@FirstProgenitor Demanding that fictional characters adhere strictly to real world living person ethical standards as a metric for a good or unproblematic story drives me up the goddamn wall

Stories are, generally speaking, About Something, and characters are one of the vehicles for that something to be relayed to the viewer.

There is no fundamental difference between an author writing on a page "I have been thinking about xyz philosophical and ideological concepts" and that same author instead writing a 600 page novel in which a cast of characters muse and grieve and fight and grapple over those selfsame concepts. The only point of divergence is brevity.

People are more nuanced than just being "about" something, but literal fictional characters are that definitionally