I don't know, to be honest I had a big problem with the eagles, and for a variety of reasons, but I'm sure having done a paper you've exhaustively familiarized yourself with the issues that people bring up!
My biggest problem with Lord of the Rings, as I've grown older, was a factor that was typically omitted from most adaptations: Tom Bombadil. I love the character dearly. But Tolkien brings up the point, only to handwave it through Gandalf, that Tom Bombadil could have handled the whole "taking the ring to destroy" thing -- Tom Bombadil was a god of the land and incorruptible -- but Gandalf's opinion was that it wouldn't work because he "didn't understand" the situation.
And not a single person brought up a concern about that.
Of course, there's Gollum too -- a huge deus ex machina at many points of the story -- but that's a whole other can of worms! I just feel like if one doesn't want it to occur to readers that there may be a logical problem here...maybe don't bring it up, making it more difficult to reason out that something is so problematic. The Tom Bombadil question always made me think and interfered with my belief in the situation.
Yeah, I don't like a tokenistic approach to it. I especially dislike it in a lot of Marvel/DC output, where they tend to condense as many minority labels on as few characters as possible, as if they want to be able to have it concentrated so they have to deal with it as little as possible. You so often used to see this (and still do) in gay characters, who almost always have partners who are usually a densely-gathered minority nexus. And are usually killed off or are irrelevant to the stories; even in 2016, gay characters are always the last priority to actually be allowed to have any actual relationships or anything pertaining.
Another pet peeve of mine in writing is for people to motivate others by people dying or being killed off.
If your character is so lazy, insensitive, unmotivated, or otherwise awful that people literally have to die before they will do something, then your character does not deserve to be regarded as heroic or even sympathetic. That may be your point and that's okay. But I've seen this happen way too many times in stories where the character in question is supposed to be sympathetic and admirable and someone is literally horribly killed by the story, and that's what motivates them to do something.
This is literally what destroyed any modicum of sympathetic buildup for the sisters in Charmed, for example. It got to the point where people literally had to die to motivate them to do what they were supposed to have been doing anyway.
