I mean…they kinda have a point. In this article, Leigh admits she didn’t have widespread homophobia in the grishaverse verse bc “Successfully or unsuccessfully, my goal was to present queer relationships as totally normal. Like, I feel like you have a lot of options in a fantasy world, and there’s a lot of prejudice in the Grisha world in a lot of ways… sometimes in terms of magical powers, sometimes in terms of skin color, but I wanted to create a fantasy world that was not as f**ked up– sorry– as ours”. Ppl praise her for not having blatant homophobia in the series, so it’s not too surprising that they’d be miffed that the stress of racism isn’t held to that standard. In SOC, I was interested in how it affected characters like Inej through fetishization, but it felt more thoughtfully written than the show in my opinion (likely due to the author’s own background).

https://www.gayya.org/2016/06/author-interview-leigh-bardugo/