Honestly, I think this only blew up for a congruence of two things.
Poor Mrs. Copeland came to her husband’s defense with all the best excuses. It’s not racist because coded fantasy race. Also, he never saw the final draft. Maybe Secret Santa gave everyone a low key racism gift with the book! Also also, we didn’t even get a copy.
She tried her best, but she couldn’t commit to a single excuse and gave all of them, making the entire defense seem disingenuous. And the excuses, piled atop one another, gave it all a worse look.
Then, thing two. People started talking about the low key racism. Other people didn’t see the low key racism. Some saw it when it was written out. Some didn’t. Then a minority of a minority who didn’t see it decided to explain to those who did that they were, in fact, wrong. That racism can’t exist in a fantasy setting, because… Fantasy setting. That just because a race in a video game makes heavy use of very specific cultures, down to the dialect used, down to the tropes and stereotypes, it cannot be racist because… Fantasy game.
This went over as well as could be expected.
So a really convoluted story of why Sean must be innocent of writing a bad book, combined with racism isn’t a thing because fantasy. If you were to remove one, I don’t think either would have made many waves, and this’d just be another very bad book.