Giving it a post in case anyone else is confused:
You can criticize Alya without being racist by /actually/ criticizing the things she's done wrong in the show, rather than making things up and pretending she did them.
If that sounds like the bare minimum, it's because it is. When we talk about "Alya salt" being a cesspool of racist garbage, we mean that people were literally just making up things to be mad about, tagging it as Alya salt, and pretending like it's an actual problem in the show.
People were saying that Alya is a vicious bully, who terrorizes Marinette with her brute strength and aggressiveness, always pushing and dragging Marinette around, and Marinette is terrified to say no to her or start an argument, because she's terrified of what Alya would do to her!!!
Or they just staright up had Alya trying to get Marinette to kill herself, or having Alya poison Marinette because the author decided that Marinette has allergies, but Alya doesn't believe her, so purposefully slips her the food she's allergic to so that Marinette almost dies, has to be hospitalized, and Alya is sued for the medical bills and disowned by her family and is living on the streets as a filthy beggar and….
I think you get the idea.
As long as what you are criticizing Alya for is something that's actually in the show, and you aren't turning her into a racist caricature for a Black woman/girl while you're criticizing her, it's fine.
This is the same problem that filled the Adrien salt tag before I started blugeoning people with actual facts and demanding they stop lying about shit just to make him look bad, and tag the shit they're literally just making up as "bashing" instead of "salt", because the crap these people were complaining about is as far from canon as it can possibly be. Not because they had any problem with Adrien's actual problem behavior, but because they shipped Marinette with some kid from Batman or something else, and therefore, if Adrien is not a love interest for Marinette, that means he has to be a horrible person. Because these people had not grasped the concept of characters being friends with other genders.
But yeah, as long as you are /actually criticizing Alya's actual behavior from the show, and not saying she's a worse person than Chloe (because 99% of Alya salt fics also tried to pretend that Chloe was Marinette's only ally and a Real Femnist™ and also a victim of the scary black girl viciously murderous bully Alya), you're probably going to be fine.
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