Hah, the ball is now in Synthesis' court!
The last two "SV has a problem" threads, I was part of the problem, but not this time probably!
So I'm Taiwanese (I am not, in fact, from Luxembourg, as my inside joke avatar might suggest). And admittedly, my longest story, an almost 800k-long
Gundam Wing affair, features a white primarp protagonist because the focus character 1) looks Occidental within the context of the franchise (admittedly the GW setting in particular has deep roots in Europe on account of its focus on European chivalry, the Napoleonic wars, and other historical factors) and 2) his name is "Walker". Ergo, I made him white--though I have done certain things like give him a Chinese foster parent from his childhood as a compromise towards familiarity (part of that was also wanting a gratuitous cameo by actor James Hong), and I've given him a rather international upbringing like myself (Walker is, uncreatively, described as having having mostly Scottish background, but is a North American and has a grandparent from the Indian subcontinent).
But I'm not without my own flaws. My longstanding
Outlaw Star story, which I actually finished to positive reception, has an Indian protagonist by the name of Chandrasekhar, but aside from some aspects of his childhood and his upbringing, there's very little that makes him "Indian" (among other things, he's not a practicing Hindu either). His half-Indian, half-Vietnamese son is even "less Indian" than he is. In
Soldier of OZ: Walker's Account, the Occidental Walker is heavily surrounded by Asian characters, particularly Chinese and Japanese (a nod to the original franchise), but I've never been completely satisfied with one of the earliest characters, Flight Officer A. K. ("Ajay") Mazuri, a Kenyan MS pilot. As with Chandrasekhar, aside from his background, some glimpses into his childhood, and a few things that pushed him into his military career, there probably isn't much else to establish him as "African" (it probably doesn't help that, in a way, he is the token black flight member, alongside two white men and a Okinawan woman). He speaks English, along with the rest of the cast. At least he's not alone among black characters--despite the heavy central and southern European lean, the OZ military forces in
Walker's Account do some off as pretty multinational, and Walker's immediately superior, Lieutenant Colonel North, as a not-so-subtle nod to late 1990s/early 2000s Don Cheadle.
In a more distant approach to the same issue, my original stories based on a post-Cold War science-fiction/adventure setting tend to focus around Eurasian characters, particularly one by the name of Major Konstantin Novikov. At least in that setting, I've put a heavy emphasis on looking at non-Slavic people in the USSR, particularly Asians, and even with his very generically Russian name, Novikov himself is an ethnic Kazakh (though considering he is sometimes mistaken as Chinese, perhaps that's just a reflection of what I'm comfortable with). Novikov spends some amount of time reflecting on whom he is even before dire circumstances see him leave Earth (it makes sense, sort of)--born outside Almatey, but educated in a Suvorov School in Moscow, a full-blooded Kazakh but probably a very Russianized one at that. I've had that approach since the start, and the characters, Slavic, Turkic, Asian or otherwise, probably spend an undue amount of time reflecting on the fact--there's at last one scene written down where a room of officers are discussing the finer points of Soviet nationality policy and one character asks, "Okay, all the Russians raise their hands." A clear minority of officers raise their hands, including one Korean (to some surprise) who also drags up the hand of a reluctant Kuban cossack officer, causing some snickering. That's reflecting a demographic pattern where the USSR's population is growing more and more Asian in the face of gradually declining birthrates among the traditinoally Slav and European nationalities, and that reflected in the changing face of the armed forces as a result (I could call this "Ask me why I hate the movie
Air Force One!
"). Several years later, when Novikov returns to Earth from self-imposed exile (it's a long story, or it would be if I wasn't lazy) he visits the newly completed Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow (based on the
real museum that exists today) and is dismayed to see a former comrade and dear friend of his who was assassinated by anti-government conspirators memorialized there because, in his own words, "Why though? Frankly, he was a terrible Jew..." (he was unobservant, only partially of Ashkenazi Jewish background) since he was related to the leaders of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
In some ways, my stories so far have been an opportunity to experiment with racial and ethnic backgrounds--though I suppose it's not surprising that my experiments tend to lean in the direction of my own ethnic background (Taiwanese characters pop up, albeit always in very minor capacities--it would only make sense for there to be more Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Indian characters).