I do think it's a beautiful thing when an author is clearly going for a metaphor, but the diegesis gets in the way. The story has symbols, but they're not just symbols, they're real things that exist within the world of that story, and as soon as the reader thinks about this, the symbol can be shattered.
I don't know what it is I find nice about this, but maybe it's the wet impact of meaning-making against base reality.
I was asked for examples, here are two:
- X-men is always the one that comes to mind, where superpowers are a metaphor for being gay, or Jewish, or non-white, but on a diegetic level, superpowers include things like mind control and being bulletproof and blowing up things. So then you have mutant registration drawn as a parallel to the government making lists of undesirables, but what the writers have done is made imagined threat into literal threat, as the people with superpowers actually can effortlessly murder someone. That is, the false rhetoric of destruction has become literalized.
- There are mecha shows where piloting the mecha is a metaphor for the overwhelming burdens placed on children, but diegetically it actually is the fate of the world, and so this might be seen to justify things that are completely unjustified. If failing a test is literally going to result in hundreds of people dying, then the cruel authority figures are making uncomfortable triage decisions by putting enormous pressure on the cadets. And if, in the metaphor, the parents need to come to the realization that their children should be allowed to live their own lives ... we can kind of see how that doesn't work if the end result is that a kaiju stomps the country flat.
Worst example of this was Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, which wants us to simultaneously believe that orogenes are innocent babies who don't deserve their treatment by society, but also that they can wipe out entire cities with their mind powers, sometimes without even meaning to.
Literally the first thing that happens in the book is that an orogene triggers (on purpose, this time) a global catastrophe that kills tens of millions of people. We are supposed to think that this was understandable, because he was Oppressed.
you could make a religion out of this
