Iris has a darker skin tone, therefore she's automatically black, therefore racism.
As a reminder, you're absolutely not allowed to dislike a character who is a woman because that makes you sexist, a character with a different skin tone because it means you're racist, a character who is gay because that's homophobic... the only characters you're allowed to dislike are straight white men. (Exceptions to all of these if they're of The Wrong Opinion, in which you're also allowed to use slurs.)
It can never be because a character is poorly written or unsympathetic. You can write a thousand-word essay about why you dislike the character, never mention any physical attributes, and it's still just because you're whatever flavor of -ist is necessary.
So since we're talking about Pokemon, bad opinions, and worldbuilding, something about Lily's comment from a few pages ago hit me again:
The first one. "Teaches Sam to treat Cala like a friend and not a pet", then implies that this was a terrible idea.
So, uh... number one, it's a Pokemon comic. You are told by every NPC in the game that you should treat Pokemon as friends and partners, not animals. Only the bad guys say otherwise, and they're treated as slavers and abusers. Even in the games where you have Pokemon acting just as pets, they're implied to be treated more like family members than animals.
Number two, according to the worldbuilding of her own universe, a trainer can communicate with the Pokemon that they catch. This isn't an ability exclusive to Lily; she's explained that Lily can understand the other Pokemon just because they're hers.
This means that every Pokemon that we've seen has some level of humanlike intelligence. There are probably some exceptions, but Mismagius can communicate like a human, Butterfree can communicate like a human (even if like a child), apparently there was once a Milotic that showed up and could communicate like a human... this is a world where if you have a Pokemon registered to you, you automatically gain the understanding that they can communicate on a human level.
Even if this weren't a given, Lily already knows that the Ralts line has human sentience and that treating a Ralts like a pet would be tantamount to doing the same to a person.
I already know that Lily was reaching for 'reasons her self-insert Mary Sue isn't a Mary Sue' but come the fuck on. She's basically saying that it would have been a better idea to treat a sentient creature like a dog because it happens to not be a human being. This is the opinion of the author, not an in-universe character who is supposed to be wrong or evil.
Lily "Damn Good Writer" "Worldbuilding is Easy" "Shut Up and Look at the Baby" Orchard.