When someone reads a book (or plays a game, watches a movie, etc) they inevitably have some first impression: the book is an allegory for X, the moral of the story is Y, character Z is a hero, etc. When they read the book a second time, or just think about it more deeply, they might realize that the text contains elements that contradict their first impression. Maybe the allegory doesn’t quite fit. Maybe there’s a subplot that seems to conflict with the overarching moral. Maybe the heroic character turns out to be a bit more morally grey than they first realized. What should the reader do?

I think the answer is obvious: you revise your first impression. If the book doesn’t work as a simple allegory for X, then maybe the book isn’t an allegory for X after all! Maybe the moral isn’t Y. Etc.

But what a lot of people do, and this drives me absolutely fucking nuts, is they say something like “Wow, this allegory about X doesn’t work. The author obviously doesn’t understand X.” or “Wow, this heroic character is an asshole. The author must be a terrible person if they think this is what constitutes heroic behaviour.”

The most cartoonish example I’ve seen is Ben Shapiro’s review of the Barbie movie, where he keeps wondering why are there adult jokes and themes in a movie that he’s preemptively decided is supposed to be for children, but I see the same pattern everywhere.

This is especially true of adults who revisit books they read as children. They compare the actual substance of the text to their terrible, immature, literally juvenile first impression, and are shocked to discover that the book doesn’t seem to be doing what they thought it was doing. But instead of thinking “huh, I guess I missed a lot of the nuance when I was a child” they think “Wow, in hindsight this book is terrible. I can’t believe the author thought this asshole was a hero!” No. You thought the asshole was a hero. That was your mistake, not the author’s.