I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.

And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.

So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”