> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.

Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.