My latest foreign film obsession comes from South Korea. It’s Okay Not To Be Okay is a Netflix original series that dares to tackle some pretty taboo issues on mental health, all while the two main characters are trying to figure out if love is worth fighting for.

The acting has been so top notch, I actually went to the IMDb website to find out more about the people playing the characters. But many of the reviews I read saddened me. Far too many people complained that some of the characters actions weren’t politically correct for this day and age. Insert my eye roll here.

If the writers only focused on checking the boxes of PC culture, they would lose the authenticity of the characters. People aren’t perfect, so as a writer, neither should my characters be perfect. They should be as messy and complex as people in real life. That means they might say and do things that aren’t PC, but as long as it’s true to the character that shouldn’t bother anybody.

The push to make everything fit some arbitrary utopia, that doesn’t even exist in real life, is killing our arts. Films are losing their honesty. Books, especially fiction, are becoming a checklist of predicable, right down to the cast of characters.

Stop being offended by the ugly and imperfect side of life. It’s real and inescapable, and that’s okay. No one appreciates the bliss of overcoming more than those who have trudged through the ugly to get there.