(this is not vagueposting about any current discourse or aimed at any specific story. I'm making up examples and not mentioning individual authors for a reason)
When assessing how successfully a subject is handled in fiction, whether the story approaches it literally or metaphorically is important. The creator is responsible for signaling this in some way; it'd be pretty disingenuous to write a straightforward heroic arc for a character depicted as an actual historical Nazi and then claim after the fact that it was a symbolic representation of some internal struggle, for example.
On the other end, everyone has seen the reviews/critiques that are like, "How Mystica Starlight Magical Adventures Fails to Grapple with the Real Horrors of War" as though abstraction is a fatal flaw and not a necessary tool when using recognizable conflict as a catalyst for characters' personal growth. It does actually trivialize real horrors to give them a protagonist, but stories transform the unfathomable into the personal. It is more respectful to draw clear lines between the play-pretend you are making up for your own entertainment and others' and things real people have suffered, even if your characters are experiencing realistic emotional fallout.
at some point you start drowning in games About Fighting Back or Doing A Revolution of some allegorical kind and people start literally adding lines like "your character Cannot be a cop" to the rules in an attempt to stave off so called "bad" engagement with the themes of the work. I've honestly started to miss stuff that's more abstract and allegorical and less in your face about depicting a Perfect society or a So Horrible It Must Be Torn Down society
Admittedly, I have not engaged with the whole extended universe of Lancer supplements because I don't have people to play the game with and it's just a lot of reading but Lancer does specifically stand out as far and away my favorite TTRPG in premise alone because it has a clear ideology that runs through the setting but never in such a way as to railroad how you the reader engage with it.
Is it a hellish dystopia where characters are expected to be punks and rebels trying to tear it down? No actually humanity is nominally organized under Union to its own collective betterment and it's perfectly viable to basically be heroic space cops going around stopping people who want to make the galaxy a worse place. So is it a perfect utopia with no problems? No there's still oppressive megacorps and humanity is scattered too far and wide for the light of things like "human rights" to be a universal concept so you can explore stuff like the horrors of war and tyranny from the perspective of downtrodden underdogs if you want.
The setting is set up in a way that presents a galaxy of possibilities not as options but merely as vibes, and is careful not to rule out too much. It's incredibly liberating to have a setting that isn't just D&D's "this race are always evil, usually chaotic, just how they are" absolutism or something like Battletech where you have to constantly brace yourself for the possibility that any chunk of the lore could have been written by some racist in the 80s as an ideological wank and gone unchanged cuz that's just how that IP gets managed. (I am kinda contributing to the problem in the OP here, D&D isn't necessarily responsible for being a beacon of how to navigate complex race relations but also D&D is railroading how players are allowed to engage with its content in the worst way possible, essentially requiring "bad" engagement with the themes of a campaign and other characters.)
Of course I don't think Lancer is just being indecisive either since it's not meant to be a game setting about good vs evil it's all just set dressing for the characters to do weird and cool shit with mechs which afaik is really what a lot of community content embraces. Is it kind of an philosophical nightmare to manipulate the flow of time such that somebody watches and experiences their own death in a nuclear fireball and then carries on fighting because that no longer happened? Probably but that debate is a bit beyond the scope of rolling dice and checking sheets so just give me that hull save already. You don't need to think about the politics of existing in a post scarcity society cuz you're here to smash things with robots, you probably are thinking about politics anyways cuz this is an unashamedly leftist game but there's no "theory knowledge" stat for you or your character to worry about.
