@force_echo: You're still getting politics and social themes mixed up. Social themes, when used purely in the descriptive sense, show society for what it is without leading the audience down any certain path. Those are perfectly fine. There's nothing emotionally detached about it. What it does is let the audience feel emotions on their own, and different people will draw different conclusions and feel different emotions. This leads to constructive debate. Politics exists for the sake of manipulation.
As far as bias, that's fine if people use it in their work. I can't control them, I can't stop them, and I don't really want to. But there's so much manipulation going on out there that it gets tiresome. I don't want to read about Captain America telling me that a political party is evil because that's the writer's opinion, and I'm not interested in that. If Storm comes across a big, evil cooperation that's fine. Those exist. But it's a bad idea to paint all corporations as evil, because they aren't. Lazy writers do this through broad generalizations, though. It happens all the time, and not just in comics.
However, if the book's sole purpose is to point out certain political arguments then that's fine. I probably won't do more than skim through it, but at least I understand that it's a form of bias manipulation. It's the people who don't understand this who cause problems. They take it as the gospel truth, search it out, and adhere to it blindly. They begin hating the other side, which harms potential debate and the chance for two opposing sides to come to friendly terms with each other.
No, you're making false distinctions. Your political stance is simply a viewpoint on a social or economic issue that coincides with that of a political party, that's a person's politics. So when authors put that into their work, which they will, they are basically stating their opinions. For some reason you think politics just means insidious thoughts of manipulation and overt propaganda, which is ridiculous. Not every "political" work plays out like a TV ad. There's something said about letting the audience feel emotions on your own. It's nice, but it means that you'll never be exposed to any opinion outside of your own head.
I consider myself a strong Democrat, but I can still enjoy The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. That book is literally one huge endorsement for extreme right-wing objectivism, but I can respect the way she makes the argument in an interesting and coherent manner, and the book even caused me to look at a lot of issues in my life through a different light. I'm still a Democrat, but I, and a lot of left leaning people, like the book for what it is-- a clever and intelligent elucidation of an opinion. By refusing to read "political" work, you're basically boxing yourself in to only middling, noncommittal viewpoints, and missing out on a great deal of interesting philosophy as a result. If you can't read political-slanted work with your thinking cap on, that's fine, but your assertion that writers should keep "politics" out of fiction constrains everyone in the same way. The Fountainhead (or something like Grapes of Wrath on the opposite end of the political spectrum) wouldn't be an interesting work of art if it wasn't for it's political opinions. At least, it would be less so. Yes, the book's sole purpose was to point out certain political arguments. If you don't want to read it for that reason, then I feel sorry for you, because the book is a masterpiece IMO, but saying that all politics shouldn't be in fiction, whether it be comics, movies, books, games, etc. is ridiculous.
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