something that’s easy to miss when we talk about problematic tropes about marginalized characters is that a LOT of them are fundamentally really just side effects of the fact that the story is so rarely ABOUT those characters. women get shoved in refrigerators to motivate male characters because the writer never cared about the woman as a character in her own right in the first place, just about her effect on the man, and this is just where it’s becoming really obvious. characters of color get to be wise mentors or quirky sidekicks because the writer liked the idea of a diverse cast in theory but wasn’t willing to write a non-white lead and those are the good-guy roles that are left. if you want to do better the answer is usually not to go down a checklist of problematic tropes and make sure you’re not doing any of them, it’s to treat marginalized characters as fully realized people with agency and narrative focus in the first place, and if you’re doing that right a lot of this will follow naturally.