At the request of someone in the mega I have read the story and will give my thoughts.

Apparently, there is some controversy about the orangutang in this story possibly being a racist metaphor...but I dunno if I see it to be honest.

Granted I don't think I can ever place myself in the mindset of the average reader 200 years ago and how they would of taken the events of the story, and also granted the comparison of black people to apes and being so much stronger and violent and having weird language is a common racist trope through history, but sometimes the curtains are just blue and the orangutang is just an orangutang.

But nothing in the story really struck me as alluding to or having the orangutang stand in for POC.
The point of the story seems to me that the "very smart" civilian investigator character is able to solve the murder and not the police because everyone expected the act to have been carried out by a human and not an animal, so they don't consider the possibility even if on closer inspection of the evidence it starts to line up.

Idk if anyone else has read the story and disagrees, but honestly if you haven't I wouldn't really bother.
most of it is just a dry retelling of the evidence in a newspaper and then Dupin monologuing about how he came to his conclusion based on all the evidence.

My greatest take away was the narrator was in love/gay with Dupin...or atleast that's what I gleamed from the very homoerotic opening.

3/10