Per a recent read, I'm ruminating over where social commentary in a book starts and ends.

...mostly where it ends.

When past a certain depth, is commentary in a book a thing that needs to be wholly committed to? And how fair is it to criticise a book for where it stops?

Say you focus heavily on one social talking point in your books. Something like wealth inequality. You examine it, have stand-ins.

Unrelated (in your mind), you have your low-income character's best friend betray him to become the antagonist.

...have you undercut your point?

In the above example, via subtext in your book you have set up the designers of a biased system as the antagonists.

To then have a lower-class "big bad" would, on some level, seem contrary to that message.

But what if that big bad's existence fits the context of the story?

Balancing the needs of a story versus it's social commentary seems something incredibly difficult to get right.

Unpicking that from a reviewer's perspective, where individual understanding of intended commentary is WILDLY subjective, often seems like it's based on speculation.

And look, we all know how a certain kind of "unintended commentary" can lead to call-outs and general shit shows on Twitter. Not my place to talk on how this can tie into harmful representation.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around where I stand on those moments where it's like...

An author has stated X, which implies Y, which would weaken the book.

To what extent is Y born from my own imagination and not the writers? And when can that lead to fair critique?

I'm aware that the answer is probably, predictably, "it depends".

But frustrating as that is, it's still something I want to think about to be a fairer and more effective reviewer. For as much as that's worth.

Would be interested to see how anyone else has dealt with these kind of thoughts for specific books!

Even if only to know I'm not the only one sad enough to want to dedicate time to talking about them on the internet