My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.
This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.