This week, Warner Bros. had a substantial hit with its adaptation of Jojo Moyes’s weepy novel Me Before You. Between the franchise draw of Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke and Hunger Games alum Sam Claflin and a built-in audience of book fans, the film almost made back its modest $20 million budget in a single weekend—a huge triumph for its all-female writing, producing, and directing team. But the movie wasn‘t an unmitigated success with everyone. The film’s depiction of its male lead, a quadriplegic named Will Traynor, prompted backlash from disability rights activists who protested the London premiere and started a hashtag on Twitter calling for a boycott of the movie. Could Me Before You have avoided alienating the disabled community? (Caution: spoilers from both the book and the film to follow.)

Both versions of Me Before You, the book and the movie, tell essentially the same story. Traynor—a wealthy businessman and extreme sports enthusiast—becomes paralyzed and, despondent over his inability to live the way he once did, chooses euthanasia as a way out. The plot centers on the last few months of his life as his new aide, Louisa Clark, tries to convince him that life is worth living. Will and Louisa fall in love—and, were this a sappier or more simplistic story, their mutual affection would be enough to change his mind. Instead, Will chooses to end his life with a heartbroken Louisa by his side.

Some members of the disabled community have condemned the book and film, accusing both of promoting the message that a disabled life is not worth living. The hashtag campaigns #MeBeforeEuthanasia and #MeBeforeAbleism cropped up, and messages like the one below have peppered Twitter for the past few weeks.

Disabled activist Ellen Clifford—a member of Not Dead Yet, a group that opposes assisted suicide—told BuzzFeed News that the film indicates “disability is tragedy, and disabled people are better off dead. It comes from a dominant narrative carried by society and the mainstream media that says it is a terrible thing to be disabled.” While many critiques came from those who hadn’t yet seen the film, the ending is the same in the film as it is in the book. There’s no denying that for Will Traynor, at least, death is preferable to a paralyzed life.

Director Thea Sharrock sees things differently. She defended the film to The Guardian, calling assessments like Clifford’s ”a fundamental misunderstanding of what the message is. It’s a fictional story about how important the right to choose is. The message of the film is to live boldly, push yourself, don’t settle.”

If the theaters were crowded with films where physically disabled men and women had lead roles, Sharrock would have a point. But unless we’re counting James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier, leading men are rarely wheelchair-bound and even more rarely are the romantic lead. Me Before You has to grapple with a burden of representation that wouldn’t exist if more films like 2004’s Inside I’m Dancing (again, starring McAvoy in a wheelchair) existed. In that imagined world, the fact that one disabled person decided to end his life wouldn’t stick out as such an impactful, negative message.

So there was no way, given the dearth of other cinematic counter-examples, that the message of Me Before You wasn’t going to alienate some. But it’s possible this impression of “a disabled life is not worth living” could have been mitigated. A few adaptive changes make Will’s decision in the film seem more black and white than perhaps it should have been. In the book, when Louisa and Will are stymied and embarrassed by the lack of wheelchair access at a horse race, Will angrily calls her out for trying to manage his life. The scene clearly conveys Will’s impotent rage, giving readers a better understanding of why someone of his specific temperament—not all physically disabled people—would find this new life insupportable. Though the horse race and its challenges made it into the film, Will is quickly cajoled out of his mild frustration by a pair of concert tickets.

In the book, Lou also finds solace in an online support group of quadriplegics who—while they confess their lives can be difficult—don’t want to kill themselves. (Moyes is very fond of support groups; one plays an even larger role in the book’s sequel, Me After You.) Critics of the original novel have called the quadriplegic support group’s inclusion nominal; none of its members are fully developed characters. But like the film version of Louisa’s mother, who represents a religious resistance to Will’s suicide, the existence of some other perspective from a quadriplegic in the film might have diluted an apparent message that suicide is the only option.

These exclusions are far from the biggest in Jojo Moyes’s adaptation of her own book. In the novel, the sisterly dynamic between Lou and Treena is far more contentious; Will’s parents‘s marriage is a mess; there’s a huge media fallout after Will’s death; and, most significantly, Louisa has a history of sexual assault. Moyes tried to explain that last exclusion to Vanity Fair: “What we found was that every time we came back to that scene—in the book, it’s almost like a throwaway line, it’s quite opaque, so when you’re reading it you almost go back and go ‘what did she just say happened?’ There’s no way of doing that visually. And every time we tried to write the scene where you have the flashback, and the men and the kind of horror of it, it became a far weightier thing.” Moyes’s argument would hold a little more weight if John Carney’s marvelous movie Sing Street hadn’t easily pulled off an almost identical scene—where a girl almost casually reveals a childhood sexual assault while walking with her love interest—earlier this year.

Moyes’s larger point—that some of the knottier subtext and shades of grey of the film were cut in order not to derail its romantic tone—probably explains why some of nuance was stripped from Will’s decision. But even if any or all of that nuance had found its way into the film, it’s probable that the adaptation would still be controversial. Long before the movie arrived, the book itself was criticized chiefly because Moyes didn’t contact any quadriplegics when trying to write Will’s perspective. Her book is a beautiful one that somehow manages to transcend the treacly tropes of the romance genre. But when writing about a very specific group you don’t belong to—especially one as underrepresented as the disabled community—it’s always a good idea to do your homework.