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Let me count the ways.
1. Iffy racial casting. Out of the main cast, two characters are PoC, one of whom (the one with more screen time so far) is a villain. Both of the PoC characters are implied to be Middle Eastern (or the closest fantasy equivalent). Jafar is played by an actor of Indian descent, which isn't terrible, but India is certainly not interchangeable with other parts of the Middle East. Cyrus, on the other hand, is played by a biracial actor who's half-Latino and rather light-skinned, which seems like a pretty odd choice for a genie. (I haven't looked up the actors who play minor PoC characters, so I can't comment on anything there.)
2. Poor treatment of PoC characters. OUAT had this problem as well. Of the two main villains (the Red Queen and Jafar), Jafar is much more sadistic and has a far higher body count/rate of torturing characters. He also victimizes the Red Queen in the initial episodes for extra misogynistic creeper points, which is doubly unfortunate considering the terrible "dark-skinned man menacing white woman" trope.
Cyrus is a bit better because he's one of the good guys, though I'm not sure if it's a problem that he has a slightly servant-master relationship with Alice (a white woman).
3. Evil WoC are sexualized. There's only been one (vaguely important) woman of color so far, Jafar's mentor. Her clothing is incredibly sexualized compared to other women on the show, which is problematic both because she's presented as a villain and because she's a WoC, invoking the sexualized "exotic" women trope. Also, her relationship with Jafar becomes sexual...which is just extremely creepy and gratuitous considering she initially seems much older than him and he's at best a teen when he initially seeks her out.
4. Some weird wardrobe choices. Why is Alice wearing a skirt? More importantly, why is she tramping all over Wonderland in heels?
5. Very poor depiction of mental health and psychiatric wards. Okay, so the image of pre-Victorian asylums as primitive jails hasn't gone away in popular culture, but that doesn't make it any more positive. It simply reinforces the idea that being committed to a psychiatric ward is the absolute worst thing that could happen to anyone. And NO ONE would "treat" a psychiatric patient by drilling a hole in their heads by the Victorian era; that is so incredibly medieval.
Also, the way the psychiatrists act and Alice's reactions to her situation in episode 1 is incredibly stigmatizing toward mental illness. In essence, we're seeing a popular narrative trope that dates all the way back to the Victorian period: person who doesn't actually have a mental illness is committed to an asylum, which is shown to be a horrible, inhumane injustice.
6. Using a background of abuse as a villain's origin story. I'm often somewhat wary of this, because it has the opportunity to be grossly mishandled. And in my opinion, in Jafar's case, this was pretty grossly mishandled. Are we really supposed to condemn Jafar when he was physically and emotionally abused as a child by his own father and half-brother? Abuse victims don't generally grow up into sadists and it's a bit twisted to have the only abuse victim on the show turn out this way.
1. Iffy racial casting. Out of the main cast, two characters are PoC, one of whom (the one with more screen time so far) is a villain. Both of the PoC characters are implied to be Middle Eastern (or the closest fantasy equivalent). Jafar is played by an actor of Indian descent, which isn't terrible, but India is certainly not interchangeable with other parts of the Middle East. Cyrus, on the other hand, is played by a biracial actor who's half-Latino and rather light-skinned, which seems like a pretty odd choice for a genie. (I haven't looked up the actors who play minor PoC characters, so I can't comment on anything there.)
2. Poor treatment of PoC characters. OUAT had this problem as well. Of the two main villains (the Red Queen and Jafar), Jafar is much more sadistic and has a far higher body count/rate of torturing characters. He also victimizes the Red Queen in the initial episodes for extra misogynistic creeper points, which is doubly unfortunate considering the terrible "dark-skinned man menacing white woman" trope.
Cyrus is a bit better because he's one of the good guys, though I'm not sure if it's a problem that he has a slightly servant-master relationship with Alice (a white woman).
3. Evil WoC are sexualized. There's only been one (vaguely important) woman of color so far, Jafar's mentor. Her clothing is incredibly sexualized compared to other women on the show, which is problematic both because she's presented as a villain and because she's a WoC, invoking the sexualized "exotic" women trope. Also, her relationship with Jafar becomes sexual...which is just extremely creepy and gratuitous considering she initially seems much older than him and he's at best a teen when he initially seeks her out.
4. Some weird wardrobe choices. Why is Alice wearing a skirt? More importantly, why is she tramping all over Wonderland in heels?
5. Very poor depiction of mental health and psychiatric wards. Okay, so the image of pre-Victorian asylums as primitive jails hasn't gone away in popular culture, but that doesn't make it any more positive. It simply reinforces the idea that being committed to a psychiatric ward is the absolute worst thing that could happen to anyone. And NO ONE would "treat" a psychiatric patient by drilling a hole in their heads by the Victorian era; that is so incredibly medieval.
Also, the way the psychiatrists act and Alice's reactions to her situation in episode 1 is incredibly stigmatizing toward mental illness. In essence, we're seeing a popular narrative trope that dates all the way back to the Victorian period: person who doesn't actually have a mental illness is committed to an asylum, which is shown to be a horrible, inhumane injustice.
6. Using a background of abuse as a villain's origin story. I'm often somewhat wary of this, because it has the opportunity to be grossly mishandled. And in my opinion, in Jafar's case, this was pretty grossly mishandled. Are we really supposed to condemn Jafar when he was physically and emotionally abused as a child by his own father and half-brother? Abuse victims don't generally grow up into sadists and it's a bit twisted to have the only abuse victim on the show turn out this way.
