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Notes -
A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad. Blackface is common and wholesome entertainment, suffragettes are treated as obviously insufferable shrews who only think the things they do because they're too bitchy for any man to want to marry, and indians are viewed as something between horrible savages and pest animals.
I'll caveat that the books (and even official record) are flaky on Almanzo's age when he started courting Laura: the book where the romance actually happens claims that Almanzo was 20 and Laura was 15, while later books after Laura is older give a ten-year age gap. The reality's... messy, with Almanzo officially being ten years older, but enough people lied about their age for homesteading act purposes that some people suspect he was only eight years older.
While the original age gap would have only been a little on the larger side in its original timeframe, by the time Little House On the Prarie was published the author was well aware it wouldn't have been acceptable among her intended readership. So it's especially interesting as an example of how a story can be sanitized and that sanitized version in turn become.
(For another example a different direction: Catcher in the Rye features a scene where the main character hires a prostitute. The main character is sixteen. They don't actually have sex, so it's all good, right? Eh... the prostitute is, pointedly, the same age as Holden. Contemporaneously, there was more outrage for having a prostitute at all in that class of novel, than for having an underage one.)
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