(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.
...was the one about Advance Wars specifically that was published in Kotaku. I have beef with the author of that article for a whole host of reasons, but it really drove home for me how there is a whole angle of discourse and analysis specifically centred around whether or not a portrayal has enough teeth to it when, sometimes, it is a failure to acknowledge the concept of set dressing and meet media on its own terms. I'd recognized it as a problem for some time before, but it wasn't until that article that I really had to sit there and go "this really just is a thing now, isn't it?"
