who knew?
I guess this means that if you're writing dark, gritty fantasy set in an old-fashioned world where men are men and most women know their place, rape would have to be a non issue.
Oh well, hand me the clippers, I guess. I wonder, though, why no one ever accuses writers who shoehorn women into limited and implausible roles in stories are never taken to task for efeminating them. In fact wonder why "efeminating" isn't even a verb, while emasculating is.
It does seem that fantasy fans are higher maintenance today and expect their fantasy worlds and societies to be "harder" or more plausible in real-world terms than they used to. And they seem to be more likely to pick nits and argue over the alleged holes in authors' world building than they once did. It never used to occur to me to wonder why a world might be stuck in the quasi middle ages for far longer than our own world was, or for viking women to be knitting (or have wall inset fireplaces in their huts), or for a world to have a concept of sanitation but no steam engines, or for there to be age of sail era ships in a world without gunpodwder.
I suspect some of it's the internet. Not only can fans get together to discuss these things more readily (and point out "flaws" to one another), but people can look things up and say, "Hey, 'escalate' is an anachronistic word in a world without the Otis corporation."
