I think Estro Junkies is a REALLY good adaptation of a very messy serialized story that smooths out a lot of its character arcs and pacing but also imo I think it deeply suffers from the reduction in POVs of its POC cast (going from four to one).
By far, I think Tahani suffers from this the hardest. She just comes off as deeply uncaring towards Nichole in the aftermath of all of that? You have a newly out trans woman who literally just confesses to you that she's struggling to see herself as beautiful who you KNOW has a massive crush on this friend of yours and when you walk back to your table together and she catches that friend making out with your partner and your immediate response is to yell "FUCK YEAH!" and then never check in with her for the entire rest of the night? There's certainly a reading that maybe Nichole's tangled feelings towards Kim and her gender were more overt and obvious to everyone else that would justify some of the actions more but also the thing is we JUST get her perspective and that's it. No rebuttal.
I also think this is rough as both Kathy and Nichole are clearly neurodiverse characters who, through racial and class privilege, have been able to live relatively sheltered lives. Thus, they are very ill equipped to deal with their own messiness and bigotry when that flares its ugly head.
But also, it makes that part of the book a lot rougher of a read when there aren't examples of them being acknowledged as neurodiverse by anyone else and receiving care and support from the other cast when they ARE on good terms and friends with them.
The absolute closest we get is from Rashmi in the second to last chapter with Katherine but even this is so much briefer than the Rashmi/Katherine stuff we get in the web fic (which I think does a phenomenal job of calling Rashmi out on her own bigotry and coming to terms with the way she treated Katherine as a "weirdo" instead of approaching her where she was).
I think a lot of this gets solved in the serial fic by being able to just air the thoughts of the other characters out much more easily and freely so it becomes much more obvious that either a) this character also has some stuff to work through via their own bigotry or b) this character is very clearly aware of this other character's neurodiversity and is very clear about that not excusing that character's actions.
Once again, I think overall the book is really good and definitely worth a read but also it does feel strange to have these artifacts left over from the serialized version that I think should have either been fleshed out more or further sanded down instead of being left in this middle space that they end up in.
I've been really chewing on this and to be perfectly upfront, I think you're right. I think I had a little bit of white woman brain myself and threw in with the girls I found relatable.
The nuance is that getting POVs of the other girls in the webfic lead to me being more open to seeing things through their eyes. In the novel, those perspectives being removed to create a white majority POV cast created a bit stronger of a connection towards these girls I was reading about directly and who I intuitively relate to more heavily (which is something I'm going to take away and unpack on my own). It's an interesting choice in the adaptation to make white and white sympathetic readers do that additional work though and push past their own biases to understand the racism at play.
All of this to say, I think *actual* thing I've been picking up on is that RCBG as a sprawling webfic has managed to touch on many different points of intersectionality across different points of oppression and that Estro Junkies has, as a result of the project of tightening its narrative, focused in fully and utterly on the specific focal point of racism within the transfem community in spite of the oppressive forces that they themselves receive from the world at large (and how class can add a further insulator to those pressures). I don't think this is better or worse but it does make it a very distinctly different work.
