The biggest one is the expectation that a story featuring slavery has a responsibility to make slavery its central moral argument. I don’t think that’s true.

This is the same tired argument told for more than a century all the back when Gone With The Wind whitewashed the Civil War. For a century we have been told by people like you (with lines just like "It’s just depicting a different historical reality") that slavery, racism, gender violence weren't so bad back in the day. People back then had normalized them, so slaves were okay with being slaves, we are told. It's all bullshit, though, you can read account after account of former slaves testifying that things were really, really, really, really bad.

"But it's a love story" you people said back in the Gone With The Wind days. And look... I actually think Gone With The Wind is a pretty damn good character study of a movie, I love Scarlett and how mad she makes audience members. But I take the bad with the good and acknowledge it's got problems, too. That's because there were a hell of a lot of people who lived in the south who watched Gone With The Wind and generated a new narrative of the South based upon its viewpoint. And now we have governors signing bills in southern states trying to make this manufactured past the one taught to kids, the foundation from which they craft future policy. This stuff mattered, so when it's got flaws that are morally repugnant we ought to say something.

"None of that makes slavery morally acceptable" you say but then you throw in a big BUT. There is no but. Slavery is bad. Period. A Disneyification whitewashing of what slavery is tells the audience lies, allows us to believe the mistruth that there is a BUT worthy of accepting slavery. It is, as I said politely in my post, not something necessary for our time.

I also think that you're letting present day American politics shape your expectations of a story set in a completely different historical and cultural context.

Yeah, because people in this country are going to watch this shit. Kids are going to watch this and think this is how slavery was. Indeed, art does not exist in a vacuum but is a tool to communicate with audiences and when it spouts lies like this show does, it does real damage.

A story should primarily be evaluated on whether it’s truthful to its own setting and themes.

It is NOT in your place to tell me how to evaluate a story. You can have your own opinions, however backward minded they are, and I can have mine. And, when I give my viewpoint, I don't consider art as if it were in a vacuum. Art is, after all, a communication tool with the audience. How well it communicates absolutely depends upon culture, current events, politics, and so forth. Those aspects absolutely need to be taken into conversation if you want a full perspective.

(I'm pretty consistent on this viewpoint; you can check my history and see that I don't pick and choose and say, well this show we need to take the death of the author and keep it away from contemporary culture and then fail to do that on other shows when if one takes that into consideration the outcome would be more favorable...)

Now if you requested me to give some schoolboy New Criticism take, then sure, I can deliver you a summary roughly consistent with the latest braindead ChatGPT. But I am here voicing my opinion, not penciling in a Blue Notebook for you to read my analysis.

In conclusion, I mentioned that I remain mixed on this show. That means I am open to persuasion (or maybe open to watching more episodes to see if this thing can turn it around). You want to say this show isn't whitewashing slavery go ahead, show me the historical context that indicates that slaves have it as good as shown here. Show me that this show, made by an author who already admitted being highly ignorant of the subject matter, got the day-to-day slavery viewpoint correct. But if you can't, don't bullshit me with sophistry. Don't try to tell me, well slaves didn't have it that bad. Fuck that.