It's a way of avoiding self-examination, pretending like morality in stories should fit a narrow right/wrong paradigm so that readers don't have to look at their own lives and ask if an antagonist's behavior echoes their own behavior, the behavior of someone they know or their culture/belief system.

When I first published “The Marvelous Land of Oz”, I encountered this approach. A reader tore into it for being “misogynistic” because there are negative female characters. In fact there’s a range of female characters, modeling different behaviors, and that’s kind of the point. The overall arc >