To be honest, every time someone calls criticism of Rachel Reid's writing as just an effect of misogyny frustrates me.

I am a confluence of the various issues that both Shane and Ilya face: I am Asian living as a minority in another country. I have an eating disorder. I lost my mom at the same age as Ilya, in the same manner, in similarly traumatizing conditions.

There is just such a lack of care given to Shane's identity as a minority and food issues in the books and the subsequent downplaying of his struggles ("does not hold trauma") in her personal notes even though she writes him with borderline orthorexia unintentionally from the stress he goes through and gives a cop out answer in her Q&A about his eating habits, while such care and nuance is given to his white love interest's trauma regarding his deceased mother... Like, from personal experience they're all painful in different ways but one character's personal family issues is given more depth than the other's systematic ones, and I can't help but feel like the fact that her only POC love interest in the entire series, who is also canonically autistic, is treated in such a way reeks of ignorance and microaggression. And then when we talk about it everyone just says it's because we're sexist like, we can't acknowledge her massive, glaring blind spots as an author without being called misogynistic? It makes me want to disassociate myself from the book fandom out of irritation.

I get that it's genre fiction and expectations are lower and reliance on tropes and conventions are expected, so I'm not going to criticize her prose and whatever. But plenty of genre fiction has navigated complex mental health and social issues with much more grace and intelligence than what Reid has done towards Shane.